Emiliano Topete @ SIGGRAPH 2019 | Maxon Cinema 4D

ladies and gentlemen from Mexico City Emiliano the potay from polygon TV thank you thank you thank you 35 years ago John Lasseter and Ed Catmull came to Segura and presented this short film called The Adventures of Andrew and Wally beam this first computer animated short film would change animation forever this moment represents the fusion between two worlds because in one hand you have the creative artist from Disney on the other you have the technological genius from the heart of Silicon Valley and the fusion between these two worlds gave birth to this beautiful art form that is 3d animation so how does a group of people from Mexico City where this art form rarely exists and this technology is not being developed suddenly gets to produce 3d animation and the answer is simple technology became available for us and there vs Maxim designed and developed intuitive and fast tools for anyone anywhere to use and from this point on as it is said in pictures ratatouille anyone could cook my name is Emiliano Tibet a I've been teaching cinema 4d for the past five years in Mexico I founded an animation studio they're called polygons and this is our demo reel [Music] [Music] [Music] so thank you animation it started for me back in 2007 back then I was doing mostly motion graphics and I was wandering around in cinah versity which is max's website for learning its tools and getting in touch with the community and I came across this so this was 2007 Mashpee and it was called the Flavio tutorial and you see in my college years I came to film school and when I saw this I remember thinking I could do a movie all by myself and of course I was absolutely wrong about that but the notion of designing a production pipeline all within cinema 4d wasn't wrong at all because 12 years later that is exactly what we have in the studio we model we do the hour you be editing here's our art director painting within body paint 3d we do our rigging our animation lighting and render it all within the native tools of cinema no plugins nothing else so this for a small studio in Mexico City it's just the way that we could afford to do this so today I want to walk you through five stages or five aspects of our pipeline production automatic rigging I would imagine a closing cartoon rigging which is just the main event and pushing the post with the former's very important stuff for animation and the fast and easy layout some stuff that we've rigged to make layouts very very fast so first off let me show you the character object so the character object is this way of doing rigging in cinema 4d automatically very fast and when I heard about this I thought that this would only be good for certain kind of characters like realistic kind of characters and I was wrong because we could do whatever we wanted so for example this piece I'm going to show you it's a piece we did back in 2015 and this characters are made entirely with a cartridge and we could do I don't know who wondered we burn it which is great the joint ricochet water-holding which is split the leg so apart from the torso and everything that cartoon animation really so let me show you how fast is to set up the character object so I have here a scene with one of the characters from our show she is called my and let me real quick Rick her with the with the character object so the only thing that you have to do is go to the character menu and go to character and hearing the attributes manager you just have to click on routes then on spine and then I'm going to hold the ctrl and the ship-to-ship keys and kids arm and legs and just like that the rig is built you can also make hands and the jaws and more complex stuff but for the purposes of the presentation I'm going to just to leave it like this and now we have to go to the next step that is adjusting so if we go to adjust I'm going to the front view so the front view here it is so there's little dots that we have on the character the only thing that we have to do is get them to the place that we want them to be so for example the chest controller and the chest joints we would like them to be here and the neck I would like them to be over here they had nice pivots from this place and lastly the head tip I'm going to put it here the arms the collar bones must be able around here displays the shoulders the elbows and finally the wrists the legs are fine I think let's go to a side view to see how things are doing over there I will just have to push this back so I'm going to hit the seven key so I don't move the the wrists the ankles I'm sorry and here I'm just going to pull the neck back and believe it or not our rig is ready now we have to go to a third face that is the binding and the only thing that we just have to do is we have to put our mesh into this fail into this field and that's about it so now I'm going to return to our perspective view our relationship between our joints and our mesh is done and now we just have to go to animate and that's it we can select our controllers and we must be ready to go so let me just show you the character is ready right so of course the eyes and the scarf are not moving I'm going to show you later on this an amazing way of constraining the things too to the joints and some waiting has to be refined in the character so for example if I were to hit add walk the character would already be walking but of course this is a character with an enormous head so there are vertices that are not being weighted automatically perfect but waiting is pretty easy in cinema so let me show you real quick how waiting is done so we will just only have to I'm going to set up another another object manager and I'm going to search for the joints so for the joints to appear in the object manager you just have to click on the on the character object go to this play and hearing managers instead of components I'm going to go for a fool hierarchy and here in my second object manager here I'm going to collapse so I can find my mesh and here in the second object manager I'm going to type joint or no I'm going to type head right and here is the joint that I want so I'm going to double click on the weight stack and this is the problem that we're having so the only thing that we have to do is select the joint that this vertices are supposed to be weighted at and just clicking at them and very quickly you can set them to the right place so everybody is very scared when it comes to waiting but it actually isn't you just have to have the patience of one afternoon and from that point on you will have two years of animating your character as you wish so that is automatic rigging that's the first thing I wanted to share with you guys today but now let's go into more interesting stuff so let me show you this amazing thing that has been living inside of cinema for years and nobody knew about this very few people knew about it but well when it comes to character animation and developing a series you need to to be able to dress up your characters because you want maybe a one script to be to happen in the moon and then you want one script to happen in the Wild West right and you want sometimes to dress them lies as a rapper and this other show was about boxing and this other show was about ninjas and this was like a parody of Mad Max so we really needed to to be able of putting clothes in the characters but we were very afraid of how this was going to be because we were very afraid of diamond dynamics we have very short timelines and deadlines in in in the production so let me show you how automatic clothing works so the is a tool called vamp and how it works is just like this let me show you so here we have a file with the same character and it's one that I was showing you earlier and if I were to select this controller we rigged the sliders that permits allows the animator to make fists right but as you can see the globe is not following the fingers so check this out the only thing you have to do in cinema is you have to go to character you have to go to manager BAM and this amazing tool allows you just to put the source that has the weighted joint and so I'm going to dry it over here and then you just have to put the target the of the mesh you want to move so in this case is the goal and next we have to check joint weights I'm going to live near a surface as a valuation method I'm going to live transform at off space I'm going to change change to global and I'm going to hit transfer Maps and just like that my goal now has this tag called a weight tag that has the information of the joints and now the only thing I have to do is go to character and ask for a skin the former the skin the former where is it character and skin there it is so back until my meshes I'm just going to make this skin the former a child of that glove and I'm going to try it out and if I can make the tail the fist this is ready to go so this is amazing right because just like that you're ready to put clothes and the clothes will follow your character amazingly so let me show you for example here the pants they can do whatever the formation we want so whatever extreme pose that the character reaches the the clothing system will reach so that's for the first and the second part of the presentation but now I wanted to show you like this is all the fast part right of producing and it's very important but there comes a time in I think every animation studios life where you have to develop your own story and develop your own rigs and your own characters and tells your story and for us this is Sally this is the series that we we are developing Mexico it's a cartoon for kids and they're just four friends hanging around having adventures but they happen to be like a child version of the gods that were worshiped in Mexico before Christianity came along so for example this is Sally she's the goddess of the wind and this is Maya she's the goddess of the earth so to achieve this kind of movement we also thought that this project this project actually it's like our way of paying a tribute to animation as an art form to study and develop it's formulas and to contribute to its evolution so in order for us to reach this kind of of extreme poses and and movement cartoon movement I'm going to show you what I call like the cartoon rigging this is like the the main event of my presentation because what we did for many years we used the character object for animating but since like maybe two years ago we studied very carefully how the character object was made and we made like a simple version that would be faster because we don't have like very very big computer computers in in the studio so we needed to optimize absolutely everything right so what I'm going to show you now is how we dissected this character object and we reduced it to its simplest form and believe it or not we managed to do this with only three tools the I K the I key spline and the PSR tack it sounds very lame but they are so powerful and they give you everything they give you the behaviors of the mechanism of a spine and therefore the line of action and the mechanism for the limbs and the PSR tag is so powerful so let me show you real quick what is this all about I'm going to show you the three tools and then I'm going to show you how they are applied within the rig so the first thing you want is line of action in a character and this you can achieve with the eye case plane so the egg is fine let me set it up for you so you can see how it is so this is a menu where you can grab this pencil and you can draw like an illustrator a path right I'm going to hit the scape key and we have like sort of a torso a pine over there already now I'm going to deselect and I'm going to character and join tool and I'm just going to hit the with the control key selected I'm going to make a lot of joints and then the only thing that you have to do is you have to right-click on the first joint you have to go to character tags and you have to go to Ikea spine and here in the attributes manager I'm just going to set type to equal spline I'm going to drive my spine over here and in end I'm going to drag my last joint over here and now I'm going to ask cinema to give me my controllers so that I can move this around and this I in the handle stem I'm just going to hit add two times and create and cinema has given us two controllers I'm going to ask cinema for display maybe a circle I'm going to make it bigger and if I hit zero I can select for example this could be the chest controller and if I move it around we have built just like that spine behavior we can reach any like shape we need for the spine of the character so that would be like the mechanism for the spine right so let me show you the mechanism for the for the arms so the arms it's the I came right and this is it's very very easy so I'm going to a side view side view that's it and I'm going to character join tool and I'm going to click one two three times so this would be like for example a leg and the same thing you will just have to right click on the first joint go to Oh this is easier even still because you could click on the first joint you could go to character and in commands there is a command that does is automatically create ICO chain and just like that cinema has done all the job for you and has given you a controller so I'm going to ask for a circle display here from my controller I can select it as well and if I were to move it around things would be ready to go and that's it for the limbs so we have the spine we have the limbs our character is ready to go so let me show you the last the last tag we used in our in our character lyrics and this tag is so powerful and it's so simple it's the PSR tag so the PSR tag is you wouldn't believe how amazingly powerful this is and it's so easy you I'm just going to select this fear go to character conversion and convert to nulls and that's it I have there a null that can be my controller so in order for this controller to move this sphere I'm going to set up a circular display so I'm going to make it a little bit bigger so that we can see it and what I do to make the constraint is a little trick I'm going to show you I select the object that I want to move then with comment I select the object that will be moving it and I hate shift C and this like little window pops up and I type in PS re and I can go down to add PS or constraint and hit enter and just like that cinema we have made this relationship between my controller and the object that I want to move so this doesn't sound very amazing like the visual effects of that we've been looking at but believe me this tag right here is so powerful that gives you a lot of speed and a lot of it's so reliable it's you can do a lot of things very smoothly in animation things of how this is built so let me show you now how these three tools are applied in our rig so I have here our same character with the rig built into it so as you can see we have our joints we have a lot of controllers over there so let me show you for example the the spine behavior how it works so I'm going to select the hip controller and if I were to move it you can have this amazing behavior with with with the hips right and just by moving a little bit the character you have amazing results the same thing with the chest right so if I were to to move the chest we can reach very easily a lot of a lot of extreme poses and what I wanted to show you is that the PS are constrained this is the part way where it becomes very amazing I'm going to show you later on another tool called expresso tag but that tool in conjunction with the PS or tag allows us to do stuff like I'm going to show you right now so if I select the torso controller I have over here a slider that allows me that allows the animator to switch between an AI K and an FK system but thanks to the PS or tag this is very smooth and of course you want as an animator to have FK possibilities because you can go very wild with FK possibility so for example if you were to be in an FK mood and you wanted to go very crazy you could go very crazy with this for example we built in this controller in the middle of the spine that you can pull off and you can have this slider that makes like things even smoother and what is amazing is that animators can go to this sorcerer controller and just go smoothly to the other stuff and this is just these three amazing tools right and so let me show you real quick the arms the arms behavior how are they working so the arms work like any other arm they have like their elbow working but I think here I have this my layer system I have secondary controllers and if I were to select this guy over here I can break the joints and this is the I K working in function with the Ikeys plane so for example if you want to do rubber-hose animation the only thing that we have to do is play with this lighter and this will allow us to have like this kind of arms where you have like Adventure Time kind of arms spaghetti arms I don't know and thanks to the i ke tank we can have like this amazing sliders over here in this in this controller that allows us as well traduced amazing start like for example stretching so if I were to drag this to 100 I will be able of stretching this arm as far as I want and this is in cartoon of course is it comes in handy so that's it like for the for the part of the body and this is like this three tags that I wanted to talk about these three tags are the ones that can do whatever you want with character animation and that's basically our Reagan now so back to our index what comes next is when you have to push the pose right so in cartoon animation and in general I mean one of the principles of animation is exaggeration so in order to achieve exaggeration in 3d we can we can use extra deformation and this is really seen in cinema so let me show you this the same [Music] so here we have Sally and as you can see we're having like very extreme poses here they've done so for example here we have this this moment where we have the chest expanding we have the mouth becoming something else and we have teeth so what I want to talk to you about is how we managed to to do the pose more there were although facial deformations that's the first thing then I will I want to talked about the rig system for the for the teeth because the teeth were a challenge for us and we managed to do that thanks to the tools of mograph to the cloner object and lastly I'm going to talk about how we managed to do this extra deformations with the former's so first off let me talk about the post morph how to do facial animation in cinema 4d so what I have let me close this here it's just a very simple exercise I have a cube I'm going to point smooth and I'm going to select this points right here I'm going to right click on my cube and go to character tags and I'm going to select the pose morph and hearing the attributes manager I'm going to check points and I tag has been already been made here and so I'm going to call this pyramid and so here what are we what I'm going to do is just scale this so that I have a pyramid and what's in about the post morph doors is that it gives you this slider right here you have to go to animate and the sliders is what you guys been saying in my character like this is just the only thing that you have to do you have to model your vertices and you will be to go so let me show you how this works in in the rig so I have here Sally and let me show you I'm going to turn on subdivision so we can see her face her beautiful face and so in the head controller we have all these lighters to make her happy or to make her sad or to make her angry or as I showed you in the clip to make her blow the bubbles she was trying to bowl to blow and all of this is a pose more as you could see and what is amazing about the post morph is that it's so powerful it it allows you to blend all of those lighters that you make so if I were to pull all of these guys together I mean we would have something very crazy but I mean you can get to very extreme things right so but of course I'm not going to do that to here but for example what we did do is that we broke apart the the expressions into a left side and right side so here we have this controllers that are pretty neat because they allow us to move the eyes but as well to scale the eyes if she's scared or to rotate them as well but here we have like all those expressions that I showed you we're in the in the like in the head controller but only happening in the right side of her face so here it's really amazing because you can get away with more stuff and of course this can be combined with whatever thing is going on in the face so all this combination really makes like it opens the door to a lot of possibilities in animation so let me drop everything back to zero and so next up is how to integrate those amazing mograph tools into character animation right so let me do here Oh a smile so she's happy right um I have this little exercise I brought for you of the cloner so in this example I have this Q that is just a child of cloner object and I have drawn this spline that resembles the shape of the mouth right and the cloner object in mograph is so powerful because it allows you to order your clones in whatever object you want in this case the spline and if I were to select for example one of the vertices of the spline and move it around I would move the shape of those clones so you see where I'm getting at these of course are the teeth and we needed to do this because the art directors sometimes just the storyboard with teeth and sometimes without teeth according because that's cartoon right you don't have to be realistic so we need it we couldn't just like model the teeth into the character we have to have something very very manageable so the corner object actually has so many parameters you can play with let me show you so for example you can offset you can reduce the counts of the clown of the cones you can play with the star at the end rotating whatever you need so let me show you the possibilities that this allows in our rig so here is Sally and if I were to hit mg I'm going to see things only through the lines and I'm going here in my layers I have my secondary control and then suddenly all these little controllers appeared and these controllers over here for the tongue and for the teeth and for the Bell and for a lot of things so for example here I have this controller I'm going to select it and I'm going to click on on and this will show the teeth and now the thing that we have to do is push the teeth to the place where they have to be so that they match the smile of Sally so I'm going to put these guys over here and again moving good for the right controller I'm going to select it and push it over here and just like that it's in its place but this of course looks horrible and so what is amazing is that I can go to that meal controller that I showed you earlier and I can play around with all those parameters that I was showing you that the cloner object has so I can play with the with the rotation I can play with the scale on X and I can play with the scale on Y and the teeth will be okay and for example sometimes the era director will draw the storyboard with rounded teeth and sometimes with like these kind of teeth right so we have this poor small that is connected to this stuff that allows us to go to rounded teeth so all this comes together pretty nice right so that's it for the mograph and the pose morph and finally let me tell you about this amazing thing that is oh no sorry so I brought another exercise called extra deformers so in cinema you can you can have this kind of of instruction to an object where you can put this weights tag and tell an information in this case the window for me to restrict thanks to this tank and you can paint for example if I were to paint here like this I could restrict that deformer to a certain area so the window former will only affect that part of my object right so let me show you how this applies in the character so back to Sally we have this I was showing you these secondary controls and if I were to select this guy over here and push it that is exactly what you were saying in that other clip on your she is trying to blow the bubbles it just had our verify the former so let me real quick unlock my meshes and here in my in my mesh as you can see I have my skin the former that is allowing me to move the character along with the with the joints but cinema allows you to put whatever the formation below that that skin the former and this opens a possibility the possibilities of a lot of things for example this right we need it for this particular scene for her to expand her chest so we just put this as verify the former and we restricted with the where the tag I just show you so that it happens only in that part of the chest and well that's it for the for the characters and now let me show you about layout to end my presentation so a lot of things oh but after I go to layout let me show you if you open cinema 4d and you go to the content browser there is this character that I made back like in 2015 and you can find it there and studied and this was like the first characters that I was reading and these for example is a very good example of how booze morphs can work with with a big expresso tag that I'm going to show you right now so you can do like really quick stuff allow the animators to fly within their workflow with very simple simple tools this was like a an exercise for lip-syncing very very fast so and now let me go to the fast and the easy layout so we have four layouts in our in our project because we wanted to talk about like all the parts of Mexico so in Mexico we have the valley with the volcanoes but as well in the south part of Mexico we have the rainforest so we wanted to have a layout for that as well and in the northern parts of Mexico force you know there's the desert so we wanted to have like that kind of layout and of course the beautiful Mexican beaches so we wanted to have like a layout in the coastline of Mexico so what I'm going to talk about right now to end my presentation is how we rigged a lot of things in order to give the layout artist some possibilities of doing whatever they want but very very quickly and the two tools that I'm going to talk about is this expresso and the xref so let me again I'm going to show them to you real quick and then I'm going to show you how are they applied in the project so the expresso this little exercise I brought is very simple I have this two cog wheels and I want to rotate B with a so the only thing I have to do is I have this expresso null object and here I will right-click on it and I will go to cat who I'm sorry Trixie nama 40 tags and go to expresso and here I'm just going to drag a and I'm going to select it and here in its coordinates I want the be the banking to go in its output column and then I want to drag B and same thing I want to search for it the banking rotation and put it here and now the only thing that we had to do is to connect these two together and when I rotate a B will do it and that's so powerful because it allows you to do all the stuff I've been showing you that we rigged in in our project of course this for example is not rotating right this has to rotate the other way so the expresso allows you to do like any kind of calculation very easily I'm not into computers at all but this is like very very as I was telling you earlier I started film production so for me it's amazing just to go to here to negate and to connect these guys to negate no node and this allows me to have the the behavior the correct behavior of the cogwheels so that's the expresso and let me show you real quick the last tool I want to talk about that is the extra so I am going to go to create I'm going to X roof and I'm going to hit on add X roof and here I have this extra file I'm going to open so what extra of allows you is to have this very very manageable pipeline because if suddenly one of your animators is finds a problem with a rig or with a texture or with whatever he can go to the xref and here in the attributes manager he can go and click on open for edits and he will automatically be presented with this file that is the original file of this queue and for example I'm just going to do something very simple here I'm going to change the material from red to green and all the all we have to do here is of course save and close or whatever and click on the xref and go to reload and things will reload in the animators scene so if suddenly you have like a joint that it's not working good you can fix it and your pipeline will be flawless so let me show you how this works in our pipeline so here I have this layout and for example if you're a layout artist in our studio and you wanted to do a scene right so what you would like is for example to graph this tree right here and bring it over here so that you can put it where the camera is and maybe you can scale it down pull it up you can do whatever you want but we made this amazing expresso rig that allows us to do stuff like this watch I watch this how cool is this I am going to hit ctrl key and drag and this second tree I'm going to just drag this slider and change its shape to another tree and this way the layer artist can get away with something pretty pretty fast and we for example made three different shapes of trees and this goes for the trees but we could do this as well with the bushes so I'm going to grab this bush and I'm going to put it here in the scene where the camera is and so for example we could have this lil bush over here but if I were to hit ctrl and drag this other bush I'm sorry ctrl and drag that's it this other bush could be other thing like for example in Mexico we have a lot of cacti and so this is this is the way that you can get away with with doing a very complex layout very very fast but that's not it check this out we have our mid ground right so this is like a hill that could be like in the mid ground and you can the same thing you could pull it over here and with control key you can duplicate it and what we do is that we just rotate it around or maybe scale it up or pull it down and we can even rebuilt in a squash and stretch that allows you to reach other kind of self within the layout possibilities and the other thing that we built to this layout is that we can select this controller over here and we can change the colors of the layout from daytime to noontime and to nighttime so this of course allows layer artists to be very very fast they sometimes have to manage I know hundreds of genes and this allows them to do it like with a lot of stability and very quick and talking about stability I have to talk about the xref so as you can see everything in this scene is is like pretty rough jagged but if I were to hit subdiv then everything note looks nice we have it this way of course so that the animators can have it like can have like a very smooth way of navigating because again we have to optimize everything right but not only did we manage to to do all our scene with very with with this not subdivided elements but we managed to do everything with a proxy so if I were to go to here to create and and select the the xref manager i can go here to reference and say exchange all to proxy and just like that everything in the scene will go to a proxy version and this is the way that we deliver the files to the animators so that they can do their stuff and they don't have any troubles working fast and having like a very very fast workflow so this is thanks to the xref and to the expresso so as you can see very simple tools very fast to set but they have such like stability within the production pipeline so that is basically what I wanted to share with you guys today let me see if I'm missing something now I think that's it so to conclude I would like to say making technology available for everyone opens the door to a world of diversity and in this world we we can listen to one another and only then we will be able to respect our differences but most of all to celebrate what binds us together thank you very much for having me you can find me in Instagram as polygon animation and that's my mail for those of you who do character animation please let us know and if your network we're currently looking for a new house for Sally for a new network so please keep in touch

Channel: Maxon

Views: 14,419

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: RY-77ON2JI4

Length: 50min 47sec (3047 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019