How to use C4D Take system for multiple animation tracks in GLTF or FBX files

okay so this is going to be a quick guide on how to work with cinema 4d and this is r25 specifically but i'm sure it works on a few earlier versions with this their take system so the reason i want to use take system is i want to use animation and be able to have multiple animation tracks in the same output same fbx or in this case gltb that i'm trying to get to a gltf file not the easiest thing to get your head around a few little issues but i will show you as quickly as possible how i did it so let's take a cube i want to keep it as simple as possible but obviously this will work with anything you can animate so from here we've got a single cube um i'm going to go to takes we don't want to do anything called main so we're going to add a new take we're going to call this take one and we're going to add another one and we're going to call this take two and obviously you can call these whatever you want that's no problems at all so in terms of the take system you select which takes system to use based on the left um so within here if i'm in a take and i want to do something with this object you can see how it's selected uh what stumped me for a long time is if i try and keyframe this object doesn't i think clicking that box does absolutely nothing i can't create any key frames i can't generate keyframes auto keyframing on or off makes no difference basically this is not aware of which objects it needs to override and which objects it's allowed to modify so in order to fix that you basically need to drag your object into the take system so if i put that in here i now have my object if i do the same for take two we basically now have two takes uh which has um is allowed to modify this object so now when i have this selected if i want to hit keyframe hey presto i get a keyframe so if i want to maybe keyframe this to do something let's say every um 15 frames let's just have this move up and we will keep frame that there and while i'm here i'll show you another quick trick which i learned off of jonas for um on university which is how to kind of animate this as a loop so within here if i'm going to jump quickly to the um the f curve because i think it's easier to see which is so you can see here you can see here we have our f curve let me move that up probably well that little bit smaller yep there we go so if i click now on the f curve um actually let's click on that position what we want to say is at the end of this curve what do you want to do so after so at the end of it we're going to loop and we're going to loop and return back to where it started but we're going to do that one frame before the loop position so in this case it's going to be 15 so it's going to be 29 which will return us back to where we started on the 30th frame and you can see how that goes round around circles and if i drop that down to say maybe 30 you get an idea about this take just has a looping f curve uh and if i show you that you can see how that modifies that nicely uh okay so that is our first take our first animation first switch now to the second take you can see we have no animation which is really nice we have a clean track so from here maybe we want to do something different with this one so maybe we want to spin it so let's start by keyframing it you can see because we added the object in here it's allowed to modify it and then this time let's go to uh let's go to frame 30. um and instead maybe we want to do something like rotate it so if i hold down shift let's just rotate this to maybe like 180 let's do that and keyframe that same as before let's get to the dope sheet and look for where it's interesting why is that not showing that did that not actually keyframe it as i expected it to let's try no it is still spinning okay odd there it is don't know i had to select it in order for that to work and it's down on the rotation somewhere but let's just hit that anyway so we can see so uh with this green one selected and get the same as before so let's select the cube and say after the animation uh oh there you go that's nice it's automatically dropped 1600 i can change that maybe make that 90 instead so we've got 30 so we're going to go 59 and we obviously want to make that multiples of 60 so let's put that's 120 i'm just curious to see if i can do different length animations for each you see this one's now spinning and this takes now going up and down that's interesting so you can't have different length loops it looks like they're both going to retain the same interesting okay so what i would usually do at this point so we can close our dope sheet is i would export this and ideally i want to get to gltf or grtb uh annoyingly exporting to gltb although it has transforms the bake animation it ignores the take system and what it basically does is only bakes in the take you have selected so i could export that but i'd only get take two right now because that's the one that's highlighted so instead what we need to do is we need to export to fbx and fbx has awareness of the take manager so you can say export multiple takes from the take manager the tracks are in there we don't need to bake them it's just keeping the tracks which is obviously our rotation and position and then from there if i export that you can see i've already got a few of these here from my first experiments let's call this part two okay so we now have an fbx uh this one here an fpx which has our two animation takes in it and what we need to do is convert it so there's a couple of ways i want to try and convert this first one is using facebook's fbx to gltf and when i tried to um export this so let me take our new file uh and i'm gonna export that one version two let's go to the original just so you can see how that works so if i try and export using the command you can see on screen which is that um and i'll run this oh missing my pause let's try that again just so you can see what the log is okay so you can see it picks up fact there's three animations but annoyingly it's reporting zero channels so skipping it so take one take two you can see but it's not gonna import it to my jrtf now maybe on some other animations this might work but for me on this simple animation this is skipping which means you end up with an animation i will show you how the animation looks because let's take our converted animation and we're going to stick it into let's just refresh that so you can prove it works so i'm using this excellent online viewer and basically you can see here we just have a cube which has no animation until animations would appear up here so let's refresh that so the way i'm going to fix that is unfortunately i'm going to have to use blender trying to avoid it because i'm a cinema 4d user but in this case i need blender's multi-take system for gltfs so we're going to go into here and i'm going to look for my part two so what we want to do is import this model so to do that forgive me i don't really know my way around blender very well but this is a brand new blender project i'll get import and fbx is it going to be clever enough no so let's go find my workspace um so number 4d okay so here we go so this is now exported and interestingly it only picks the first take so in here i found set actions and you can pick which take to run but it doesn't show both um and also i've noticed in the timeline although you get this kind of summary view you only basically get the one take you've got selected so that's no good so what we need to do here is if we go to this non-linear animation can see we basically have the one that's selected right now and i can add in a new action strip and i can select the second take and we can name this one now take two take one okay so this way we have our two different takes um and then from blender i can this time do an export gltf and let's go and stick that back where we need so cinema 4d okay so we're going to call this up let's do this one as we've already done this part okay so in terms of animation settings i've just got animation turned on i haven't messed with any other animation settings it's just important it's the grtb great so that's now exported actually we should find in here we have a part two interesting that's a bit bigger than the last one um so part two glb in fact if i open this into um 3d viewers if i hit miss the 3d viewer sometimes works sometimes it doesn't we can see it's showing one of the animations we also have the second animation real quick way of actually tweaking these so you can see they're both baked in but most importantly i'm going to use the viewer and stick that into the glt viewer viewer and this time you can see we now have two animations and interestingly it will actually blend both which is really quite nice so we have a uh we have our up and down we have our rotation and we have a combination of both of them which is exactly what i needed to get to so long where you're getting there but it works one thing to be aware of and this is what i'm playing with with this model is um when it comes to importing all the bits and pieces here if you just drag this in it's not picking up the children so it's important to basically select all children so let me see if i can do this select children there we go now when i drag that into the take system and i do that into there this time it's going to take a while i now have all the information i need on this one and the same for this and that will allow me correctly to uh do exactly the animations you've just seen on the others but this time of the character which is exactly what to be doing same scenario working with the take system in here that's basically it

Channel: ION VFX

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Id: JOUFTRq_eOk

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021