MoGraph Unboxing: After Effects and Cinema 4D Project Files from the Short Film, "Bumble"

Joey here and even though I'm Jewish christmas came early courtesy of our friends at hold frame today I'm unboxing the cinema 4d in After Effects project files from bumble a short film from the talented folks at bull pen let's dive in picking apart someone else's project files is an amazing way to learn new tricks our friends had hold frame have hooked us up with project files from a short film called bumble and today I'm going to unbox them with you and see what kind of advanced tricks we can learn together make sure to check out this video's description if you'd like to grab the full set of project files for this film plus some breakdowns and extra material from the filmmakers alright first let's watch the film and I thought it might be good to get a truly unbiased opinion alongside my own here you watch this [Music] [Music] [Music] pretty awesome hey what do you think like the big flower had so many kind of a yellow thing goodness like yep alright so I have a whole bunch of questions about how this was made and fortunately I have the project files courtesy of hold frame now if you haven't heard of hold frame it's an amazing resource for motion designers and animators to download projects from some of the best artists in the world it's basically like having access to the source code for some of your favorite work and it's an incredible way to pick up some advanced tips and secrets so here are some of the questions I want to answer by digging through the projects first how did they achieve the look of this film I know it's 3d but it kind of looks 2d the colors and the overall aesthetic are really cool and I want to know how they pulled it off second how did they do the spider web scene this is one of those how the hell did they do it things and I suspect it's less complicated than I'm imagining third how did they get the seeds to pop off I'm curious did they brute-force this did they simulate it I don't know and finally what other tricks will we discover I know I'm going to be surprised when I check out the projects and I'm hoping to learn some new things to add to my bag of tricks alright let's start in the cinema 4d project files so to begin I'm checking out this PDF that came with the project and it has a lot of really cool details about how the project was actually executed including some links to animatics which is great because this is normally a step that you don't see as someone viewing a short film so let's take a look at the 3d animatic and one of the things I'd like you to notice is how simple the scenes are the bees themselves don't have any shading or texture and in fact there's not even wings on them and so you might be wondering like I am how the heck all of this got put together so let's go into the cinema 4d project and take a look so this is the second shot in the film and let's kind of dive in and take a look at what's going on here so the first thing that I want to call out is that bull pen used Arnold renderer for this and I'm assuming that that's just a combination of an aesthetic choice they like the way that the Arnold renderer looks but also they probably just know that renderer really well so I'm gonna go into the extensions and open up an IPR window so we can see the Arnold render and I'll just dock this over here on site this IPR window by the way is basically an interactive render window so I can scrub through the animation and very quickly get an idea of what my renders gonna look like and you are probably wondering where the hell the color is well as you can see looking down here in the materials there is no color in the scene and that is on purpose we'll find out why when we get into After Effects but in short bullpen decided to leave all decisions about the final color of these 3d objects to after-effects to the compositing phase which frankly I think is brilliant but if we zoom in there is lighting there is shading and even with this flat sort of grayish white color it still looks pretty cool and by colorizing it in composite bullpen had a ton of flexibility now you're probably noticing that this B also has no wings in addition to having no stripes or color so what the heck's going on there let's close the IPR window so we can zoom in and take a look and let me leave the scene camera here so we can zoom in so if I click on this B you can see that the B is essentially just a pill shaped object and it's already been made editable but parented underneath it I do see an object or a null called wings and parented under that there's some geometry so let's turn this back on you can see by these two red traffic lights that the object has been disabled in both the viewer and the renderer so by holding option and clicking I can turn those back on so if we sort of scrub through we can see that there are actually wings on the B and they are indeed moving so why don't we take a look at the animation that's going on there so to do that I'm gonna hit shift f3 to bring up my timeline and I can see here that there are rotation keyframes on the pitch rotation property of each wing and if I hit tab I can also check out the graph editor for this and I can see that these are sort of rhythmic wing flaps and they're just repeating over and over again there's not a lot of personality or thought to it at this point and so what my gut is telling me is that bullpen did this so that they could actually have more control over what the wings were doing by not rendering them in cinema 4d but instead rendering them later on in After Effects if I play this scene you can see what I'm talking about the wings are indeed moving but not with a lot of character and it could be a lot more interesting but of course if you animated them in cinema 4d and then changed your mind in one of the wings to pause or to flutter as soon as the bee landed you'd have to rerender the whole thing that would be obnoxious so here's what they've done there is a null that is parented underneath the main small bee body and there's this little tag on it if we click on that you can see it's an external compositing tag and what that's going to do is it's going to allow bullpen to export the position scale and rotation information about what this null right here is doing and to then parent 3d objects in After Effects to it so if i zoom out and I play this animation again you can see that the null is following the bead now why is it not following the rotation well it actually is but there is a setting up here that you may not know about this setting will toggle between showing you the world coordinates or the object coordinates for any object and so if I click this now you can see that this null object is bringing with it the position and the rotation information which would make it really easy to parent wings to this and After Effects so let me turn these wings back off now another thing that's missing are the stripes on the B so in addition to having no color there's also no stripes and it seems like that would be a difficult thing to add in After Effects without some kind of information so how is this working so this is actually one of the things I learned looking at this project which I've never actually used before because I don't use cinema 4d as much as I used to so check this out so what we're seeing here in the IPR window is the beauty pass of this render that is typically what you see when you hit render inside of cinema 4d and you can see that there's all sorts of shading going on here and generally looks pretty nice even though there's no color but Arnold liked all renderers is capable of spitting out other passes now you might be familiar with the render settings in cinema 4d and there is a big multi pass button here where even using the standard renderer and cinema 4d you can add a whole bunch of image passes and utility passes to use and composite Arnold works the same way up here in the IPR window you can see that currently we are displaying the Beauty pass but I can switch this and see other passes now of course there's an alpha channel being generated and there's a whole host of other channels that we can sort of take a look at now there's some that you're probably familiar with like ambient occlusion these are the shadows created by objects that are very close together sort of self shadowing and you can layer that in to make your 3d render look more rich but what are some of these other ones so things like web now there is no web in this shot so I'm assuming that that's a pass that's only active in a different shot but I'd like you to look at the B pass huh now that's interesting what the heck is going on here if we click on the B body itself and look at that piece of geometry in the object browser we can come over here and see that there's only two materials applied to this and they're actually both identical which makes me think that maybe one was accidentally duplicated but neither of them have stripes down here in the material browser there is a material that has stripes on it and if I select it and I go over to a sign it's not actually assigned to any objects so what the heck is happening here all right so in order to clear this up I'm going to open up a separate scene that will make a Ovie's a little bit clearer for you so this is really simple seeing two spheres some lights if I hit command R and render this you can see it looks amazing now let's say that the camera was somewhere else saved over here and I wanted the ability in composite to manipulate this back sphere separately from this sphere well I need a mat for that and so of course I can select that sphere in the object browser right click go to render tags and add a compositing tag and then in the compositing tag settings down here I can turn on one of the object buffers now what this is going to do is it's going to create a mat for this object in object buffer 1 and if I actually want to render object buffer 1 I just need to go into my render settings make sure multi pass is turned on and add that object buffer as a channel and there we go if I hit shift R to do a quick picture view render you'll see here's my beauty pass and then if I go to single pass mode I can see my object buffer you might already be familiar with this but a OVS are actually a newer feature to cinema 4d they've been around in third-party renderers for a while but in cinema 4d they were just added in R 21 so here's how they work first I need to go into my material settings here and it's important to note that this is a node material when I created it I went to create materials new node material and this is a newer feature that came out in our 21 and this is the feature that allows you to use a Ovie's natively in cinema 4d so if I go to the node editor by clicking this button this is the node tree that is actually creating the material for me and if you've never used this it may look like a bunch of poppycock and balderdash but it's really powerful and it adds some new features that you can't really get with normal materials so without getting too deep into how node materials work this node right here defines all of the channels that the material contains and this node over here is the diffuse channel and all of these settings and options that go along with that now you'll notice down here in material 1 there is an AO V channel and I can type things into it if I want to so for example I can click on the material node here and I can go to the AO v multipass a section here and I can add a new pass and let's give it a name let's call this sphere 2 and then I can actually just click on this to fill that AOV with a color white let's say and then I can say add to render settings and close this if I go into my render settings here you'll see that the AOV has been added to my multipath section automatically and so now if I hit render you'll see that nothing has changed however if I hit shift + R to open the picture viewer here's my beauty pass but I also have an AO v pass and because this material is on both spheres they are both filled with white so if I wanted to separate them I could maybe name this material a one command drag to make a copy and name this o - and then in o - I'll go to the node editor and I'll change this a Ovi D - - I'll swap out the material that's on sphere - with this new one go into my render settings and make sure that a o V channel - has been added which it hasn't so let me add that right now and then I'll hit shift our and you can see now those a OVS are working exactly like object buffers which is nice but that's not why these are so cool let's go back into the node editor for this first material and let me just remove this AO v pass that's on there so now I'll add a fresh one and let's call this one checkers over here in my assets I can find a shader that will generate a checkerboard I'm going to grab that drop it into my node tree and I'm going to pipe the result into the color channel of my checkers AOV so now let's close this down if I hit command R nothing changes but if I hit shift our here's the beauty pass but notice that a ov1 has a checkered pattern in it now a ov2 is filled with white we haven't changed anything there so why is this useful well there's a lot of ways that this could be useful but just to demonstrate one let's go back into the node editor remove this checkerboard and let's look for a shader that can give us some noise and we could just add maybe a basic noise shader to our node tree pipe the result into the color channel of the AOV maybe change the noise type to something I don't know more interesting and now if we close this down and we do another render and we look at that aov you'll see that now this AOV has that noise pattern on it and this could be really useful if we wanted to say have a mat that would let us color correct just certain pieces of this sphere to add say some grunge to it or something like that or if say there was a texture that we had mapped to the sphere with stripes and things like that we could have an AO V that would give us a mat for just certain parts of that texture because it's based on the texture space and not just the object itself it's a lot more versatile than an object buffer and that's why a OVS are so cool and now here's another really simple scene with a sphere some lights and a simple texture and this time we're back using Arnold so the IP our window is open and you can see that we've got a beauty pass here we have an alpha pass and also I have set up an AO V for Arnold called checkers and this has the checkerboard pattern on it now notice in the object manager the texture that's on the sphere is this blue texture it's not this checker texture down here and so to add an AO V that references a certain material on an object you can add the Arnold custom AOV tag you can give that AO via name tell it what material to use and then you set it up in your render settings and you can now access and render it and just to show you how useful this could be if I move my camera around you'll see the IPR is updating for me and so if I had some animation on this if this sphere was rotating I would not only be able to color correct the beauty pass in After Effects but I would also have this mat that's checkerboards that I can use to do whatever I want to change the color on that part of the sphere to brighten or darken or mess with the hue or blur or do anything else I want to and because it's texture based it sticks to the object so hopefully now you understand what a Ovie's are and why they're so cool and you also hopefully understand how the bullpen team managed to get a mat so that they could create stripes on the B in after-effects they created an AO V using a striped material so now they'll be able to color correct the B to look any way they want and they have a mat just for the stripes that doesn't interfere with the beauty pass pretty slick [Music] another pass that I wanted to call out which I thought was really cool is the facing ratio aov and essentially what the facing ratio pass is telling us is what angle we are looking at each piece of the object in comparison to the camera so things that are looking at the camera straight on like this surface of the B are white and things that are sort of turning away and almost perpendicular to the camera they get darker and it's almost like the Finnell seder in cinema 4d and I'm imagining that bullpen use this pass to get some interesting compositing effects so I have learned a lot about how they sort of did look development for this just by breaking this apart now I want to look at some of the animation so this is shot seven this is where the B lands on a flower and the weight of the B pulls the flower over in this kind of sad pose now when you just watch it it may seem like a very simple scene there's not too much going on but I want you to look closely here look at how much animation is really happening there is the sort of overall animation the primary animation of the plant bending like this and the B is sort of attached to it but then watch all these other little leaves they're all sort of overlapping and reacting to that primary animation now how are they doing that it's really well done and it looks almost like it's simulated and some people might actually see this and think that this is some sort of elaborate dynamic simulation well let's take a look so the way that this is constructed is you've got each leaf having its own object here and what's very interesting to me is that these leaves are actually outside of the hierarchy of the main plant that's kind of fascinating so if I just sort of turn all of these leaves off for a second so they're not distracting us you can see that we've got this plant composed of a cylinder and a sphere and there are some copies of little petals that go around and in fact the bee itself this piece of geometry here is actually inside of the hierarchy for that plant and the reason that they did it that way is because then the bend to former that's in there will actually work on everything it will work on the bee and the flower at the same time that's really clever if I turn the bend off you can see that this is basically what is being bent this entire set up including the beat now that's really clever because it lets them get away with doing this in a simple way versus having to set up constraints or something more elaborate and the way they edited this helps that to look this shop begins with the bee already touching the flower so they don't need a bee to land on it and then have the flower Bend they can just do it all in a separate shot making it a little bit easier to rig now how do they make the bee fall off this is one of the oldest tricks in the book what they have here are two copies of the bee so if we go back in time when the bee is sort of swinging through the air this copy of the bee here that is within the hierarchy that's being bent that is the bee that is visible and if you look here you can see that the traffic lights are green but at some point in time I'm guessing right where these key frames are watch this boom turns red and that means that something else must have turned green so if I go back a frame aha look up here look at this Big B layer that layer turns on and notice it is outside of the hierarchy of the plant but it's in the exact same spot and so then that one can just sort of move now there's a lot of really nice animation going on here I just like to point out that even just something simple like this Bend has a lot of nuance to it if we open up the timeline and take a look at this you can see there's a lot of keyframes on the bend if we just look at the strength you can see that there's a really nice curve with some overshoots and then it kind of dips again and this is really really well done here and all of that love that the animators put into it definitely shows now let's turn these leaves back on because I want to point something out now at first I was confused because the leaves are like I mentioned they're not inside of this plant null that's being bent and so what that means is if we take one of these top Leafs for example you zoom in here as the plant is bending and moving the leaf is moving with it but there's no constraint tag on here if I move over you'll see there's no constraint tag and if you don't know a constraint tag is a really cool tool in cinema 4d that would let me essentially parent this leaf to this stem right here but they didn't do that and I don't know why maybe they just didn't have time to set it up or maybe they thought it would be quicker to just do it this way but in any case if I open up the timeline if I open up the properties of that leaf you can see that the position of the leaf was manually keyframed some poor animator literally had to go through this animation and move the leaf so that it appeared to stick to the stem now you might be thinking oh well that's not very clever and they could have done it in this way nicer way and Chris Schmidt definitely wouldn't have done it that way and you are correct however doesn't matter would you have even noticed that just watching the piece and this is a very fast way to animate that allowed them to have total control and to add all kinds of character to this so each of these leaves believe it or not is manually keyframed both in position and rotation to get a little bit of wiggle out of them and also to make them stick to the stem and I just thought that was really cool and brilliant now here is what I thought was one of the coolest shots in the piece which is the bee flying through the spiderweb pretty nifty now when I saw this my first reaction was probably the same reaction most animators have oh they must have used Houdini or soft body dynamics or something to make it work the way it did well of course they did it a much smarter way than that so first let's just zoom in and see how they actually constructed the spider web and I just want to point out if you get really close to it you can see it's just a bunch of sweeps connected together if you get too close to it the illusion that it is indeed a spider web is broken but of course it's small in the frame like this and so this is an example of knowing how much detail you actually need in your model based on how close to camera an object is and this is why storyboarding and animatics are so important now how did they actually construct the web well this is actually really really cool what it appears they did was to take a whole bunch of nulls and to arrange them probably on some sort of piece of geometry that they built to create something that looks kind of like a spider web then they created a series of sweeps like this and what they did was they swept a circle spline which is why these are small thin little tubes this is a thin little circle spine and they swept it along a tracer now if you never use the tracer before they're really handy it will let you feed in a bunch of objects and it will create a spline that connects those objects and those objects can even be animated so you can see that this tracer here is connected to null 11 17 and 16 and so it is literally following those nulls so if I select them down here and I right click and say select objects now those nulls are selected and I want you to watch as this animation plays out notice that those null objects do move all of those nulls are animated as the bee hits the web and it happens really really fast let me change my camera here and get a better look at the web and I'm gonna turn my bee off for the moment so all of these little circles here these are showing you where the nulls are and the three that I have selected you can see that as we get towards the impact boom they all move and it deforms the web in real time it's really cool I can actually move these nulls around and you'll see it changes the shape of the web so it's a really slick way of rigging this in a simple way and also easy to animate now if I go one frame further you'll see that part of the web turns off so again this is just some simple sleight of hand to make it seem like the bee broke the web but literally all that's happening is a part of that web is being turned off so let's explore this a little bit deeper if we come down here and we click on web and go into the timeline we can see just how many key frames are being used here you can see this really long column of key frames on all of these sweeps those are the key frames for visible and editor and visible and renderer in likely those are the key frames that are turning parts of the web off and so you can literally see on this frame we have turned off parts of the web not all of it though because some of it remains and the nulls themselves just have a little bit of position animation on them and that's kind of authoress to it now there is something that I noticed is missing from this and if we look at the original shot you'll see there's this little wispy piece of web that kind of falls down after the bee flies through and I'm not seeing it here inside of cinema4d and so I'm guessing that we're gonna discover some shenanigans once we get into After Effects I wanted to show you one more shot cinema4d before we go into comp and it is this shot because again this is another shot where I thought did they simulate this did they use X particles or something fancy so it's a really simple shot you basically have the B just kind of coming down and knocking all of the seeds off and leaving a few remained and what's great is you can actually see exactly how they animated these this is a bend deformer and you can see it being animated if I click on that bend deformer going to the timeline there it is and there is that nice oscillating animation curve which if you've taken animation bootcamp you will recognize immediately how did they get all of the seeds to fall off well before I answer that I'd like you to consider if you were the animator being asked to animate this you might spend a day or two trying to figure out some clever way to use physics some sort of simulation maybe particles to get this to work so let's actually dive in and look at how they did this now first of all as the B comes down I can tell you that not every single one of these balls is actually being animated because look at how many there are and it seems like some of them are probably just turning off so if we go into our timeline shift f3 you can see that indeed there's a lot of these spheres that only have two keyframes on them and if we open them up to see what those keyframes are visible in editor visible and renderer that tells me that a lot of these are just being turned off on certain frames which is smart less to animate if we go way down here you can see that some of the spheres are actually being animated there are keyframes on them and you can see that the keyframes don't really have much rhyme or reason which tells me that a human touched every single one of these layers which I love now let's confirm this so if we go and find a seed like this one which is falling you can actually see the motion path every single one of these that is falling was hand animated pretty wild right now I know that plenty of cinema 4d artists would rather die than do that much hand animating but I got to tell you that sometimes that's the best way and you shouldn't be afraid of that even though there's a lot of these you find yourself getting into a groove and you're just keyframing away and you animate a few of them and you know probably took an hour to to do it but look at how much control you have look at how you can get a nice spread some fall clothes some fall far away you can have some fall sooner or later slow or faster these are things that it's pretty tricky to do and to control accurately with dynamic simulations and so I was really pleased to see that bullpen went the extra mile and just hand-animated this shot all right there are a lot more really cool things inside of the cinema 4d scenes for this but I think we've looked at plenty for now let's go into After Effects and see how they composited this film all right so we're now after facts I have opened up the project and this looks quite a bit different doesn't it so it's hard to imagine how we got from those colorless grayscale renders out of Arnold to this so let's just start exploring and the first thing I want to note is just how organized all of this is the entire film has been laid out shot by shot and this is how you do it people it's just a lot easier to navigate if I want to know how this shot is comped I can just double click and bullpen was nice enough to provide pre-rendered PNG sequences so it's easier to kind of move around like this as we explore so why don't we start with shot one because even just with this shot there's lots to talk about so let's go ahead and double click this pre-comp do you go inside and it's gonna take a minute to render because there's a lot going on here so just in this first shot there are 39 layers most of them are pre comps now I'm not gonna go through every single one but I am gonna go through a few just to give you some idea as to how extensive the compositing is in this project one thing I like to do sometimes if I'm going through someone else's project is to go layer by layer and solo the layer so I can see what's going on so let's start here with the background so this looks fairly simple on the surface but let's go into the pre comp for it so just this background layer has nine layers and three of those are pre comps now they are the same pre comp but you can see how this is like a Russian nesting doll of comps so let's just keep going all the way down so we are now a few pre comps deep I can actually push the tab a button to see exactly where we're sitting and there is yet another pre comp called facing ratio let's check that out and finally we are at the bottom so let's see what's going on here so let me solo the bottom layer which is just a black solid a white solid on top so I think we're gonna be finding a lot of leftover layers layers that don't actually need to be there this black solid obviously doesn't need to be there because the white solid is covering up and sometimes if you're working on a short film and you've got a lot of compositing to do you don't perfectly clean up your After Effects projects and in this case I'm gonna forgive bullpen so let's double click on this layer so this is a render right out of Arnold of the facing ratio pass of the Sun if I double click this layer this is the actual render of the Sun so you can see that it's basically just a sphere or maybe it's even sort of a flattened disc you can see that there's some nice lighting this kind of a rim light around the edge of this thing and so this is the beauty pass and then this is that facing ratio pass that is basically like a fernell it's showing you how much of the object is facing the camera how much is sort of turning away from it so in this comp basically all that's going on is we have the facing ratio pass of the Sun using the actual render of the Sun as an alpha mat most likely because if I look at this layer again and I hit option 4 I can see there's an off channel there ok wonderful now one thing I would like to point out is that this image has been scaled down and positioned where it should be in the frame they didn't actually place the Sun there in cinema 4d and hit render they decided to place the Sun where they wanted in calm now if we go back up the chain here this is where it starts to get really interesting let me turn off this alpha checkerboard so the way that this Sun is constructed is through a few different layers and this is how their colorizing everything in this film so at the bottom we have a yellow solid with a color on it there is a levels adjustment on it which I'm guessing is just used for convenience to sort of push the yellow into a more saturated place and it's using that Sun beauty pass as an alpha mat to get this nice a circle then the next layer here if I solo that this is actually just this beauty pass here but it's composited over that yellow circle in screen mode so now we're bringing back some of that nice highlight and then finally there's an adjustment layer that is using as a luma inverted mat the facing ratio comp that we just looked at so if I turn on that adjustment layer you can see that basically it's just darkening the edges so let's zoom in here for a minute because this is pretty interesting and I think a good example of why having all of these render passes can be useful if I turn on the facing ratio layer and solo it you can see that it's basically giving me a mat where the edge of an object is black because it's starting to turn away from the camera and the center is white so using that as a luminance mat for an adjustment layer it gives me the ability to only mess with the edges of an object in a really really targeted way so after all of those steps we now have a yellow Sun and what's interesting is that in this background the Sun layer down here is turned off there's a lot of extra stuff here so let's kind of walk step by step through this so we've got a white solid with a gradient ramp with a very specific gradient on here after that we've got two copies of the Sun layer the first copy is blurred quite a bit as you can see which kind of acts as a nice gradient around the Sun so it's actually a really clever way of creating a gradient from blue to white and then feathering in this yellow color too you can see that they've also filled that Sun with a less saturated color and then above this blurred layer we have yet another blurred layer this is actually a pretty good trick to stack blurs because that way you can get an area that's a little bit more well-defined in the middle while still having a really big sort of outer Corona there and then the last two pieces are a null object that was probably used just to scale things and move them and a shape layer which is a gradient ramp in soft light mode so if I set this to normal you can see that this shape layer just has a gradient ramp on it that's sort of darkening this corner and leaving this white and if I set that back to soft light it's just creating a little bit of the vignette effect so look at how many steps were taken just to create the perfect background for this shot which we haven't even looked at yet and now we are back in the main shot and I'm just gonna go layer by layer here turning on some of these flowers and you can see essentially these are all the exact same comp just placed now what's really cool about this is that this lets you do the layout of your shot in After Effects instead of cinema 4d so if we unsolo all of these and I decided that it would feel really nice if this orange flower here we're sticking up a little higher I can go find it there it is tulip too and I could just move it up or move it down or scale it up you have a lot of control when you do your compositing and After Effects in this way you have literally an insane amount of control versus doing all of this in cinema 4d which would create much longer render times with all of this geometry and then if you wanted to change one flower you'd have to re-render the whole thing so this is awesome now how did they get the flowers to look this way and why don't we use that same tulip as an example so what we'll then actually did which is pretty cool is they created a look dev comp and what they did was render out one of each flower like this and some of these flowers do animate in later shots but in a lot of shots they're just backgrounds so these are just stills and you can see they've got in each flower to look exactly the way they want and then if you go back to the original shot we're just looking at you can see they've simply masked out the flower that they want to use for each layer so if we want to focus on this tulip we can go through and solo each layer try and find that Tula so this layer is named blood petals all right so that is one of the layers we're gonna need and then we're gonna want the stem for that as well so let's just go through and try to find the stem okay and you can see that all of the stems are on this green layer so here's our tulip here's the stem let's start diving in now inside of this green layer so what we have here at the bottom is a green solid that is being luma matted out by this layer here and this layer is just the alpha mat for all of the green parts of these plants after that we have this layer in screen mode and if I double click that you can see that this is the beauty pass of the render so we're screening the beauty pass over a flat green color and I want to point out a couple of things if i zoom in and I take a look at say this leaf you can see how soft and almost 2d this is looking but look at the original render here this doesn't look as soft and as 2d but it's because of the way it's being composited that we're getting this neat look now there's also some effects on this layer that's being screened so let's turn those off and see what we have so to start with we are tinting the layer so that white is not really white it's got a little bit of a yellowish cast to it so that's actually a really nice color trick is to never let your highlights be white never let your shadows be truly black have them be warmer or cooler and then there's also a levels effect which you can see is lowering the white output so that it's not so bright just lowering it a little bit and messing with the gamma quite a bit to give a little richness to the mid-tones in that beauty pass which is helping get this look after that then there's a another copy of the beauty pass but this time in multiply mode now why would they have the same pass in multiply and screen mode well what this is letting them do it's actually very clever is it's letting them separate the way they colorize these shadows in the highlights from their Beauty pass pretty slick so you can see that on this multiply pass they've also let me turn these effects off they've also tinted the darhk's so that they're green and and not just black and then they've done a levels adjustment here to brighten them up a little bit after that there is an adjustment layer that is using this pre-comp as a luma inverted mat so let's turn that adjustment layer on and then see what's going on so it was probably pretty obvious that adjustment layer off on is adding a lot of brightness to these leaves almost like a glow so let's go into this pre comp and see what we're looking at so this pre comp is basically the facing ratio pass of each plant and I can tell because they've added the letters F aren't and if I go into this pre comp I can see that I've got a white solid and then the facing ratio pass that is now being matted out by the luminance of the Alpha Chandler you might be asking why did they need to create a track mat for the facing ratio well let's find out if I turn off and don't use a track mat you can see that the render out of Arnold is actually giving us a black background here and you can get some weird edge artifacts if you have a black background but you're compositing this over something that is lighter and so this is just a really nice way of creating a white background for this to composite on top of so let's set this back to luma matte and we're good to go so now that we know that this pre comp is the facing ratio passes and this adjustment layer which is definitely brightening things is only being applied on the inverted luminance of that facing ratio we're getting really deep in the woods here you can kind of see what's going on so let me zoom in on one of these leaves and play with this you can see it even better if I bring this back to where it starts and I crank it up you can see that it's really brightening up everything but not equally if I look at the underside of this leaf that's not really brightening that but it is brightening the top a whole lot more and so this is kind of giving it this interesting sort of brightened glow look right so again it's just sort of playing around I'm sure that bullpen spent a lot of time experimenting to get it to look this way and finally we have one more solid here that has another pre-comp here that this looks like this is some other interesting past so let's take a look at that a minute but let's turn on this layer and you can see that it's not doing too much I'm noticing it a lot right there it's just kind of knocking down some of those highlights that got a little bit too bright let's go into this pre compensate what's going on here so I have the white background we've got this pre comp which is the ambient occlusion pass so we're taking the ambient occlusion pass and the areas that are darker we are filling with this green color and I'm assuming that the reason bullpen did that if I just kind of before-and-after this is because some of these areas were getting a little bit hot and this just knocks it down a little bit it's a really smart way of using ambient occlusion the ambient occlusion pass remember is black and white and this is just kind of a nice way of putting some color into it and so after all that we have these nice really interesting looking green stems and leaves so now that you've seen how the green was achieved you can probably imagine how the rest of the color was added to this film if we go into the blood petals comp which that might be my favorite pre-comp name of all time there's a lot of pieces to this but again every piece is just making a minor adjustment here let's start at the bottom so we've got a fill effect on a layer that is basically the Alpha channel of this tulip we're then covering up the top portion of that with the orange and we have we must have some sort of custom map for that so if I double click this you can see that here is my render pass my a o v just for that portion of the flower which made it really easy to add the orange right where they wanted it then there is an adjustment layer that is applying levels of fact only two areas of certain luminance and this is just the beauty pass so this is interesting because what they could have done is just taken the beauty pass and screened it over this but instead they used an adjustment layer and use the beauty pass as a luma matte which it's kind of interesting because then instead of just screening white over these colors you're actually color correcting these colors so I don't know maybe you have a little bit more control so now we have another orange solid that is being luma matted by another pre-comp and this pre-comp is using something called a glass pass which looks sort of like a specular pass it's sort of a lot shinier than than the beauty pass looked and so I'm guessing they just thought well I like these shiny parts and maybe this flower needs to be a little bit shinier so they used that as a matte and using an orange solid with a fill effect on it as opposed to color correcting it you can be very very precise if I want this to have a little bit of blue in it I can change the color and look I get I get blue there but you wouldn't want to do that because that looks awful so after that we've got looks to be another copy of the beauty pass but it's been tinted so the blacks are a little bit warmer and then the levels have been pushed and it's in multiply mode and it's using as a luma matte the petals matte so you can see what this is doing and again a lot of these things that bullpen are doing they may seem kind of like a convoluted way to get a look but as a compositor you have so much control when you do this I could crush the blacks a little bit and bring up some more of that color from the bottom and from the shadow areas but if I didn't want to do that I could do the opposite I could take the white input and crush that which is gonna bring some of that area down if I wanted this to be slightly more saturated I could just add more saturation to the color so there's a lot of control you have when you set up your passes this way next layer so this layer is just sort of brightening up the screen area a little bit and it's using as a matte this set up here which is its selfie pre-comp probably composed of other mattes kind of smashed together then we've got this layer here and this layer is really interesting it's adding a little bit of lighting just on that green part so it's using this green bulge pre-comp which is a matte for the green part and it is in screen mode with a little bit of a tint on it again it's not white see if I turn that off it's such a subtle thing but it's the Devils in the details if I have that tint effect off then that highlight is just white if I turn it back on it's a little bit warmth to it and the levels effect just sort of knocks down most of this because otherwise it gets gnarly and it just leaves the highlights and there you go so then we have another layer here in multiply mode doing a similar thing except on the shadow side we've got an adjustment layer here that you can see is bringing out some nice highlights on the green section of this and it's got a luma inverted mat which is composed of this pre-comp which looks like it's probably the beauty pass or the facing ratio it's kind of hard to tell it's the facing ratio yeah you can see it if you kind of dig deep enough so that facing ratio is a perfect use for it you just want a little bit of light on the edges while the facing ratio gives you that it can let you constrain your color correction to edges you've got another adjustment layer here that is super subtle it's just doing a little bit of brightening right there and then we've got a another green solid this sort of knocking down some of the highlights in there and then finally we have another copy of the beauty pass screened over everything let me turn that on and it is using this mat right here so it's only screening back over the tulip itself and if I sort of turn that on and off you can see it just beefs up the sort of specularity the shininess just a little bit so let me unsolo all of these and it took all that work just to get that one flower to look a certain away and you're probably thinking this is insane so I kind of want to try one thing really quick so I set this up really quickly I just wanted to show this to you I took the original Beauty pass and I removed all the effects put it in normal mode 100% opacity and I just put it next to this and I want to zoom in and I want to ask you that if I gave you this render and I said I want it to look like this there's not really a straightforward way to do that it really is about taking all of the passes that I've given you and using a whole bunch of compositing tricks to achieve this look and it's really hard to aim at this sometimes it's kind of one of those things where you have to experiment and you can tell bullpen definitely did a lot of experimenting because there's a lot of layers that are turned off there's things they tried that they abandoned and that's how it's done [Music] so we already talked a lot about how they did the color and you can imagine how much work it was every single thing in this film was colorized in that way with that level of detail and I wanted to talk about one more aspect of color which is the stripes on the B because I thought it was so interesting the way they did that so let's go into shot too and take a look alright so here is shot too and there's a lot going on there's some pre comps I want to point out really quickly that this background is completely different than the first background we looked at and this is one of the beautiful things about having so much of the look of your film done in After Effects if you decided that you wanted the Sun a little bit more overhead a little bit off to the side it's really easy to do that and see everything in context if you're creating all of that here and not doing it with say a sky object in cinema 4d alright so let's go into this pre cop here and take a look at the B and the B is its own pre comp several pre constant fact and let's just zoom in and take a look at this so here is essentially our B layer and there's not even any wings in this in this comp at all and we still have a few other pre comps in here so let's go into those and see what we're looking at so this pre comp here you can see this is using that AO v pass that had the striped texture on it and if we go back this pre comp is just the beauty pass so you see there are no stripes but you have all of the lighting and all of that my shading so how is this built up well start at the bottom so we're starting with a yellow solid and it's using as a luminance Matt this stripe AOV now it's been filled with gray the levels have been knocked down I'm not sure why yet but let's go to the next layer which is also a yellow solid and it is using this layer as a luma matte so let's try to understand what's going on here so this layer looks like just a PNG sequence and notice that this end of the B has a white stripe on it if I recall correctly if I go into this pre-comp though that has been inverted so they've done some compositing several pre comps deep if you if you really want you can go grab this project from whole frame and dig through to see how they inverted that but basically they have one version of that mat that has the stripes in different places and so what they've done is they've been very very picky about what color this base sort of dark color is and then what color this yellow stripy part is then after that by the way stripy part that is actually what entomologist call this part of the beat so then after that we've got another yellow solid when we turn that on we can see that this yellow solid is creating the highlights on the B it's doing that because it's using as a luma matte this B render pre-comp which is built off of the beauty pass so that is how we are bringing back the highlights and here I want to show you another thing that's cool about this because they have a yellow solid and you can see they've they've boosted the lightness of it so that it's based off of this color but it's just brighter now and the way that they're applying it selectively to create these highlights is by using the Beauty pass as a luma map they can put a levels effect on the Beauty pass so if I turn that off you can see that the Beauty pass is a lot flatter right but if you turn that back on I could boost those whites and I could crush those blacks and I could create a much harder edge to the B if that's the look I was going for but obviously that's not and I didn't make this film so I don't get to make decisions like that but I'm just showing you just how much power you have over the look of this thing you can get drastically different looks by messing with the levels using this as a luma matte the way they did and then finally you have one more layer here if we turn it on you can see that that creates the shadow at the bottom so that's basically doing the same trick as this layer here that's using the Beauty pass as a luma matte this is using the Beauty pass as an inverted luma matte so it's catching the darker parts of it and this is letting bullpen create shadows that are very precisely colored the way they want now if we go back and look in context you can see that having a warm colored shadow like this it plays really nicely off that cool background and it was a really smart color choice cool so then they basically just done a lot of work to get the colors of the scene to look exactly the way they want and back in the master shot they've added wings to the B now how did they do that so let's solo this layer for a minute this is the pre render that doesn't have the wings on it and I want to turn on this layer the small B wings now when I turn this on you'll see that there is a solid layer here that has keyframes on it there's actually a keyframe on every single layer this is what happens when you add that external compositing tag in cinema 4d remember how I showed you there were wings in cinema 4d but they've been turned off and in their place was a null object with an external compositing tag well that comes into After Effects and you can use sin aware to extract that and to bring that in and you get a keyframe on every single frame and it matches perfectly if we go frame by frame you can see how it follows the B so this is fantastic what this lets us then do if I turn this off is to then create wings by just creating shapes really simple shapes you can see that all bullpen had to do was create a little shape layer here two of them make them 3d and then they are simply parented to this null which is itself parented to small P wings what's great about this is if we hit u to open up all the key frames and we go into the graph editor you can see that they were able to control how the wings sort of slowed down as the bee came to a stop and they were able to make that creative choice in the context of the final shot they could see how the colors were playing how your eye was going to be directed to a specific part of the frame and then if they wanted the wings to do something different they could literally just change the keyframe and after effects like this and the wings would react differently it's really really smart that they did it this way because now they have control up until they hit render for the very last time now the way these way look is really interesting so I'm gonna hit shift command H to hide all of my outlines and I want to take a look at this as I go frame-by-frame through this you can see that the wings are basically flapping open and closed once every frame in the beginning part of this animation so they're moving really really fast and the motion blur creates this great illusion that they're flapping even faster if I hit command K and I go to advanced I can look at the motion blur settings and it looks like they have been messed with here so the shutter angle is 240 meaning there's going to be a lot of motion blur more than you would normally have what's cool about this is the rest of the render doesn't have motion blur the bee itself coming out of cinema 4d no motion blur but the wings motion blur and so that gives you the illusion that this scene was shot with a high shutter speed but the wings are going so fast that there's motion blur it's a really clever way of getting that look so here's another thing I wanted to call out that was pretty clever there's an adjustment layer in each scene and they're all kind of dialed in to taste but this adjustment layer is essentially compositing a blurred version of the shot back on top of itself but it's only blurring certain parts of the image it's using as a luma matte this shot now why would it do that well to find out why don't we crank this up you can see that it's really just kind of blurring the edges of things right it's not blurring everything and so it was set to two it's very very subtle but if I turn this off and then on I mean gosh you can barely tell you really have to like stare at the pixels over here by the b2 see any difference but it just sort of softens the image ever so slightly in this imperceptible way and what that's gonna let us do is get away from the hard edge sort of 3d look and that's one of the reasons that this film looks so nice it looks very 2d so here is the final rendered shot and this is just one shot of many in this short film hopefully it's starting to dawn on you just how much work this kind of thing can take if you care about it as much as the bullpen crew obviously did all right so we talked a lot about how a bullpen colored this film let's talk about some of the other things that I thought were really interesting inside of the After Effects comp and this shot is a perfect example so in this shot the larger be kind of hovers over the small be and let's kind of go to the middle of the shot here and you can see right in here the shadow starts to overtake the petals of the flower and the bee and initially I thought okay they probably just did this in 3d they would literally create a light and have the larger bee move between the light and this flower and this be casting the shadow so it would be realistic and that's not what they did so let's solo these layers layer by layer so let's first turn on the background and again I want to point out basically every shot has a custom background pre-comp so that they can shape where the Sun is precisely where they want it's just a level of detail you don't normally see you've got the camera then you've got this pre comp shot in here so let's go into here alright and we can do the same exercise here we can go layer by layer and first we're just sort of turning on these background flowers which are just kind of there and again what I love about this is I can move them around I can create a different composition if I want to here is the green a part of the flower here are the pink flowers and here is the bee excellent and finally there is the adjustment layer that adds that Gaussian blur alright so let's take a look at what's going on here so you might notice that the shadow is happening there but you can barely see it it's very subtle and there is no shadow being cast on the B is there hmm so let's unsolo all of these and go back one layer so the shadow must actually be happening in this comp and if it's not happening in 3d that means they're somehow faking it in After Effects so let's take a look so there's an adjustment layer here with a Gaussian blur on it so I'll turn that on and that's just softening things even a little bit more then we have one of the wings here and you'll notice in this case it's actually folded up against the B there's not even any animation on this layer then there's another adjustment layer and this adjustment layer has a mask on let me turn this on this is Jeff sumit lair is only affecting the wing and you can see that because it's using as an alpha mat a copy of the swing layer now are there more efficient ways of doing that yes there are but that is one of the things that in after-effects you kind of have to pick your poison you can just copy your lair and use it as an alpha mat and it's quick and easy and easy to see or you can use set mat which has its own gotchas but there are a lot of duplicate layers in this film because of how much control bullpen wanted so I want you to notice the mask on this adjustment layer how its animated by hand to create that shadow effect if I turn off the outlines you can see that it's creating that hard edge shadow just on the wing so now let's go up here you've got another adjustment layer that is using as its luma mat the mat for the B so this adjustment layer is only affecting the B and what's really cool about that is you're giving a different shadow on the B then you are on the wing which is sort of physically accurate that is actually what would happen because the wing is farther away from the B and so the shadow would be cast in a different place that would be very hard to do in 3d and because they've done it this way just manually drawing masks on adjustment layers they could control it and get exactly the movement and the shape they wanted so let's keep going there's another adjustment layer here and this adjustment layer is using as its mat an alpha mat for the green part of the flower right so this this adjustment layer is only going to operate on this green part and so as we go forward in time there we go you can see that it's creating a shadow there and the way they're doing that is really cool they're using a levels effect this is awesome because what it means is I can be really heavy-handed if I want to or I can be like bullpen and be just really subtle and nice right you can see that really what they're doing is they're just kind of beefing up the very light shadow that was actually showing up by ducking the white output which really nice subtle way to do it and then there's one more adjustment layer here that is on the petals themselves and it's using as a mat this alpha mat for the pedals and this adjustment layer has its own mask on it which you can see is quite a bit more complicated they are sort of mimicking the 3d shape the form of these petals and what that would look like with a shadow falling on it so for this entire shot they're really cool cast shadows they were all created by hand with masks and adjustment layers in After Effects and here is the final comp shot in all its glory and I think I actually like it more knowing how the shadow was faked in After Effects I think it's so brilliant now here is another really great example of the little finishing touches in sort of handmade details that can really bring a shot to life so there's a few details that I want to call out on this shot because I think this shot is just so beautiful so first of all I want you to again and notice that this background is different than all the other ones there's an extra sort of light area up here and down here and that's done very deliberately because you have a white spiderweb that you need to see in the center of the frame so the center of the frame needs to be darker than the rest of it and so they very carefully shaped the gradient by hand to make your eye go exactly where they want it to go very very cool there's also some really nice compositing work that went into these blue cups here to give them that nice edge lighting I just thought it was so pretty and I wanted to see how they did it and so just to walk you really quickly through how they did it we can sort of do our little trick and go solo so they have the sort of base color they've got a screened copy of the Beauty pass they've got an adjustment layer that is using the facing ratio as an inverted luma matte then they've got another blue layer here that's just bringing in a little bit more color into the shadows that's using sort of a modified version of the Beauty pass so that they can get the shadows to to be used as a luminous map then you've got another layer here and one or layer at the top set to screen mode and just to show you the attention to detail here let's look at this Cup in the corner this final layer brightens that just a little bit that's what it's doing I'm not even sure it hits these other two it does a little bit it's just it's just subtly affecting the highlights just a little bit just not so much but a little bit and sometimes that's the difference between having it really pop off of the frame and not and in this case it does now let's look at the spiderweb because to me that is one of the coolest parts of this entire film when the bee flies through it there's this moment where this little dangly comes down and remember in cinema 4d we couldn't find that thing so let's go into this web pre-comp and take a look at what's going on so this is the render of the spiderweb straight out of cinema 4d and you can see that it's a very very simple element now it's been composited against the background in screen mode which is really cool if you look at the web render you can see there's a lot of dark areas of it right because this is solid geometry in cinema 4d but to make it look more like a spider web they rendered it separately as a separate pass and composited just the web in screen mode now where's that little wispy let's find that so if we zoom in here and we kind of step through frame by frame as the bee approaches the web you can see a few things happen first of all there's a copy of the web up here and what that's being used for is as the bee makes contact there is one frame let me turn off my outlets here there's one frame where bullpen wanted a little bit of the web to actually be on top of the bee as though it had broken through but part of it was still in front of the bee if I turn this off you can see what that's doing and we're talking about one frame people literally one frame and then it's gone but it's a little detail that that lets you know that the animator kissed this so then there's this shape layer and this is kind of the unsung hero so let me turn my outlines back on and let's zoom in close so we can see what's going on here so what bullpen did was literally hand animate with a shape layer this little piece of web coming down I'm gonna solo this just so you can see this and let's open up the keyframes so you can see this literally was just hand animated there was no Newton used there was no Dueck no fancy pre comping or puppet pin literally a shape layer and lots and lots of keyframes and doing things like this obviously takes longer it's more tedious but you get more character to your animation sometimes for example look at what happens when the web sort of swings through look how quickly it stops and kicks back and overshoots it has this character that would be hard to get this whipping action would be pretty hard to get if you actually rigged this and set it up and tried to simulate it or animate it in some other way by just doing it old-school you can get exactly the character you want in that little tiny detail adds so much this shot there are hundreds of other little nuggets throughout this project file but I just tried to pull out some of the coolest ones that I thought can be useful and maybe your things that you could use in your next project so I hope you learned a ton from watching this and please leave a comment below if you want to see more mograph unboxings like this one hit subscribe if you want more motion design training like this in your feed and check the description to grab the entire set of project files from hold frame including a complete breakdown of the project from bullpen the original animatic files and a whole bunch of extras you can dive into that's it for this one I'll be around that's really good that's awful edit that out [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 26,519

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: ksGEmN6Bd8A

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020