mO2 - Primitive Objects and Lighting in the mO2 FCPX and Apple Motion Plugin.

everyone Robin here with part three of my little series on motion VFX as amazing new plugin for Final Cut Pro 10 and motion mo too if you haven't seen the first parts of this series you should find links to them in the description if you have and you like what you see maybe give us a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button and that little notification bells so you don't miss out on upcoming episodes so after looking at a bunch of basics I now want to look at setting up a simple scene navigating that scene using lights and more so let's get started to mix things up a little bit we're going to use motion this time around and since mo 2's handling is pretty much 100% identical in both motion and Final Cut Pro 10 anything we do here is equally applicable to how you would do it in Final Cut Pro I've simply created a new full HD 25 frame per second project and for those of you that want to follow along in Final Cut Pro 10 I'll simply switch the window layout via the window menu to cinema to make things visually more like Final Cut an option I think most motion users aren't actually even familiar with okay so now all I need is the mo 2 generator which I can easily add by simply clicking the add object menu then going to generators motion VFX and selecting mo 2 which places an empty mo 2 generator into my project with nothing more than a default camera if I wanted to do the same in Final Cut Pro 10 I could simply use one of these static templates for example and delete everything from the scene or just use the generator in the generators library with it selected in my layers pane I can go into the inspector and then to the generators tab where I'll find the exact same window that way already saw in Final Cut Pro the only thing we don't see as we do in Final Cut Pro are the on-screen controls in the viewer for those of you that have seen my tutorials on EM flare 2 you'll already be familiar with the procedure of having to right-click the generator in the viewer and selecting control in the pop-up-menu or switching to the adjust item tool as it's called in the tools menu which both work out the same after which we get the top bar inside palette for the camera posts effects as we saw them in Final Cut Pro which once again will hide for now by clicking the button at the top left mind you that if you at any point deselect and re selected the mo2 generator you'll have to also reactivate the on-screen controls and since we want to be looking at lights and later of course materials as well will obviously need something more than just a camera so as we already learned in a previous episode I'll just right click in the inspector somewhere in the gray area and go to the model and primitives submenu from where I could add a primitive one-by-one but since I know I want several I'll select from library instead here I'll go to the primitives category and select the cone by the way I just happen to know that all of the primitives are actually one metre in size by default this is something we want to remember for later on so with the cone selected I'll now just command click the cube disk as well as the sphere further down the list and click Add the window closes and I see all my selected objects in my scene list as well as all of them bunched together in my viewer slicing into each other first off I want to use the disc as my stage or floor so just for organizational purposes I'll drag it to the bottom of the list just for starters and while I'm here I might as well select all my objects with shift right click them and select group that puts them in a group or no with which I could manipulate all of them together if needed and I could also rename it if I wanted to by simply double-clicking the name and calling it objects for example just to be pragmatic now to scale my disk as a floor I'll select it go to the basic parameters below and click and scrub its scale value upwards with my mouse a little pro tip just like a motion in Final Cut Pro 10 if you hold down the option key while scrubbing then the values change at a tenth the speed as without and if you hold the shift key it changes at 10 times the speed pro tip number two if I reset the value back to one and go to the 3d gizmo as it's called in the viewer we know that by dragging one of the little cubes on any of the axes we can scale something on just that particular axis but if I last selected one of the little scale cubes and then mouse over the center cube in the middle between two axes we see how it highlights two of them at once of course meaning that if I click and drag now I can scale an object on both axes at the same time and since I actually do want to just scale it on the X and z axes I'll click on the bottom of the cube and drag with shift until it reaches the huge size that I'm looking for and if I wanted to scale all of the axes at the same time I would just need to click the little black box in the middle and drag the same goes for the position axes after having selected one of them by the way very cool idea so now that I have my floor if you will I want to position all my objects directly above or rather on it and spread them out a bit if I select any one of them and look at their position values I can see that they are all positioned at the absolute zero point in my scene by default I also know three things one every object is one meter in size secondly the position values are also measured in meters and lastly the position is measured from its anchor point which is exactly in the middle of each object by default so to position them directly above my floor I can do one of two things I can either select one of my primitives for example to cone go to the Y position value and enter 0.5 in other words half a meter and hit return with that my cone is directly on if you will the floor alternatively for example in the case that I actually have no idea how tall or large my object is I can select my sphere this time and scroll down and flip open the parameters for the anchor point here at the very top I have an alignment pop-up-menu clicking on this I can see that I have a simple way of offsetting the objects anchor point relative to its current center anywhere from left to back so if I select set bottom I can see the Anchor Point has been repositioned at the very bottom of my sphere and its Y position value has changed to minus 0.5 meters to reflect that now all I have to do is enter 0 for my Y position and it too is directly above my floor being able to easily align the Anchor Point like this is yet another feature I would love to have for motion objects also now I want to spread them out a bit which I could of course do by simply using the 3d gizmo but I'll just select the cone and move it 1.5 meters on its x-axis then select the sphere and move it - 1.5 meters on its x-axis then do the little Anchor Point trick for the cube as well and maybe reposition the camera a little you by the way primitives are far more complex than one at first would suspect if I select any one of them I get a parameter area in the inspector that is unique to primitives depending on which primitive it is it will have more or less parameters for changing its characteristics selecting the sphere for example only gives me three additional parameters at the bottom such as radius with which I can scale it a segment count with which I can increase or decrease the amount of segments or vertices it has and with that how smooth it is something that will prove important later when we talk about instance errs by the way so a lower value will give it more of a angular or chiseled look and the higher the value the smoother its surface becomes I even have six different types of spheres to choose from from the menu below that anything from standard to Hemisphere the latter for example gives me only the top half of a standard sphere the cube on the other hand has some unique rounding parameters once enabled it allows me to round its corners by a certain radius and determine their smoothness again with a segments parameter lastly the cone has the most primitive specific parameters ranging from radius parameters as well as rounding but also a slice parameter which a few of the primitives have such as the cone cylinder disc and others as the name suggests once enabled this allows me to slice the given primitive into a random portion of the model that I can define with the to end from angle values these all of course also being animatable so we can see that checking out these parameters after choosing any given primitive can prove to be very powerful whereby primitives have yet another bonus they'd load pretty much instantly that is a lot faster than if you were loading any other model with the same complexity so I can only recommend playing around with them for a while to see the endless amounts of variations one has with such seemingly simple models lastly there are some settings for planar reflections which I'll cover in the later episode so with that we have our simple scene that we can play with and explore mo2 even further let's look at the options for navigating a scene the navigational tools can be found in the on-screen controls across the top as we already saw at the far left we see the button for the camera post effects flyout menu which we'll get back to when we talk about exporting next to that we have the camera menu where we can select from either the current active camera or a prospective camera since I currently only have one camera in my scene selecting active camera will show me its point of view what I'm shown under the active camera is always the topmost camera in my scenes content list should I have more than one that is also set to visible in other words this allows me to add as many cameras as I'd like to my scene and cut to and from them simply by animating their visibility again something we'll get into in the later episode when we talk about animation selecting the perspective camera on the other hand shows us the point of view from an invisible camera with perspective distortion as with a real camera just for reference this cameras purpose and functionality is exactly like the perspective camera you find in motion and can be used to navigate your scene but does not appear as an object in either the scene nor the scene contents list therefore other cameras can't see it and it also cannot be animated but this is the camera you want to be sure you are using when navigating your scene to make sure that you are not altering any animations that you may have created for an active camera which is also the one that will be rendered something that is of course very important to remember in fact if I hide any and all cameras in my scene then all I see in either mode is the perspective cameras view so with the perspective camera selected I can now move over to the right hand side above the viewer where we see another four buttons the last three are for controlling the current viewing directions which regular users of motion will already recognize the first being the pan tool by clicking and holding this button I can pan the current view on the x and y axes using my mouse so basically move up-down left-right in a straight line the one in the middle is the orbit tool if I currently don't have anything selected clicking and dragging this will orbit that is circle my current view around the center point of my scene but if I have one or even more object selected my view is orbited around the center point of that selection usually demonstrated by selecting my sphere for example or my cone and orbiting around them the view rotates accordingly depending on which is selected the third button is the zoom button though this is not in the optical sentence but rather by clicking and dragging this button up and down you are moving or pushing the camera closer to or further away from the center of your view respectively and just like with scrubbing parameter values in the inspector holding the option key while scrubbing any of these three will decrease the speed by one tenth the normal speed and holding the shift key will speed it up tenfold then to the left of these three we have the so called frame object button with an object selected either from in the viewer or from the scene content list clicking this moves the camera so that the selected object or objects are centered in the frame this of course is extremely handy for example when you've lost your orientation within a scene and would like to quickly return to a specific object as a reference point so for example if i push randomly into open space then select my three objects clicking the frame object button Reece enters them almost exactly as before if I just select the severe and click the frame object button the sphere is centered in my view selecting my floor or disk zooms me back that I can see it in its entirety shift-clicking the three primitives in my scene content list and clicking the frame object button gets me more or less back to where I started so to round things off let's look at lights we took a quick look at them in a previous episode this time we want to create our own an mo - scene can be lit from two types of sources by its environment which is the only thing lighting the scene at the moment and which we'll get into much more in detail later and directed or area lighting the latter meaning actual 3d lights placed within the scene just like all real world light sources they have a physical shape and there are four types as with models and text objects we can add one by right-clicking somewhere in the dark area of the scene content then add object and light let's start with a sphere light by selecting it from the list with fat it too is placed at the zero coordinate of my scene putting it directly inside my cube obviously not something that I want so I'll just drag it on its Y position until it's above the cube severe lights shine in all directions and illuminate the scene based on their intensity color and radius looking into the inspector and scrolling down to the light section we can see these and other parameters listed here I can control the color of the selected light by simply clicking on the flyout menu here I can give it any random color and maybe just warm it up a little in the pop-up menu below that I can change it into any one of the other three types of lights the intensity of course determines its brightness once outside of the cube it became visible as a big shiny ball this is because a lights shape in MO too is visible by default which I can change by unchecking the render shape checkbox but one should note that even if this option is disabled highlights from the light will still be visible especially in very reflective objects I'll leave it on for now light radius controls the physical size of the light once again measured in meters last but not least I can of course enable shadows but one should also consider that using sphere lights with the shadow enabled requires six additional renders of the entire scene per frame which will of course affect performance especially if you add more than one using a spotlight on the other hand with shadows enabled doesn't suffer such a performance hit so if using a spotlight is a viable alternative it's something to consider when building a scene speaking of which let's switch this light to a spot using the pop-up menu some of my light as well as my shadows disappear because by default the spotlight is actually pointing at me so away from my objects obviously I can change this by simply using the 3d gizmo to move it off to the side and rotate it so that it's hitting my objects looking back at the light parameters we can see it has a lot of the same settings such as color type intensity radius and has even retained our previous color and shadow settings beyond that we also have a setting for the spot angle as well as angle smoothness slider changing either radius or angle will determine the overall light coverage of my spot but also changing the radius scales the size of the shape that is visible if I have render shape enabled the shape only being visible if viewing the spotlight from the front by the way this of course being a great way of adjusting the visible source of the light to fit the physical model of a light for example changing its smoothness makes for a softer or harder edge of the light scone but it also softens the shadow we see being cast by the objects on to each other and like I said enabling shadows for a spotlight only requires one additional render of the scene to be calculated as opposed to the six additional renders I mentioned before when using a sphere light by the way the lights intensity is provided in physical units namely in lumen so actually simulating real-life lumen values that you'll find on the package of a light bulb for example so using both the correct scene scale meaning meters combined with actual lumen values will in fact make for more realistic lighting results if we switch our light over to a directional light using the type pop-up menu our have seen darkens a bit and the shadows disappear directional lights emit parallel rays of light in a specified direction from its source located at an infinite distance in other words even though we can see the light represented as an object in our scene its light source is in fact coming from an infinite distance away shining in the direction it's pointed therefore even though it's technically above my objects if I rotate it on its x-axis making it point upwards it still illuminates my objects from below and as opposed to our other two lights a directional light only has color and intensity settings and since a directional light is technically extremely far away its intensity will generally have to be much higher to have the equal effect on my scene last but not least we have an ambient light this light emits in all directions illuminating all objects in the scene from all directions equally ambient lights have no position and no representation in the scene the most common use for ambient lights is to add an overall fill effect or color cast to a scene I'll just set the light back to a spot light and adjust it again so it's illuminating my objects and lastly let's just add an additional point or sphere light to our scene by right-clicking in the gray area of the inspector pane going to add object light and sphere again it appears at the zero coordinate of my scene and I'll just move it up and out a little bit address its intensity is needed and turn off its shape for now this way we have a little bit of additional lighting from the front to prepare us for applying materials which is up next and that's part three I hope that was helpful and if it was let us know in the comments coming up in the next episodes we'll look at materials animation and much much more if you want to be sure not to miss any of the new episodes subscribe and hit that little Bell to be notified once they go live any and all relevant infos and links down below in the description thanks so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next videos

Channel: motionvfx

Views: 6,538

Keywords: FCPX, Final Cut Pro X, Apple Motion, Motion 5, Video Editing, Video Production, 3D, Rendering, VFX, MakeMotionGreatAgain, PostChat, Video, Editing, YouTube, VLOG, MoGraph, Graphics, Apple, final cut pro x tutorial, mObject, final cut, mO2, apple, editing, post production, vr video, 3d video, vr, vr 3d, fcpx plugins, vfx, mobject, motionvfx, motion 5 3d text, motion templates, motion, rendering, final cut pro x plugins, real 3d, motion graphics, fcpx effects, animation, tutorial, FCPX Tutorial

Id: 709bWSzYPJ4

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018