Simon Russell @ The 3D and Motion Design Show

hi my name's simon russell i'm a freelance motion graphic designer i'm based in the uk based in a town called plymouth which is in devon um i'm going to talk a little bit about a project i did with treatment studio um for a classical group called the chronos quartet and the video it's kind of a music video called one earth one people one love um but first i'll play my so you get a gist of what i do [Music] [Music] [Applause] okay that's my reel uh as you can see i used to do a lot of live work um a lot of motion graphic-y particles sound responsive um kind of stuff so this job um it was done through a treatment studio and it was directed by willie williams it was for the chronos quartet the piece was composed by terry riley um it was for the anniversary it was commissioned by nasa for the anniversary one anniversary of a voyager um probe it's got really interesting kind of backstory if you just kind of read the wikipedia on it um but i won't go into it now um so i'll skip through the piece quickly um and you can watch it uh on my website which is simon fa russell.com um if you if you want to have a look at it or just it's on youtube as well so just google it chromos quartet on earth one people one love so there's two main sections there's like a there's a globe uh which we see forming uh in this initial bit um a lot of the geo was done in houdini but i'm gonna show you how to do the same thing really in cinema 4d the only bits you couldn't do as easily of these bits which i uh used for midi uh which for group supply just to sort of time up some of the meteors and and just kind of subtle touches really but it was the geo was generally done in um houdini or a lot or some of it and then brought into cinema 4d for everything else um because cinema cinema was the kind of backbone of a project and and brought everything together so you've got these globe sections and there's about four different treatments for the globe and we also scan scanned of a group playing the piece with a connect camera which is a depth camera which gives you a point cloud or quite easily turn it into a mesh um and so this is this is for group playing so it's one seamless shot um some of the challenges were vast loads of data so it's just wrangling the data and just getting it to kind of work and to be able to see it and design it and to just get a feel for it as you're working for it rather than working totally blind um i'll just skip through so that's the group playing it goes through different globe treatments different uh quartet treatments i keep wanting to say band quartet um so you've got a teal techie one uh you've got a cello solo metallic dddd and then we dissolve into dust very quickly show you the main file i used to do it make myself smaller so each null p's contain the planets queues contain the quartet sections i just use takes to um skip through and turn on the kind of correct layers you've got each one here one of these things it all had to really be in one project um just because it was one continuous shot and i didn't have to keep jumping around and pasting cameras around and and and fiddling around too much it was easy enough just to make it all in one just use takes and layers and just be just be organized um it's it's yeah and in i'll just jump into actually i've just pulled out say first planet um into a comp here so is this this planet yeah so here's a planet the setups are fairly simple in a way um i've just exported a lot of alembics and then put on poly effects to sort of bring them on and off some more extrudes um i've got these little tags espresso tags which um say which frames to turn on and off the uh the alembic which is just a little sort of helper thing that i made you can just drop them on so it just does a comparison of a time and uses a switch to turn them on and off and that's quite helpful so you can just drag through and it turned on and off all the olympics and it saves doing all by hand so that's that really so oh actually i'll show you uh some a quartet one as well um so these this is a piece of a quartet the renders it had to be 16 000 frames i think um and it rendered with physical render because i couldn't really use a render farm so i had to um the budget was was small and the turnaround was fast so it just had to be quick um and as you can see that took like 10 seconds to render it i mean that you know that's that's long i think i got it down to like four or five seconds um for each render um so it just it just had to be quick basically okay this is kind of work through technique i would use for um maybe doing a kind of layered sphere type thing so i would start off with a sphere um as ever make an icosahedron maybe make it a bit more dense something like that so i want to create a few layers and cut them away and add a bit of animation so quite often what i do an effect i like is the poly effects and that turns each one into a clone essentially so [Music] you see you can pull them down like that and make them each a little bit smaller just so you can see what i'm doing a little bit um and then i'm going to put a plane effector into that and then i'm going to scale that down to zero sorry minus one and then my fall off i'm going to put some noise so that's a random field um and then just turn that into noise um and then i want to make my scale quite big because i want nice sort of big chunky bits cutting away and then on my remapping usually i use a spline um or a curve sorry and that just sort of gives me nice control i don't have to play around with sliders too much so let's cut away quite a lot of it obviously you can play with different noise types and all that kind of thing uh i'm not going to worry about that for now turn off a preview so that's that's kind of what i want to do i want to animate my noise as well so i'll make my animation speed say 20 something like that so it just sort of cuts away um something like that so i want a few layers as well so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just put those in a null alt g um paste it and then just make a slightly bigger sphere like that and then i want to pull this one back a bit so i'll just use my remapping again um so you can see the sphere underneath so i'll just put it back in my noise something like that and maybe i'll make the sphere underneath kind of bigger just add a little bit more variation or less segments let's say 36 so we've got a kind of multi-layered thing something like that starting to get a little bit interesting and maybe i'll just do one more and so this one will be one right on top um and even denser so let's maybe try uh 196. and then let's try different type of noise uh something like displaced turbulence something like that uh and the scale smaller i want just some sort of loose cloudy type things um just as a little sort of overlay just some subtle some subtle noise flickering over the top let's say that and then obviously you can change the speed or you know whatever let's say that's five percent just to give it subtle so we're playing uh you know 12 frames a second it's all right you can fairly easily preview that but what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna i'm gonna send it all out as an alembic so i can then bring it back in and preview the whole thing and not worry about playback speeds um [Music] so that's cool that's that's getting to where roughly where i want to be i'll make a few more maybe let's make 128. um cool okay maybe i want to add a bit of rotation um in the spheres something like that so as they rotate obviously the noise field stays the same and it looks quite interesting obviously i could just keyframe it but just to show you a different way of doing it i'm going to put on an expresso tag um pull that in a bit i drop my sphere in i want to rotate it on the h and so i drop that into that h and then time is going to drive my rotation so time there we go and just pull it across into rotation on the h and then if i hit play it's rotating quite fast so i want to slow it down a bit i use a math node and then get my math set it to say multiply sometimes it helps just to make this little helper node in espresso it's worth um knowing espresso really i like it it can do some nice things so so this is multiplying by about a second input about inputs there maybe i'll put it to 0.2 and then let's have a look okay that's just a gentle rotation let's make that point one um so on the sphere thing here what i can do what quite nice technique is instead of absolute reference so wherever i put that tag it's going to reference that sphere if i put relative reference it will use um the tag will just look to what's underneath it so what i can do is i could drag that tag to another sphere open that up change the speed a little bit so say 0.06 and then onto my clouds drag it on there as well change that to 0.03 and then because it's on relative reference here um it'll always just look at this object it's on so i hit play and they're all turning it just gives a bit of subtle movement um again you can keyframe it or i'll do it like that it's just another way of doing it so what i'm going to do you know that's playing it the frame rate's okay but obviously if i made it denser um the more layered the more interesting you make it uh the more it's going to slow me down and i needed speed i needed to look at what i was doing so i would export that as an alembic so i'm just going to select select for bits i want okay file export alembic um choose where i'm going to put it so let's call that globe cut uh [Music] and then so i get 100 frames selection only um and then hit export and then i can just check that make a new file bring it in [Music] make sure scale is set correct and there's my free spheres let's have a look and then i've got much faster um frames per second there it's just rotating nicely properly in real time if i do shift v i can look at my hud and then i get frames per second also i'd like to have camera ticked on as well so you can just switch between cameras in your hud um okay so that's the first sphere technique okay i've got my um my sphere uh bit sort of cut away and is looking interesting so maybe i want to have some sort of building a protrusions coming out these empty space bits so i'll just copy the bottom layer just duplicate it up just for the tutorial i'll delete all the others because we've already exported it um so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to group my sphere put it into a null and i'm going to put on a mo extrude stick on um one extrusion step that should be fine so it's just pushing out the um it's just extruding the uh little triangles right so it's got effectors which is cool which is what i want to do so i'm going to stick a plane effector in there so i'm going to push it out outwards along the normal is um on the zed um i'm just getting these nasty little jackie bits so let's just put the uh sphere into a connect object and i'm going to put a phone on to manual just so it looks alright and then it's got rid of it just fuses all the sort of single points um so what i want to do is get my mo extruded got my plane effector just want to add a bit of variation in there so in my falloff i'm just going to put a random field um maybe make it a noise field as ever just because it gives more control yeah and that's that's the kind of thing i'm after but i want it poking out the little holes um so i'm just going to go back to my previous um previous effector field which i used to cut away the sphere and just kind of switch it over something like that just so it's it's kind of it should if i've done it right i'm not sure if i've done it right hopefully it should be poking through the little holes um and then if i press play you can see we've got some animation there um i kind of want to make it a bit more dense make it more interesting as it's still procedural um that's kind of easy to do so there we go let's pull in let's pull back some of the geometry oh something like that i'm going to make my extrude lower something like that i'm going to play with my remapping again do it as a curve it offers me the most control so some of it quite low a lot of it quite low and then push out some nice spiky bits that might be too far but you know whatever it's a tutorial it's just to give you a gist um and then again uh let me just export that so i just get my connect object and just hit export again okay continuing with a few techniques to make interesting spheres i'm going to make a sort of hexagonal sphere here so um hexagonal wireframe type thing and let's see where it goes so i've got my sphere make it an icosahedron i keep it fairly high low poly at the moment just so it's fast um so i'm going to put that in the null alt g and to make hexagons you can just use a bevel um a bevel deformer and then make it proportional and just put it on 50 and that just happens to make some quite nice spheres um what i'm going to do to that as well because it's probably got double edges and all that kind of thing i'm just going to put it into a connect object and put it onto manual foam and so there we've got hexagonal sphere it's procedural obviously so you know you can make it higher higher divisions or whatever um what i could do i'm just going to hide that i usually have a little null where i just hide things just turned off so i can drag copies and maybe editable select the edges do edge to spline um and then i can just sweep that so put it in a sweep that's my shortcut and then i use an n side as a profile just because it gives a bit more control um than using a circle you don't have to worry about what kind of divisions or whatever um so i know i've got six sides there so it's you know a fairly low resolution um sweep on there at the moment but you know that's often all you need even three sides keep the police as low as you can um that's fine might give me a half decent wireframe but i want to create something maybe a bit more procedural um i can have a bit more control so i'll just pop that there and take back what i was using um okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a more procedural cloner based uh wireframe effect so i'm going to get a cylinder or yeah cylinder and put it in my cloner put it to object mode put my connect object into the object um and then it's on surface at the moment and my distribution wants to be on edge and i make my a cylinder much much well i'm gonna make it three sides just for speed i'm gonna make it much smaller something like that and so we're starting to get the effect that we want i'm going to hide my connect object also a little way of working often helps is to put them put your objects in the object manager in order of execution so the way you want cinema to execute them so first you create the geography geography geometry then you clone onto it and then you do your effectors or whatever so you'll find with more complex setups sometimes it it it does help to do it in that way um and it'll process it a bit more cleanly and you won't have to refresh or whatever um but so that's my cloner with the cloud onto the edge so i'm going to take scale on edge and just put that to 100 and now we've got our kind of procedural globe um and of course we can change the divisions so make it a lot more dense we could uh change uh the radius so maybe maybe 0.5 um that's cool so that's obviously being a cloner then you can do all your clonary things i could put i could scale all the clones on or do whatever i'm going to make them multi-instances just because it's quicker and it's always about speed so what could we do to this i'm going to make it say back to 24 um often on the one earth when people won love i created just a bit of jitter and everything a bit of a stop framing effect just to mimic the kinect scans of the quartet so i'm just going to put in a random effector underneath my sphere um and maybe put it onto noise put deform onto point just to create a bit of movement and i'm going to change the noise scale to quite small uh and i just want my noise on the z because that's just pushing out in and out um and there we go so scales like animation speed a bit lower and then just a subtle bit of movement maybe so if i hit play we can just see it going along it's a little bit slow but that's fine you can't really see it doing a lot but you get the gist of it's not doing anything that's why it's subtle [Music] there you go you got your subtle sort of hexagonal sphere um as i said i could also kind of transition this on which i did quite a lot in the piece um kind of transitioning on these you know that that was a lot of a challenge actually you've got very very dense geometry it's not bringing it on gracefully and having it evolving into each other and evolving out of each other um and i did a lot of this kind of thing so here's a plane effector i'm just gonna stick it on minus one to hide it all um and then just do a linear fall off perhaps um and you know it can just you know we could just move it through and it could grow grow quite nicely um over a sphere um that could be quite a nice effect so maybe let's do that i'll animate that so go back to the start um and make my position maybe say it goes on over 25 frames 24 and then pull it through something like that um and let's make it a lot denser uh 96 maybe oh it's going to be super dense or do literally nothing um that's because it's in my freeze transformation unfortunately so let's go to my object again and i know it's not that strange so again this isn't refreshing for some reason but maybe if we just turn it off and turn it back on again make sure our order's kind of right maybe that did the job that's kind of too dense maybe so let's go for i don't know 64. something like that and make my cylinders a little bit thinner so 0.25 something like that [Music] and then we can just have it animating on perhaps um let's take it down again there's something else we could do let's just add 24 again because they're just going along with edges um cloned on the edges i don't have them going along all the way on the edges so i'll pull them in a bit that can create quite a nice look just creates a bit more interest um and i'm making i just i'll duplicate that cloner let's put a uh sphere in there let's make it an icosahedron oh that looks quite cool doesn't it so getting into weird architectural space there we go um make it an icosahedron make it as few divisions as i can and let's not have it scale on edges let's just have it on the vertexes and create a slightly sort of like atomy atom array look so something like that so that's still going to transition on to have a little bit of movement to make it interesting um flipped a little bit i'm just going to take off the line clone because they're kind of round so we don't get any flickering so it just sort of transitions on something like that let's make it a 48 look at that [Music] and there we've got kind of floopy hexagonal good thing maybe that can kind of overlay everything or you know you can do whatever but it's all kind of procedural but at the moment it's it's a little bit slow what we getting 1.5 excuse me 1.6 frames a second which isn't enough so again i'm just going to output that as an alembic and then we can kind of use it and look at stuff closer to real time okay i'm going to create something a little bit different now not a globe but just some of the debris that was sort of floating around the outside so all of this stuff here uh just turn that down there's quite a lot of it floating around um and i'll just show you how to do that in cinema so i actually where are we um i modeled uh some rocks uh they have really low poly um rocks let's just arrange them there's an arrange tool which is very old but it's kind of good so let's say like 50 you can just have a look at stuff um so there's a few big rocks and lots of little ones and some medium ones so i'm just going to grab i'm just going to grab all of them and i'm going to make a circle get the access to it hex said make it bigger get a cloner paste in my rocks um because i want more small rocks really i want a lot more small rocks i'm just going to duplicate those up quite a few times i'm just holding command down and then maybe get some mid rocks as well just duplicate those a couple of times and i want to mix them up a little bit so i'm not going to iterate them i'm going to stick them on random and then i'm going to put it into object mode and again correct order of execution put the clone underneath the object um i'm going to drop my circle into the object like that and i'm going to make quite a few say 100 and i'm going to um make the circle much bigger something like that and i'm going to select middle mouse button selects everything underneath i'm just going to make those smaller like that i'm going to make my big rocks smaller as well just manually um just grab them doesn't matter too much i'm not being picky and then to create some of the movement and hide the circle for now i don't really need it so let's put a random effector on there just to move them around a bit pull them off the spline a bit and let's just so quite often i select shift select all the three um parameters and then if you hold down command uh on a mac um you can just scroll them all at once grab them all at once uh if you hold down right there we go yeah scrub them all at once um something like that and on the cloner you've got animation controls which is quite nice you can move them around the spline so i'm gonna put the rate up it doesn't need to be that high let's try six percent so i'm gonna have it a little bit slower than that you get the idea um i had it really slow in the animation but just so you can see it um these things are a little bit nasty you're seeing these little jumps here um what you want to do is just take smooth rotation and that will fix that so it's moving around nicely and you can create some variation of a movement as well so they're moving at different speeds put it up really high so you can see some are quicker some are slower uh i want lots and lots and lots of kind of space debris i'm gonna make them multi-instances it's a really nice feature stick 500 on there maybe i'm going to change my spread i want more of a disc disc shape so i'm going to go back into my random effector just take down a y um just sort of flatten it like that um select two i want to affect x and z and just push it a little bit more like that um also i use this random effector just to randomly rotate randomly rotate them so just put 360 in all of them so they're all kind of pointing different ways um i'm going to use the time effector which is quite a nice little effect you can use for all sorts of things um let's drop it in there again maybe let's just put these down below for good practice i think that's right and so because i've already rotated my clones um the time effect is just going to keep rotating them uh 90 degrees every one second so let's just have a look at how that looks i can't see it brilliantly i'll just put it up a little bit more so you can really see them spinning so hopefully you can see it's even tumbling around um so i wanted it more subtly say 180 you can you can randomize that as well how much each one um rotates maybe by randomizing the weight beforehand using another random effector but that's that's kind of how i do the do the space debris um and that's fairly simple i mean you can because they're quite low poly rocks as you can see uh i just sort of hand modeled them i got some platonics and just pulled them around a bit and just sort of created things just a little bit interesting and that you know it's fairly straightforward i think and we can just export that so again i won't show you doing it but i'm just i'm just going to export it and then we can bring that back in and play with it a bit later we've exported a bunch of sort of alembics so what do we do with them well this is the kind of fun bit um i'll just grab in with debris for example um you just get an import dialogue and generally just hit okay so just hit play um and you just get really nice playback speed i'm just going to bring in all the elements we had before so just hold on a minute so those are all my kind of bits that i've just brought in uh we've got their sort of um what we've got we've got a hexagonal mesh um starting to look groovy and starting to be kind of a little bit complex um what i'll do is i've just got some basic materials um to lump everything together to begin with um so again i'll just press play i've still got you know eight ten frames a second i can see what's going on i can get a sense of animation i can do previews really quickly it's just easier to work with obviously if this was all live it'll be very slow um on any software really it would be slow this kind of level of complexity um let's just put basic reflective material on let me put a sky object in there um and i've just got an hdr um let's see what render so i'm just on physical render quite low-ish settings just hit render and actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to just take down my phone level because i want nice sharp edges and we start to get something looking a little bit cool um a little bit sci-fi a little bit spacey um something like that um so what i tend to do a lot is if we just grab let's check what we're doing yeah okay so these are my sort of cutaway cutaways cutaway spheres that we did first um so what i'll quite often do is i'll again start using the same effect so i'll put in me extrude put it as one step uh let's do that for the other one too um and then let's put in a bevel deformer as well probably just activate the bevel deformer at render time just to give you some slightly like nice edges just to sort of bling off of oh it's going to start running a bit slowly possibly let's have a look um because it's creating a lot more geometry now so we wouldn't necessarily want to see the bevel at playback oh we're hanging a little bit slowly i'm not sure what's going on let's just turn off the bevel for now but you get the general gist you can start just doing the same um kind of things you do to your uh geometry anyway um as well um what you can do so which sphere is this one so that's our main sphere let's just concentrate on that one uh we could put in our poly effects um and we can just do exactly the same things we can kind of scale down all our polys whilst keeping it all live um whilst it's still playing back with the extrude on um or whatever and obviously you could run your you know your plane effector um through that to kind of transition stuff on uh if we wanted and i did that quite a lot in the piece just sort of transition things on so again it's using alembic but it's still kind of keeping it live uh let's just take all that off and yeah it's just nice to use and you can um let's just go to wireframe um yeah it's just it's just quite a good technique obviously you're baking stuff down so you haven't got the flexibility of keeping all parametric and adjustable but you know there's a nice there's a nice trade-off um and you can do things fast and play them around you could you could clone these you could have a lot of these spheres kind of in the space at once and and it's just quite a fun way of doing it um i guess this is one more thing i want to talk about uh just talk very quickly about rendering um which is which is kind of important just using kind of float on the xrs but uh let's get on to that so in terms of rendering i'm just gonna i'm just gonna render out a single frame what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna try and make some um make some of the little meteors a little bit glowy and just give them a nice effect in post so uh this is my debris um what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna duplicate it make it editable editable it's a mouthful uh i'm just start picking a few randomly um obviously you take a lot more care uh if you're doing this but there we go and then i'm gonna hit um u and double w or select connected and then i've got material here uh which is just just got a luminance channel in and then it's just got 200 let's make it 250 and let's give it a tinted tint of yellowy orange or something like that and then i'm just going to drag it onto my geometry get a little plus automatically creates a set selection on my collapsed um geometry but the cool thing is i can just drag that onto my alembic and just get rid of my collapsed one and then let's have a look yep i've got my live kind of ultra bright bits and there's a good reason for putting it at 200 if you render in 8-bit or 16-bit it won't really make a difference it'd just be a kind of burnt out white although it will kind of have a stronger effect in the reflections you get a nice kind of burnt out white effect but in 8 and 16 bit it hits a ceiling when you render a 32-bit in um an exr or something like that you'll start to get um kind of a lot more options in in post um i'll just put on that reflective material oh that's me right what i'm going to do okay so let's render in the xr so i've got it set to exr automatically the x exr list is the lowest quality smallest file size at the bottom highest quality over top uh i use dwaa um it's good idea to use 16-bit float and 32-bit here that just sort of limits your numbers a bit um i won't go into that now let me just render this frame and then i'll open it up in after effects i've just bought literally that frame um i've rendered i brought it into after effects i've just put a camera lens blur it's a standard after effects effect um i'm just going to turn it on put it on really high you see on the image i'm on 32-bit mode here um in linear srgb interpolation um and what we're getting is kind of the white for bits for 200 lumens it's still keeping that strength and it's really kind of burning them out if i use a mask layer i've just got this mask layer here really simply done with gradients um so i've got to move myself here we go that just tells me tells tells what to blur so it's not blowing in the middle um this obviously looks quite gacky just because i've done it so fast but it gives you an idea um let's do a screen grab of that on him and then let's just stick on eight bits to give you an idea of you see and then that's in 8-bit so you really lose that top end it keeps going in 32-bit float so it's really useful and then if you render it as 16-bit floats out of after effect out of cinema the file sizes are fine and it's it's just worth doing and you'll get much nicer motion blurs when you start doing stuff like this and an effect i use a lot as well um in after effects as well in this 32-bit is just exposure and you can really start cranking kind of cranking your values and just kind of making really in much more interesting kind of sparkly effects um and i'd definitely recommend just investigating that just try it out it is really worth it but see that's far too much it's not looking great but you get the idea anyway that's the final thing i wanted to mention um cool i'm gonna go now thanks so much bye-bye examples of a similar kind of things envish project i did uh intro we had this jaguar and it was driving past some window reflections so this is the shot there it's quite short um and all that is is just some images of a city um an image of a car on an alpha so just a psd and then it's all just reflected in a bunch of kind of planes just kind of a cloned grid and then with displacement mats put on them to give a kind of warped glass effect um and because i was using this kind of 32-bit workflow you can see some really nice kind of burnt out um sections of the shot and also you've got if you use physical camera and use depth for field in the shot as opposed to in post you get the nice bokeh effects for nice and blurriness of the lights and it's it it can just add some really nice stuff and the renders on that were were pretty quick it looks like it's some kind of full-on cg thing but it's not it's just some images and that's that's obviously where you want to be at where you're doing it quite simply but it looks it looks nice um it looks expensive um this is another this is a corporate video i did you've just got these kind of this kind of grid like pattern it's called an nd tree but it's just kind of a subdivided up um grid and i've just tilted it a bit and these shapes kind of fly off of it um it falls away and then we've kind of got these kind of shards which meant to be exchanging information and the whole this big grid thing was done in houdini and some of his shapes and then i just brought it into cinema and rendered it in um in the corona render which is probably not the most popular render at the moment um so let me have a quick look at that one there we go um here we go so again i've just got a bunch of nulls with each little section in so these little i just step out of my camera um hopefully i didn't move the camera i think i did but i won't worry um so i only made one of these or i don't know maybe two or three of them just for variation and duplicated his ver if you look here record pupil um duplicated the alembic and then it's also got an alembic uh curve or spline coming out of it as well if i just scrub a little bit you can see them shooting across so i brought in the alembic spline and then i've just swept it um and it's got over bright colors on it so you get a nice glow um and i just moved these around a little bit and it's great because it's got start of animation offset so you can choose when it starts so you can set up all your different um alembic instances or just your alembics in different places keep copying and pasting them offsetting the time offset the position offset whatever you want um and create complexity that way and i've used instances for these as well so i've just sort of dropped dropped a few of them around and it's pretty lightweight i mean you can see uh just play it you know seven frames a second that's fine you can see what you're doing you can get a sense of it um have i got a start and let's have a look at all these pg oh yeah so we've got background as well here um so do we want that one yeah this is just this is just for background again it's just another kind of alembic i brought through and then i could just because it's baked as an alembic i could just push it around a little bit and move my camera around and get my shards flying kind of close to it and just kind of see what i want to do um you've got a background element here um wait you've got two background elements what's what's this i don't know what it is i haven't been in this floating grievel so this is just like agree beliefing if i fly through and again i've just put a um mo extrude uh onto it just to give it a bit of depth so geometry can be lightweight or heavy weight depending where i'm at again in this background kind of just got the same thing it's just literally um actually that maybe it's this one here i've got a background plate it's beveled it's just got random effector on it just to mix it up a little bit and to create some interest um and again it's just the same kind of same kind of thing i was doing for the um kronos quartet again um it's good if i let's check i've got that turned on so this is the alembic i brought in for houdini and then it's good because you can bring in extra information if you can send it out of cinema and back in again or out of whatever program you're using but i've got a point color on here or vertex color tag so i can drag that tag into into a shader if you just put a vertex map um vertex effect shader um effect in your your shader slots you can bring in all that information i think i added that to the reflectivity so some of them were more or less reflective i think i jiggled up for uvs for everything so i put on a general texture but i wanted it slightly different on each um on each little plane so i just jiggled it up a bit um and that's that one and then let's look at quick times again um so this is a mess and piece for a composer called olivier messian i did and it's got quite a lot of uh geometry it's got quite a lot going on it's quite complex look but again the frame time is rendering is super quick because it's just like a grayscale diffuse render with a little bit of ambient occlusion um and a cell render um and i put a depth um pass on the cell render just to cut it out when it gets very small i still use the cell render it's just the oldest effect but i like it um you've got these cicadas flying around that were done in x particles and then you've got all these crystals and again these were all kind of just just alembics mainly i kind of made them out of cloners and wherever and just brought them in and then just offset the timing let's have a look at that quickly close that one [Music] so this is yeah this is the messian thing um you see again it plays all right in the viewport i've got some stuff turned off um look clockwork toys they've got this kind of it's a lot of golden ratio stuff um and as you can see i kind of pull pull through it all and then it's got this great big let me see if i can remember right yeah is it bad yeah so it's got this kind of swarm of cicadas that fly out of this great big time clock um and just sold over cicadas which are just sort of insects um like grass um like locusts or something um if you hold down j you can just scrub in the viewport which is quite useful but so they were done here they are coming out of the clock these were down in x particles and i wanted them to have geometry and to be kind of aligned so they're kind of really a low poly little kind of insect thing so as i said i use a generator and x particles and then um just exported them as an alembic brought them back in so i can re-time them a bit if i need to and then you know i'm i've got playback of you know six seven eight frames a second which is pretty good because they're quite complex they're flying around they're doing you know some cool flocking stuff i think it's just for uh x particles flocking um modifier uh but it's nice and it does what i wanted to do so that's for messan one um where are we so that's kind of that's that's more or less it i mean as i say you can bring in curves this is something i did for 59 productions um you've got this kind of um person um made of almost kind of shards of energy but they're just little um just little little splines basically um that i brought in and if you just render with hair it's so quick i love using hair just to render these things um you've got a violin and you've got all these kind of musical shapes it's quite tricky brief it was to kind of i can't even remember what it was for when you reach the end of human imagination beyond wanton something like that but again do your heavy lifting in one step do all the sims and then bring it in and play with it in alembic that's that's for general gist of what i'm saying just finally to sum up i just went through a bunch of kind of modeling techniques using the bevel um to do things like create a nice hexagons out of triangle meshes uh cloning onto splines just different ways of doing that and then doing kind of whatever setups you're going to do using fields to cut things out or it can be anything then export as an alembic um then bring it in and then you can use your poly effects you can use your mower extrude you can use the um kind of procedural bevel on it and just all those kind of things you can bring stuff on and off um with your effectors just your plane effectors and then you know it's about also as well looking at the sort of 32-bit float mode which is if it's not it's not that complex but it's worth just starting to render an exr in that mode if you want to have nice glowy kind of burnt out things and nice effects in kind of depth of field and bokker and all those things and it's just worth playing with it can bring an extra kind of element to what you're doing if you're making really fast moving little sparks it can make them really bright and glowy and it can just add more drama um to your images and so on um and finally just to promote myself so uh for me my website is simonfa russell.com um and i'll be doing some sort of arty stuff so i've been doing some plotter um drawings which is kind of plotting sound waves and stuff and that's simon russell.art and my twitter simon fa russell and so is my instagram anyway um it's been a lot of fun and if you've got any questions give me a shout or just say hello all right thanks very much bye bye

Channel: Maxon

Views: 7,327

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, sculpting, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, motion graphics, mograph, subscription, visual effects, vfx

Id: BBUUpTujN7U

Length: 50min 8sec (3008 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020