Twist ANYTHING in After Effects AND C4D Lite!

this video is sponsored by surf shark in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to twist text and basically anything you want inside of After Effects but I'm also going to show you how to do it inside of Cinema 4D light because it's bundled with After Effects you already have access to it it produces better results it has better controls and it even renders more quickly so there's no reason for you not to be using Cinema 4D light let's Jump Right In for this first technique we're going to be sticking in After Effects and I kind of feel like there's some secrecy involved with these cool text animations that you see online and I don't want any technique in After Effects to remain a secret I want you to be able to create whatever you want to create but what I do want to keep a secret is what I got my family for Christmas this year fortunately there's a really effective way of doing that with this video sponsor surfsharkvpn besides keeping your personal data private and secure from cyber 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the source comp whatever we put into this is what's going to get Distortion applied to it so with that layer selected I'll press Ctrl shift C or command shift C on a Mac and I'll just rename this Twisted source so I know that's my source comp and click OK and this particular animation I want to look like it's rotating in 3D space getting twisted as it's rotating and then rotate it off again so to do that I'm actually going to rotate it all around in 3D space using four different sides so it's like this long rectangle block of text that's actually rotating so to do that quickly and efficiently I'm just going to enable the 3D switch right there for this pre-comp duplicate it and before I duplicate it anymore rotate it backwards by clicking and dragging with my selection tool on this red rotation axis Gizmo and then just hold shift to snap that in 45 degree increments I want to go back 90 degrees so now I have one facing the camera and one that's parallel or perpendicular I mean to the camera and what I want to do now is tie these two together with the anchor points so I'm going to press a to bring up the anchor points of both use the property pick Whip and click and drag that to the original Anchor Point so now whatever this Anchor Point is this one's going to adopt it as well and that's going to be important in a second but before we get there let's duplicate this one more time rotate it again on the x-axis negative 90 degrees duplicate one more time and then click and drag and rotate one more time negative 90 degrees now I have four instances of this layer they're all tied to the original Anchor Point and they're all rotated incrementally by 90 degrees so what I can do now is grab the z-axis of that Anchor Point Property click and drag it and as I do that all the anchor points are going to adjust at the same time and I can push them out to where where the top and bottom layers are beyond the height of the text so that I'm kind of getting this a block now this long rectangle with four sides that all have my source comp inside of them now obviously I can see through each one of these sides I don't want that to be the case so I'm just going to jump back into this pre-comp and I'm going to make a new rectangle by double clicking on the rectangle tool no other layer selected and that makes a rectangle the size of the comp but I don't want it to be the entire size of the comp because if I go back here that's going to fill the entire comp and I just want it to basically go to the bounds of that layer so I made this 146 pixels on the Anchor Point why don't we just say 140 to be a little bit more round of a number go back in here and that's the size that I want to make this rectangle so I'll double tap the U key to bring up the modified properties and adjust this size so I need to unlink the width and the height and change the height to 140 except that's actually not the right size it needs to be double that because the Anchor Point is only pushing it out 140 pixels in one dimension I need to double that to go in both dimensions so that's going to be 280 or I could just say times 2 and that'll do the math for me so now I have a rectangle serving as the background so I'll rename that BG and that should fill in all the transparency that we had in this main comp and now I can just parent all of these layers if I select all of them with controller command a and then use my parent pick whip to grab that first layer why don't we name this leader I can rotate that and all of these layers are going to rotate with it and it now looks like a 3D rectangle so that's really cool that's exactly what I needed to hide all that transparency and give this convincing 3D look alright so I'm going to press R to bring up the rotation and that was actually affecting the orientation I want to now add in some keyframes but not on the orientation so I'm going to reset that back down to zero and we're going to use the X rotation to animate this so all I need to do is set a keyframe here on the X rotation on the first frame of my comp go forward maybe let's say two seconds and increase the Cycles one revolution so it's going to go 360 Degrees all the the way around in a positive direction if I play that back this is what it looks like so nothing too complicated but now that that's done we're going to start twisting this with Distortion using the time displacement effect if you want to know all the intricate little details about how this effect works you can go check out my effects of after effects video click on the card above to watch exactly what this effect does and how it works I'm going to go a little bit more quickly in this tutorial just so we can get through it all but I'm again going to double click on the rectangle tool with no layer selected and I'll call this time map and I want to change my fill from being a solid to being a gradient so I'm going to say linear gradient as the type click OK and then just jump into that gradient and change this to just a two color gradient from black to white and click OK and then I want to move these handles over to the right while holding shift and then grab this one move it over to the left and I need this to be very precise starting and ending on both edges of the comp so I'm going to go into the rectangle shape group into the gradient fill and find my start and end points for that gradient looks like I nailed the start Point that's negative 960 right on the edge of the comp there and on the end point that needs to be positive 960. and now I know I have a full linear gradient going from black to white and I can reverse this if I need to but we'll just call that time map and move that to the base of the comp I don't actually need to see it anymore what I do need to do is make an adjustment layer so I'm going to come up to layer new adjustment layer and I'll call this time displacement and then search for the time displacement effect time just place there we go apply that to the adjustment layer and by default it's going to use its own layer as the source that's not what I want though I want it to be the time map so under time displacement layer change that to Time map and already we're getting something really interesting if I scrub through this it takes a little bit of time to render but we're getting this Twisted Distortion which is kind of what we're wanting let me jump back to the start of the comp and I need to point something out because of the way that this effect works we're starting to see Distortion before we want it to and that's because white and black values are mapped positive and negative times what this effect is doing is looking at this map taking the brightness values of that map and then Translating that to time offsets based on the placement of the pixels that make up that gradient it's kind of hard to wrap your head around but it should make sense once we start to modify it here everything from 50 Gray up to the white values is looking forward in time and the darker values are looking backwards in time and to make this even easier to visualize I'm going to apply another effect to this gradient so I'm just going to search for the posterize effect and this will allow me to basically change the number of levels of gradient we're actually getting this isn't actually affecting the time displacement yet I need to go to the effect and tell the time displacement layer to also respect the effects that I've applied so I'm going to do that by choosing effects and masks and when I do that now it's a lot easier to visualize because I'm basically turning the resolution of this time displacement down even further so if we zoom in you can see that each band of this gradient going from white to black is offsetting the contents of this pre-comp everything underneath this adjustment layer in time and if I go to my posterize levels and I increase that the more levels there are of black to white brightness levels the higher the resolution of the time displacement there actually is so hopefully that gives you a good visualization of how this effect is actually doing this Distortion all right let's get back to the start of the comp and I'll get rid of posterize so since nothing thing is happening before the start of the comp we're not getting any Distortion at the start of the comp and since I don't want this Distortion to happen until the comp has already started playing back I actually need to remap my gradient values so I'm going to go back into that gradient editor and instead of using pure white on this end I'm going to change the brightness value down to 50 percent and already without even applying this you can see that my Distortion has disappeared so let me click OK and then just play this back and you'll see now that Distortion is passing through my text and it looks exactly the way that I wanted it to that gives that twisty effect that I'm after but it's obviously very segmented look at all that blockiness that's not exactly the look that I'm after and what we can do to smooth that out a little bit is going into the effect control so let's zoom in nice and close and go to the time displacement effect and take a look at the time resolution this is set to 60 FPS I can increase this to 120 it'll take a little bit longer to process but after it's done you see that those chunks basically got a little bit closer together now I'm not going to lie to you this is a very slow to render effect and it is kind of difficult to get good looking results but one way to get better results is to go to your project settings down here you see I'm working in eight bits per Channel if you alter option click on this value it's going to change to 16 bits per Channel and that's basically going to give you much more color depth in your scene which allows you to have many more brightness and values in your gradient and this effect can take advantage of that so if I change my time resolution up to say 960 just go really high again this is going to take longer to render now I edit it out but down here you can see the frame render time was 34 seconds yes it looks extremely smooth compared to what it was but man that's a long time to render one frame if I play this back now it has processed it and it doesn't take quite as long to do every single frame so if I just pause right here you see it's taking on average three and a half seconds per frame now so it's not the worst weight do this but it definitely takes a lot of time to process and it still doesn't give you the cleanest crispest results possible there is some Distortion in there still but as you can see it does give you some pretty good results so if you absolutely have to stay in After Effects this is a decent way to pull off this look now I don't want this map visible in the background obviously but as you can see every time you change something it's going to have to reprocess basically the entire range of motion so be aware of that this is a very slow process and I would not crank up this value in fact I wouldn't even work in 16 bits per Channel until you're ready to render because it just goes so much quicker if I change this back down to eight bits per Channel and turn my samples back down to say 60 then we're working with a lower resolution of time displacement but you can see how much more quickly this is rendering so if I turn my black background back on it looks like just the text now is twisting but here's what you can do now that we have this set up if I just press U to bring up the keyframes I can ease of them by just pressing the F9 key with them selected go into my graph editor and just ease this out with the speed graph so it's a little bit more extreme and again let that reprocess but then preview it and that's going to have a dramatic effect on how the Twisted Animation plays out through all this time displacement and we can adjust how long this time displacement offset actually takes so right now it's going at a rate of one second but if I go into the time displacement effect I can change that Max displacement from one second down to say half a second if I say 0.5 now it's going to happen a little bit more quickly or if I said 0.25 it'll go even more quickly it's more uniform I should say not necessarily a speed thing but you see it's twisting less if I increase this up to two it's going to have a much tighter twist and the start and end are going to be basically still for longer so you can play around with this value to get whatever you like I think that half second twist looks pretty good and we can even take this one step further and add in a little bit of anticipation and over shoot with our keyframes let me just turn off the time displacement for a second so this renders quickly but what I want to do is add another keyframe at the start you saw I shifted these two keyframes forward in time instead of going straight into that rotation I want to rotate it back a little bit so I'm going to go to the second keyframe rotate it in the opposite direction maybe 14 degrees why not before it moves forward and then once it gets to the last keyframe what I want to do is have it overshoot so let me go back just a little bit and add another keyframe right here actually let me copy and paste this keyframe and I'll rotate it forward so let me just go forward maybe about 20 degrees and that way it's going to first rotate back anticipating the motion that it's about to happen then it will rotate forward a bunch and then overshoot where it's going to land and then come back to that resting point now I need to go into my speed graph and adjust these curves a little bit to get something a little more smooth and I might need to re-time it a little bit so let's just space these keyframes out a little bit more so it has more time to come to a rest at the end but let's play this and see what it looks like without the Distortion at first so it anticipates spins overshoots and then comes to a rest that looks good now let's see what that does to the time displaced version so I'll re-enable that let it preview and then we'll view it as a whole so there you go you see it gives it a little bit more personality this is something you can play around with endlessly however you animate the source is going to change how the time displacement actually ends up looking and then playing around with these other settings within the effect as well will change that final look of the animation and remember whatever you put into this Source comp is going to be updated in the main comp so you could change the text to say something else you could put photos in here video animations other pre-comps whatever you want and it will all link up to this Source precomp the only thing you might need to change is if the height of your text changes then you'll have to change the actual Anchor Point for that leader layer so that this is spaced out appropriately for whatever you have within the pre-comp and also just remember to make sure this rectangle size is filling out the background at a height value double to what this Anchor Point is so then it mats off these other layers now if you want transparency if you want to be able to see through where this black is but you still want to maintain that matting that's going on what you could do is again pre-compose all of these so sole press Ctrl shift C and then just give it a name I'll call this 3D block and then click OK and apply the extract effect if we search for that over here in the effects and presets I'll just apply that keying effect to my pre-comp and then just bring up the black pretty far by clicking and dragging on this top left corner square and then grabbing the bottom left one and dragging that back towards the left doesn't have to go all the way but basically what this is doing is removing all of the black pixels but with this fall off that's a little bit more soft than if we were to just clip it off completely but now what this allows us to do is fill this with whatever color we want it still maintains all the matting of the precomps but what this allows us to do is now composite this into anything else or on top of anything else while maintaining control of say the fill color if I applied The Fill effect I could change this to any other color and keep all that original matting while still giving me the ability to composite this on top of any other comps and of course once you're happy with the animation go ahead and increase your bits per Channel up to 16 bits and maybe go into the time displacement and increase this it doesn't have to go up to 960 maybe we'll say 480 and see if that gives us a smooth enough result basically you should be working with as low of a Time resolution as you possibly can without sacrificing quality this is definitely one of those effects that you need to get in there and just experiment with and change the animation to see how you can come up with your own unique distortions I'm only rotating this on one axis you can obviously rotate it on any axis play around with the scale though the colors see what else you can do to come up with unique looking deformations by the way if you want to support more tutorials like this one then please consider becoming a patron over on patreon you can click the card above to follow the link to go there thank you so much to all the patrons who are already supporting me it's a huge help to be able to make more content here on YouTube alright now let's take a look at the Cinema 4D version of this same effect and I'm going to be using the light version of Cinema 4D because it's bundled with After Effects you don't need any extra licenses that other than your Creative Cloud subscript option that you already have you can use Cinema 4D light directly in After Effects and it actually renders really quickly and the only real way to get into Cinema 4D light is by opening After Effects going to file down to new and saying Max on Cinema 4D file when you click on that it's going to ask you where you want to save this file because it has to create it so I'm just going to stick mine on the desktop I'll call this twisty and click save and then it's going to open up Cinema 4D light now I'm not going to go in depth into Cinema 4D light but I will try to do every step that I can to help you along the way if this is your first time using it I don't want you to be afraid of it I want you to get in here and see why Cinema 40 is so much better of a tool for 3D than After Effects is so I don't need this little quick start dialog so I'll just close that out this is the project that we just created in After Effects you see it's called twisty.c4d whatever I put in here is going to show up in After Effects so if I were to make a cube and I hit save and then jumped into After Effects this Cinema 4D file that I have in the project panel I can click and drag drag down to the new comp button and once it loads it will be displayed right here in After Effects using the cineware effect that is the bridge between after effects in Cinema 4D alright so let's jump back into Cinema 4D I don't actually need that Cube so I'm going to select it and press delete what I do need to do is basically recreate that same four face 3D rectangle that we created in After Effects using four different planes so I'm going to hold down on this cube right here this is where we can get to all of our primitive shapes kind of think of these like the shape layer Tools in After Effects and I want four planes so while clicking and dragging on that Cube I'm just going to hover over plane and let go now this is facing up if you imagine this as a 3D space you can see that 3D grid it is flat on the ground right now and I want it to face the camera to do that I'm going to come down to my attributes and I'm going to change it from the plus y orientation to the minus Z orientation and now it's kind of facing in the distance so you can click and drag on this little rotation up here to orbit around the 3D scene and zoom in and out as well as pan so just click and drag on these three and then there's this fourth button here when you click on that this is the for up view so I can see my perspective top right and front views all at once I'm going to utilize all four of these views to make my rectangle and you might be wondering why am I not just making a cube since it already has all the sides on it I could change the size to be whatever I want well it's because of the way that we're going to apply textures I need to be able to control how that texture is displayed on each face of the geometry and I can't control that with a primitive shape and with Cinema 4D light I don't have any access to the modeling tool so to keep this as simple as possible we're basically going to do the exact same thing we did in After Effects make four different planes and then rotate them around in 3D space to make a 3D box so with my plane selected I'm going to come down to the width and the height now these are measured in centimeters currently the units is centimeters but the units really don't matter since it's a 3D program it can be whatever we want so I'm going to work thinking in terms of pixels and if I jump back to After Effects and we take a look at that Twisted Source comp why don't we just stick with this for now remember this rectangle if I double tap the U key is 1920 by 280. so I can adopt these values into centimeters in Cinema 4D and it won't matter because the ratio is really all that matters so I'll type in 1920 on the width and 280 on the height and now I have a rectangle that's the same ratio as the rectangle that I have as this shape layer here in After Effects now I need to get this text into Cinema 4D and this is one of the cons of this technique is that we have to actually export an image out of after effects in order to use inside of Cinema 4D there's no way to dynamically link a pre-comp from After Effects into a material in Cinema 4D but I think the benefits of Cinema 4D outweigh the cost of exporting this texture so I'm going to start by just resizing this composition to be the size of that rectangle 280 pixels tall so I'll go the composition composition settings and say 280 pixels on the height and now that's going to fit my texture just fine what I want to do now is export this as a still image so I'm going to come up to composition say save frame as and file and that will add that comp to the render queue with the output module defaulting to photoshop I don't want a Photoshop file I want a PNG so I'm going to click on the word Photoshop and I'm going to go to the format and change it to PNG so there's PNG sequence don't worry about it saying sequence I don't need a sequence I just need one still image everything else should be fine though I'll click OK and because we have this set to current settings because I went to composition save frame as the render settings were changed to only export the one frame that I had selected so that's a little neat trick if you're ever on a single frame and you only want to export that frame go to composition save frame as and it will automatically isolate just to that one frame now if you wanted to distort something in cinema 40 that wasn't static you could export a PNG sequence and load that in but that's something for another tutorial we're going to stick to this static text image for this tutorial so I'm just going to stick this on my desktop hit render that'll export and now I can jump back into Cinema 4D make a new material by coming up to this material manager button right here click on that once and then click on this plus to add a new default material next I want to double click on that material and change its properties so I don't need color I'll uncheck that and I don't need reflectance because none of the 3D properties of Cinema 40 are really going to be applied other than the actual geometry so what I want to check on is the luminance this way there's no lighting being involved it's just going to put this texture whatever I load in here flat on that geometry no lighting from Cinema 40 is going to modify it at all so with that luminance selected I'll come over to the texture and click on this little folder icon and this allows me to navigate to wherever my texture is so there's my Twisted source pre-comp that I exported as an image I'll select that and click open and now that that's loaded into the material I can close out of it and click and drag that material onto the plane and that text is aligned because the ratio of the resolution of the texture matches the ratio of my geometry it's not distorted at all and I can be sure of that so I'll just close up my material manager I now have that plane with the material applied and I can start building my box to do that I first want to bring It Forward in Z space so just like in After Effects I can click and drag on this handle with my selection tool my move tool active and just move it around in 3D space I could also do that from my top view here and that's just a different view of the same movement now I want to move this a specific amount remember the height is 280 units in this case centimeters but if I jump over to the coordinates tab I want to move this forward half of that value so 140 but it's actually in the negative Direction on the z-axis so with the z-axis selected I'm going to type negative 140 and press enter and now I know it snapped to that 140 half of the height value and I can now duplicate and rotate this just like it did in After Effects except I need to rotate it from the center of this scene and my Anchor Point for this primitive plane layer can't be modified so what I need to do is make a new null object which is this button right up here I'll just click on it once and that makes a null right in the center of my scene and to use that as the parent of this plane I'll just click and drag the plane on top of it and now it's a child of that null object which allows me to do whatever I want so I could rotate this around the center of the scene freely now now I undid that with Ctrl Z because I didn't actually want to rotate it yet but what I do want to do is duplicate this three more times and to duplicate something in Cinema 4D in the object manager just hold down controller command click and drag until you see that arrow and I'll let go and that made a duplicate of it so what I can do now is jump back into this perspective view by clicking on that for a button again click and drag on that red y-axis rotation just like in After Effects hold shift to snap it into five degree increments this time but I want to go back negative and I need degrees and then I'll actually select both of these nulls just by clicking on one holding Ctrl or command and clicking on the next and then again control click and drag upwards and now I have two more copies of this I'll actually rotate this around a little bit and then click and drag on that red y rotation one more time while holding shift so it's 180 degrees this time and I've completed my 3D box that's all made up of these planes with the text all being displayed properly now that's set up I need to make a camera that's facing this straight on so that it looks the way that I want it to when I bring it back into After Effects so I'm going to come down my toolbar here and get to the camera the standard camera and just click on it once that adds a camera to the scene I'm going to make sure that I'm viewing through that camera by clicking on this target right here and then come down to the transform properties for this camera and zero some of them out so on the X I want that to be zero on the Y I want that to be zero and for the rotation I want those to be zeroed out as well so the camera is centered in my scene on the X and Y and looking straight ahead now this actually looks just fine but I would like to have no perspective on this camera and that's something we can do in Cinema 4D so I'm going to come over to the object tab with that camera selected and under projection change it from perspective to parallel and that's going to zoom in a little bit but what I can do is just click and drag on this button right here to kind of Zoom back out and fit that within the frame a little bit so that I'm touching the edges of that texture of my entire geometry and it's nice and framed now one thing we haven't looked at yet is the resolution of this project file if I click on this button right here the render settings this is going to be where I can say what the output should be and it's currently 1280x720 that's not what I want I want it to be 1920 by 1080. so I'm just going to type those numbers in and press enter and nothing has changed in my scene really because it's all relative to what's in 40 is going to Output the ratio is the same so my camera hasn't changed at all one thing you might notice is how fuzzy this texture looks and this is something else we can actually modify so let's open up our material manager one more time double click on that material come down to viewport and up to texture preview size the default is very low resolution but this is just a preview let's just push this up to say 2048 by 2048 and now it's nice and crisp all right with that done I'll close that out collapse the material manager and now let's look at how we could actually distort this I'll switch back to my 4 up view by clicking on this button right here and what I want to do is actually put all of these null objects within one more null kind of thinking of this like pre-copping so let me collapse all of these null objects up make one more and then grab all of these and drag it in there and I'll just rename this first null by double clicking on it and we'll call this control now that everything else is grouped underneath this null object I can use Cinema 4d's deformers in this menu right here to actually deform the geometry that's within that null object the one deformer that I'm concerned with is the twist deformers so while clicking and holding on that deformers menu I'll go down to twist and let go that adds a Twist to former to my scene but it doesn't do anything yet because it needs to exist in the same group as the geometry that I actually want to distort so I need to drag that down below all these other null objects but making sure I go into the control null so right here not there you can see the difference between that highlighted Line This is in that null objects group this is outside of it so I want to go right in there and now I can actually distort anything in this group by clicking and dragging on this slider right here and obviously that's not twisting in the correct direction so I need to reorient it a little bit so I'm going to switch to my rotation tool by pressing r on the keyboard and from my front view I'm going to click and drag anywhere in this comp outside side of that Center area and hold shift so that I know I can snap to 90 degrees right there and now it's twisting in the right direction but it's really really tight you can see in every view here that's a really tight twist so what I want to do is again click on that twist deformer and go to the size now remember I just rotated this so the width is actually the y-axis the height of this deformer since it's now on its side so I'm going to click and drag that and in fact I'm going to just type in the number 1920 since that's the width of the geometry and now if I zoom out on some of these you can see that the deformer is the same width as my box now the height and depth don't really matter but if you want to be consistent we could make these 280 as well and it will fit the geometry perfectly now and what's really cool about this deformer is the way that it bends is super smooth right from the get-go and if I click on this for up view for my parallel final View and press controller command r that will render the frame and you can see that that Distortion is 9 smooth but if you ever feel like you're not getting enough resolution out of this Distortion you can always go into your planes just control Click on each one of them and come up to the width segments and increase this value so if I change my display to say lines so we can see all the texturing and I just turn off my twist for a second I can increase the width to add much more geometry to these planes and that gives the twist to former more geometry to work with and warp most of the time you don't see any kind of issues with the way that this deformer works but if you need to you can bump that up and it really doesn't take much longer at all to render alright I'm going to save this and jump back into after effects and just take a look at what that looks like in the comp so we've got the twisty pre-comp and why don't we just rename this twisty c4d just to make it easy to understand and this does support transparency there we see that we have that if I turn the transparency grid on under the effect controls under the cinewear effect I'm going to change the renderer from viewport draft to current and that just basically means the final rendered version of this project file from Cinema 4D so this is what it's going to look like in the end in here in After Effects but now that we see that's working out I'm going to jump back into Cinema 4D and let's actually animate this twist and if you've only ever animated inside of After Effects then keyframing and animating inside of Cinema 40 is going to seem very strange at first but it actually has a really fantastic way of animating things what I want to do is animate this twist property but I also want to animate the rotation of this control null which would be this y-axis right here and I want to make sure that I'm working in the same frame rate as what I want to be in the end so by default if I press Ctrl D in Cinema 4D that will bring up my project settings and my frames per second is defaulted to 30 and if I go into my render settings that's going to reflect the same thing but I can change those two things independently just make sure whatever frame rate you want to work in is showing up in both the render settings and the project settings so that your keyframes don't have any issue issues now I was working in 24 frames per second in After Effects but 30 frames per second that's just fine so I'm going to leave it as is and at the start of my scene I'm going to add a keyframe on the angle but I'm going to change this down to zero first so the way to add a keyframe is to find that keyframe button the diamond shape that we're already familiar with and click on it so that adds a keyframe unlike After Effects though it's not going to automatically update if I go forward in time and change this number it's not going to set that second keyframe until I click on that button again there is an auto keyframing system in Cinema 4D but we don't need to get into that for this tutorial so let me just undo back to where we have this first keyframe on the twist value for the first frame and then I also want to go into the control null into the coordinates and on this rotation P for pitch I think is what that P stands for that's what I want to set a keyframe on so I'll click on that keyframe as well and now I can go forward in time so why don't we just say it takes about two seconds to get through the entire twist so I'll go to frame 60. I'll rotate this forward let's say 270 degrees so that's three turns one two three faces forward and then click on that keyframe one more time to add a keyframe as you can see this is now animating between the two and it's automatically easy eased those keyframes so you get easy ease by default and Cinema 4D but I also want this geometry to be twisting so maybe we go for it about 15 frames go to the Twisted former into the object settings and increase this angle to twist it now actually this is twisting in the opposite direction I want it to so I need to click and drag to a negative value on this number here so that it's twisting in the opposite direction so why don't we say a value of about maybe negative 45 degrees and click on that keyframes so now it's going to rotate and twist at the same time and then maybe around say frame 45 we set another keyframe for it at that same value and then come to that resting point of 60 frames and change this back down to zero and again set one last keyframe and if I play this back we're going to get something that was very similar to what we had inside of After Effects but I think that we can push this a little bit further modify the easing of these keyframes and work in a little bit of that anticipation and overshoot so what I want to do is see a better view of my timeline and my keyframes and the way we do that in cinema 40 is by going up to window and down to timeline dope sheet or F curve those are kind of funny names but timeline is what we want so I'm going to click on that mine is docked down here so I'm just going to click and drag this to make it a little bit bigger but now I can scrub through this and see my keyframes a little bit more easily now they're all grouped underneath this control null I need to expand this out to be able to see the rotation and twist keyframes individually but first I want to disable the twist deformer if I just click on that green check mark it'll disable it that way it can work on the timing before I add in the deformation from that twist to former so let's just play this back and we'll see the timing alright so it takes a good amount of time 60 frames two seconds that's a pretty long time but when we add in the anticipation overshoot that might change the pace so let's open up the rotation so we can see that red axis keyframe right there and hold down controller command while clicking and dragging to duplicate this keyframe so I'm going to move it forward maybe I don't know 10 frames and then I can just double click on this value to edit it so I want to make this maybe a value of negative say 20. remember that's going to rotate it back 20 degrees now so that might be a little bit too much but let's just play that and we can see now it's anticipating before going forward and then let's just duplicate this keyframe as well controller command click and drag it back to about maybe this 45 frame Mark and I want this to go forward past 270. so let's double click on that value and say 300 so that's 30 degrees past and play that back so because of all the default easing if I play this back it's all pretty smooth so far but I want to make that even smoother and to do that I'm going to jump into my f curve which is like the value graph in After Effects you can click on this button right here to switch to it or press the Tab Key and because that property was selected that's what I'm seeing in here what I want to do is just ease this curve as you can see like I said it does look just like the value graph but you do need to know how to navigate it it doesn't automatically snap into the view like after effects does so the way that you can navigate around this is again with these little pan and zoom in and out buttons right here just click and drag you can also use use the keyboard shortcuts of one just hold down the one key click and drag to pan and two click and drag to zoom in and out on that y-axis but with all this in view I'm just going to select this keyframe by dragging a box around it and then click and drag on this handle to modify it now this is going to behave differently than it does in After Effects so you can see that this is adjusting the width of both handles attached to this keyframe but it's also not locking to that horizontal position so one I need to hold down shift so that I'm only modifying the handle that I grabbed and I also need to hold down control to lock that to the perfectly horizontal position with that done I can ease this out really strongly let go of my mouse and then let go of the keyboard buttons then select this key and do the same thing click hold Ctrl hold shift and drag this out to the left to be much more strongly eased and if I play this back now we have this animation that goes a little bit more strong on that ease and I think that's actually really good timing it's simple but it looks pretty nice now all I need to do is turn that twist warmer back on and modify the timing of those keyframes to get something that lines up a little bit better so let's grab that twist and actually just press tab jump back into this dope sheet view and I'll stop the animation to go back to the first frame so for this twist property I need to have it start twisting basically at the same time as the rotation of the control just in the opposite direction so we went negative 20 degrees backwards in the rotation so I'm going to grab this twist and bring it to that same point in time and change its value from 45 to negative 20. that's less of a distortion now but it's in sync and counteracting the rotation of the actual geometry so we're twisting it basically on one end without doing much to the other end this left Edge just the right Edge is twisting right now before it begins to spin and that looks good for the start of the animation but that twist is actually leading the rest of the animation and I'd rather it kind of stay there and let the right Edge start this wave of twisting and and let it gradually get to that point so what I think I need to do is go forward in time to about here and then add another value so I'll control click or drag that angle value and just change it to something else maybe positive 20 and see if that helps counteract the twisting movement and basically flipping what gets to lead the Twist and that's actually making me realize that this third keyframe should be going in the opposite direction not negative 45 but maybe a value of 45 or really whatever value this is past that 90 degree increment which remember it ends at 270 and we went 30 degrees beyond that for the overshoot so it's a value of 30. so I could change this to 30 on the Distortion to counteract that final twist so let's play this back and see what it looks like and I'll click off of this so we don't see as many overlays and that's actually working pretty well so we've got the initial Twist from the start leading the animation and then the final counteracting twist at the end so these are all working together nicely now and I could probably push this twist angle even further right here so maybe instead of 20 I say something like 60 or even 90 and get a much more dramatic twist now I'm going to need to play around with the timing of that a little bit more maybe this should happen right around the 30 frame Mark so that when the entire geometry is rotating at the fastest rate that's when we get the max twist in our animation but it's all very fluid very Dynamic looking and if I go into the F curve by pressing the tab key on the keyboard I can modify this curve even further so maybe it's getting a little ahead of itself right here I'll ease more strongly out of this one again holding Ctrl and shift just to modify the outgoing velocity of that keyframe but that takes care of the smoothness over here on the left Edge syncing up the twist with the rotation and makes for something that looks really nice and fluid now looking at the F curve it doesn't seem like I really need this keyframe if I just delete it that'll probably simplify things a little bit maybe I could ease out of this one a little more strongly same thing right here but now I have less keyframes to deal with for making this same animation I think that looks pretty good so I'm going to save this I'm going to stop the playback and jump back into after effects and right away I can preview this in After Effects and you see that it does not take that much time to render at all because the standard renderer in Cinema 4D is very quick to render when you're not using any kind of lights or anything this is just flat geometry with flat textures using that luminance channel so no lighting is influencing the rendering process of this at all so it's clearly much quicker to render than the time displacement technique inside of After Effects natively it also in my opinion produces much smoother results if I zoom in you can see it's all anti-aliased but it's done in a very nice smooth way versus the time displacement which only has as much resolution as you're able to give it with the brightness values of a gradient I don't need to be in 16 bits per channel for this to work I could drop this back down to eight bits per Channel and that's just going to help it render even more quickly but we're now getting a very similar look in Cinema 4D light dynamically linked into after effects and we can treat this just like any other piece of footage so I could take this twisty c4d comp put it into another one and I'll call this twisty color and we'll use the same process as we did before with my transparency grid enabled you can see the black bar I'll just take that extract effect apply it to the layer bring this little square over to the right drag this one back to the left add the fill effect so I can change the color of this to be whatever I want let's just choose another bright color and then I could time remap this so I can isolate just those 60 frames that I want so maybe go from 0 to 2 seconds and maybe let's give it another extra 10 frames press Ctrl alt t or command option t on a Mac to enable time remapping click on the add keyframe button I don't need this last one right here but now I have these keyframes that represent the start and end of the animation and I could re-time this if I wanted to and after effects will handle that just fine so now if I wanted this to go faster that will play back faster and now I don't necessarily need to do that but with those keyframes where they originally were I could add a quick expression to this property alt or option click on it and say Loop in plus Loop out after that parentheses say minus value with a semicolon at the end and this simple expression is going to infinitely Loop that sequence of keyframes in both directions so I can move these keyframes around wherever I want and it's always going to Loop in both directions so now I can say duplicate this move it up and maybe move it over and then press U to bring up the keyframes and offset It Forward in time maybe 10 frames I'll hold alt shift and press the right arrow key and then I'll duplicate it again press U shift that forward in time again another 10 frames and this time move it over here and then I could duplicate both of these layers bring them to the top drag them down visually to the bottom of the comp press you to bring up those keyframes shift them and forward and time 20 more frames and now I've got all these copies of this one instance of Cinema 4D and if I set my work area to those keyframes and back it off one frame from that second one so I'm looking at these ones right here it's going to infinitely Loop because of that expression that I set up up it's all very Dynamic and easy to update now I realized that was a lot to cover in one tutorial especially if you've never used Cinema 4D before but I wanted to give you some perspective on how you could achieve this effect with different techniques whether you need to stay in After Effects or you have the luxury of jumping into another piece of software to create something that you just couldn't inside of after effects if you create anything using this technique please tag me at Jake inmotion on Instagram or Twitter or anywhere you can find me online I would love to see it and share it with everyone I love getting tagged in those posts and seeing your work if you ever have any questions don't hesitate to leave a comment let me know what you thought of this tutorial if you have any ideas for tutorials in the future if you have any questions about after effects that you just aren't figuring out I'd love to hear about it and add it to my list of running tutorial ideas make sure to give a thumbs up on this video If you enjoyed it if you learned something from It And subscribe so that you're not going to miss out on any other future content from me and you'll always be up to date with what I'm creating thanks to surfshark for sponsoring this video thank you for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 22,033

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe After Effects, motion graphics after effects, motion graphics tutorial, motion graphics animation, motion graphics tutorial after effects, cinema 4d, c4d lite, cinema 4d lite, after effects text animation, c4d text tutorial, after effects cinema 4d, cineware plugin, cinema 4d animation, after effects type, cineware cinema 4d after effects, cinema 4d lite after effects, cinema 4d lite tutorial

Id: g9NdQcD9lmU

Length: 45min 25sec (2725 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022