Webinar Character Animation In Cinema 4D

so welcome everybody and thanks very much for attending my name is Janos pills and today we're going to have a webinar about how to start character animation in cinema 4d and first I want to show you what the contents of this webinar are first of all a small introduction and some modeling tips after that we will continue with creating a shark rig with the amazing character object then we will create a spider walk cycle with C motion and in the end I've got some final tips for you and animation theory so let's start prior to working at Maxon I worked as a freelancer and this is how I started with character animation this is actually some study works with a fish and this fish is wreaked only by using the standard deformers of cinema 4d so there's no joint hierarchy and stuff like that it's just bent deformers yeah the second thing I want to show you is a character called Lila which is my first biped character my first human character and rigging her was more advanced but not as difficult to do as the next ones which are the characters of my graduation project this is Egon and as you can see we've got full body animation and yeah it was five minutes of animation in total so the rigs had to be very solid this is the other character out of this graduation project a small elf called Ely and yeah he was the main character and had a very difficult rig and yeah I created all of that rigs in cinema 4d release 11.5 and in 11.5 we didn't have the amazing as I said the amazing character object to Rick characters in a very short amount of time these are the rigs arm I created for those characters I show to you and as you can see from the left to the right it's getting more advanced there's more control objects you can control your character with and yeah it was a tremendous amount of work and whoop it was sometimes tedious tasks the Rick on the right side for example took me about three weeks to create and now with the character object I will show you later you can create a rig like this in an hour or so so that's pretty cool yeah let's start with some modeling tips in advance - rigging a character and the first tip I have for you is model your character in a stance instead of a T stands it's because in a relaxed State every character lets his arms hang down and this is kind of standard and deformation needed for achieving relaxed arms is less in a stance compared to T stance so unless you've got a monkey character which is hanging in the trees all of the time model your character in a stance the next tip is clean topology so you should always try to keep your edge flow yeah horizontally or vertically so your deformations yeah will be more clean the next one is only used quads and this is because of the subdivision surface object which work the best when you input only quads then we've got the tip which is areas with much deformation need more detail you can see this right here at the elbows where we've got lots of detail or more detail than we have for example at the upper arm and this is because the elbow will deform very much because it's an elbow and as here is just one bone inside in real life we don't need as much subdivision why creating the mesh and the last modeling tip is follow natural muscle lines especially in the face so what you can see here is a two head and the left one yeah is pretty straight modelled and this is not a good approach because I didn't follow natural muscle lines and for creasing this is important so the natural muscle lines as you can see on the right side are circular around the eyes and around the mouth and when it comes to creasing you will have an easy time yet to get those creases feel right and look more natural as it follows the edge flow so these were the modeling tips and enough words let's go let's jump into cinema 4d and I prepared some scenes for you and the first one is the shark we want to rig so first of all I want to press play so you can see there is no animation in the scene and it's only those two objects and first let's have a look at the edge flow of the shark we can do this by pressing display and guro shading with lines so this is the edge flow and as you can see it's horizontally and it's vertically and it follows the natural lines okay so how can we start to create a rig and well it's pretty easy you can just go to the character menu and choose the character object and as your character object appears you will have some options so the first one is in the basic tab of your character object you can define the size of your character and yeah we will do that by selecting the shark and having a look at the size which is around 5 meters so let's go back to the character object and choose a character type which is fish and we uncheck auto size and type in 500 centimeters so the character object will know that 5 meters is the size of the shark and when we create our rig it will automatically create it in this size so we've got 4 sub tabs which is built adjust binding and animate in build we will yeah as the name says we will build up the character rig out of a template we can choose then we will adjust it to the shape of our character then we will bind it and I will explain that later and then we have the subtype for animating the character so let's start with building the character ik by choosing from a template we've got lots of templates templates like biped rigs quadrupeds birds fish and so on and we will choose the fish template and as we choose this one we you have yeah the ability to choose from we have some components and the first component is the spine and we can choose between FK and I K so for those of you who don't know what FK and I came means I prepare a scene for you this is the arm of our mannequin and I rigged it with AI K and I rigged it with FK and or the other way around with FK and with I K and yeah FK means forward kinematics which means that you will move your rotate your arm based on the base of the of your limp of the arm and what will happen is when you rotate it the whole arm rotates and as you choose the lower arm it will rotate as well but what if you want to your character to grab something from a table like a gas you would need to you would need the arm to follow the hand so you can animate that easily and therefore you can choose I K and I can basically means that you can take the hand controller for example and when you move it the whole arm moves and not only this when you when you choose the upper arm you can move it as well and the hand will stay so you can move your character as it's holding something so let's switch back to our shark and we will create an IKE a spline alright so i just release the mouse and what you can see is cinema 4d created a whole spine joint chain which with controls and what you see in the object manager is just this spine I K component so cinema did a lot of work from you right now and yeah let's just continue so the next thing I want to create is the joint for our fins and we can see those here and there are some shortcut tricks I want to show you so normally when you click the fin it will create one fin and as you click it again it will create the other thing but maybe you want to create both fins at once so I delete them and show you how this is how you can achieve this and this is by pressing command key on Mac or ctrl key on PC so when you press it and choose the fin I K it will create both fins for left and right at once so this is pretty cool so we switch back to our spline to our spine I K and we will create a dorsal fin with AI K as well and here's another trick if you press the shift key while releasing the mouse the spine I K object will stay selected and we can just continue adding more fin joints okay I did that so as you can see we've got the dorsal fin and our spine I K objects still selected and we can select the next component which will be the tail and we will choose the tail I K and I press shift as well like I did before and yeah this is the complete rig and I don't know if you watched the clock it's about 5 minutes and we have the the whole rig which is completely functional so you can do everything with it but of course we need to adjust it because it's not fitting the proportions of our shark so as I said we have those four modes and we switch to adjust mode and what will happen is all of our joints become dots which are connected by a line and we can adjust those dots pretty easily and therefore I would recommend using one of the site views so the first thing I want to show you is in the front view first I want to adjust the fins and well I can just select the move tool and I select this fin component right here and when I drag it it works symmetrical and this is because in our adjust mode we can switch on symmetry yeah so let's adjust it just by scaling it by rotating it and the important thing is that it needs to or every dot needs to be inside of the mesh so it will work best so let's change the view to top view and move it and rotate it a bit so now if you want to follow the shape of the fin with your joint chain you can easily grab the other joints as well and move them but as you can see the whole rest of the joint chain moves as well and there's another trick and this is by pressing the seven key you can yeah adjust just one joint which is pretty cool and you can work really fast so now that I adjusted the fin in top view I need to control I need to check it in one of the other views and I take the front view again so let's scale it in Braille transform mode just like that and a bit like that so now we have got our oh no not yet but now so now everything is inside of our fin and yeah we can continue and therefore we go to the side view and we will adjust the dorsal fin next and this will be more easy because we don't need to care about symmetry and the dorsal fin is just straight up so I can move it rotate it and scale it as I need it to be yeah let's do it just like that I'll scale it a bit up so that's it and the same for the tail that was not the tail this is the tail move it rotate it well this is a repetitive process as you can see takes a while but it also is the step that will take the longest time but we will be there in a minute right now we are finished so and I recommend - we have to check it in perspective view so orbit around the shark and yeah I think that looks pretty good so we can go to the next step of the character object and this is binding and when we bind you can see that the shark object is automatically inside of the objects field and this is because and the shark was selected while I created the character object but I can easily delete it and I want to delete all of my other objects which were created as well and I can show you how to bring it in it's just drag-and-drop into the object field and it will automatically create the skin de forma and the waiting tag for you the purpose for binding a rig is that every point of your geometry needs to know which joined it yet depends - so when you move a joint you need specific parts of the geometry to move with the joint and you can achieve it by binding the rig to the geometry so now that we did that there is a standard waiting and we can continue by going to animate and let's look what will happen if I press play and wow look at this the shark is moving and it took us around 15 minutes to to get there from a from a kind of dead shark model to an animated shark look at this but there are still a few things I want to to change for example the dorsal fin which is very jiggly and yeah I want it to be more stiff and therefore I stop the animation because I know that you will have some problems with the frame rate which will be very low but don't worry after this webinar we will make it available on our youtube channel and we record it in a higher frame rate so it will be fluent yeah we wanted to adjust the dorsal fin and we can do this by going to the character object and we need to get access to the joint hierarchy and we can get this access by going to the display tab and there is a subsection for managers and as you can see in the object manager there are only components show as you can see here there's the spine component the fins components dorsal fin and tail and as I changed that to full hierarchy you can see what cinema 4d did for you so it created all of this joint chains with expressions and with restrictions and protections and yeah imagine setting all that up by hand it will you know it will cost you hours so and here we got our dorsal fin joint chain and this is driven also by an AI K tag and as the I Kate egg has a tab for dynamics we can adjust the stiffness of our dorsal fin so watch it again the dorsal fin is jiggly and what we will do now is we will put up the strength to 100% and when I replay the animation you can see that that the dorsal fin points upwards and isn't as jiggly anymore so I don't want to see all of that in my object manager at the whole time so I go up to the character object again and I change the object managers view from full hierarchy to just control us which will be which will have a better overview and as we can see we've got five controllers it's the master controller main controller then we got a dorsal fin controller and the controller for each fin ok but why does the shark move let's go to the master controller and we go to the controls tab and here we can see that there is some user data set up for us and we can for example increase the speed or we can decrease the speed and I think this is the more common way sharks would swim and we can even adjust the nose wiggle or the tail wiggle in minutes or in seconds you have an animator track I'm so glad to have that inside of cinema 4d this is so cool but as you can see right now the shark is swimming just in one place and I want to change that so I go to the first frame and I want to let the shark swim through my viewport so what I can do I choose the main controller and I set a keyframe for that and then I move the power slider to the end of my scene and I will move the shark to the other side of my viewport and I will set another keyframe and as you can see the shark swims and when I go to frame hundred I can pull the shark up for example set another keyframe and then I go to frame 50 and rotate it a bit set a keyframe and I go to frame 150 rotate it again set a keyframe and let's play that awesome so what else can I do so I don't like the joints being visible in the viewport so I will disable them by going to display tab and in the viewport I change the visible parameter to control us and so I have just my controllers of course some of you will ask okay so now I have these pre-built presets but I want to add custom things to my rig and I can tell you that this is also possible so this is just a help for you but you can extend it the way you want it so let's move on to our next scene so the shark swims the next thing we want to do is to make a spider move and therefore I have this nice spider object spider character and yeah I will show you the scene so when I press play nothing is moving but the spider is full-rigged so when I grab my hips controller and I move it you can see that everything behaves as it should I can take the legs and move them so everything is set up and we just want to make it walk and therefore we will take advantage of cinema for these object for cycled animation which is the C motion object which you can find in the character menu and as it is for cycled animations you can also use it for walk cycles of course and yeah there are two things you need to do first the first thing is the see motion object is deactivated by default so you need to activate it and the second thing is that you need to tell the see motion object ya which which objects to move and therefore we've got this object field round here so I will lock my view or my attributes manager so um it won't change the attributes as I click through their objects so and first I one to drag my hips controller into that field and I want to add my legs as well and what is important is that you add it as children of the hips controller so the hips controller will be the hub which every leg is attached to and the legs are the targets and as you can see the spider did something it did not did not break the rig but it just started to animate so this is the spiders walk cycle of course we have to adjust it and first we want to to change this dried which is way too big I change it to 40 and we can also change the speed of our cycle so this is the time it will take to go through one cycle so as I decrease this value the spider will move faster okay so let's adjust it even more so a spider has eight legs and two of those I don't know let's call it arms but these arms move at the moment they behave like they were legs but of course they are not so we go to these small legs and we can change their behavior by changing the driver and the driver right now is set to steps and we need it to be the hub and the hub is the body so when you um when you set this to hub these legs will follow the body so right now it's better but we should add some more movement to make the spider remove more natural and therefore we can activate or select our our hips controller and we can add actions and as you can see here we've got an action we can add and I will do that by pressing ad so watch this the spider is going crazy and yeah we can scroll down and there we see a lift has been added and as we click it we can see the parameters of this action so we can increase the lift for example to 10 so it's the spider is getting kind of a hip-hop spider or something like that bouncy spider and let's decrease it to 5 and here we've got the F curve for our cycle and of course this is again the point where you can adjust those things that cinema4d gives you so it's pretty easy to we are to make a character walk but you can also create your own style by adjusting those f curves and I will do that I will make the spider hope for one small time and for one big time for example but I will increase this effect again just like that so we have a little bit of bass variation inside of our f curve and of course we can add some variation and yeah this is the first thing we needed to adjust well I will decrease the amount of lift so it is a bit more subtile and I will add another action so let's go back to Olo hips controller and let's see what actions we have so we have actions for the position and we have actions for rotation but we have all these other options for actions and which include parameters user data for example so you can include your user data into a walk cycle or a cycle animation in general and what we will create first is a twist so we choose twist and nothing happened of course because we need to edit so let's edit and now as you can see the spider does the twist so let's adjust it we will set the twist amount down to two and I will add some variations well this is looking much better but I will add another one which is the roll so when we add this head we have this motion as well but of course as the others we need to adjust it I set it down to two as well and add some variation and again you can modify all of these curves so you can individualize your animation and this is so easy and you've got a walk cycle so the body looks great but as we watch the legs they just um yeah they slide over the surface so I don't like that I want them to lift as well so when the legs move forward there should be a lift and I select all of my legs or the spiders legs and I choose the lift and press add and what will happen is yeah that the legs immediately start to lift but the effect is first of all it's not enough so they should lift more and on the other hand side we need to adjust the face of all of our yeah moving legs so they are they are symmetrical right now as you can see but a spider doesn't move symmetrical so what we can do is we adjust the faces and I will yeah I will choose the first object which is the left leg and I will set the face to minus 25 and watch watch the leg so now it's the same face as the second leg but it's the opposite face to the right one and this is what we want to achieve so we do that for all of the left legs and yeah I will set up the parameters pretty quick and this one 250 just like that and as you can see our spider moves unsymmetrical and this is this is it's really so cool and as I said we need to adjust the lift as well we need to increase it so let's go to our lift of the first leg and let's increase that number to 30 so and as you watch the the front left leg it lifts even more than before yeah we need to do that for all of the legs and this is some copy and paste work I will just go through it quickly just elect all of the lifts and paste the 30 centimeters just like that and yeah now we are ready so watch this the spider has a walk cycle and this is actually looking pretty good yeah what next so what we can do is or what we want to do is we want to make the spider move because right now it has a walk cycle but it stays at the same position and one thing we can do is we can add a straight walk and this is just by changing this walk parameter and we can set it from static to line and as you can see Wow the spider moves imagine doing that by hand you will sit hours days or even weeks depending on your skills so now our spider our spider walks straight on but I want to decide where the spider will walk and we can do that pretty easily just by changing the parameter from line to path and because we have no path it's in the center again but we have this path field and I just pause the animation and I go to my top view and when I show you now is one of the new r17 features which is the spline sketch tool and this is so cool you can sketch a spline just like that and yeah it will smooth out so when I press shift I even have a smooth tool and what is really cool about this tool is that I can when I increase my my radius for the for the spline sketch tool well let's select it again just like that we get this feedback round here and this means we can start in the middle of the spline and draw it in a new way and then we go to the other side of the spline and we will we release the mouse and the spline will just update this does not create a new spline is it just updated the old one I love it so let's move it again alright so here we got our path for our spider and we go back to the C motion object and we will drag this spline into the path field and immediately our spider starts to walk along this path let's go to perspective view this is so cool I love it yeah imagine doing this by hand so the spider will set its steps and they will just stay on the position where it dropped the foot or the leg but what if I want to make my spider walking along a specific surface so let's try that we create a surface yeah let's create a landscape and we will scale it up just like that and we will watch what happens if we press play of course it will intersect the geometry of our landscape let's switch off our world grid it's a bit disturbing just like that so and now we can go to our C motion and let's change the tab and we go to route and in the route tab we can add a surface into that field around here so as I drag the landscape in the spider will automatically start walking on this surface look at this this is so crazy and well I repeat all the time but imagine imagine doing this by hand this is so crazy did we it will take you a long time and with this tools it's just a few clicks so how can we improve that animation okay so let's alter the starting point so we get our spider right here as you can see the spider is on the yeah on a surface which is not just flat but the body of the spider is pointing straight upwards so and we can adjust this by checking aligned hops so when we do this watching the spider it will automatically tilt and it will walk along the surface with the right angle of the body and now watch this it's a procedural thing so when I move my landscape the spider will automatically follow that landscape isn't that cool that's so great that will save you so much time I love this feature so press play again and yeah I think that's pretty cool and let's add some other stuff which is corrections and variation and we want to achieve this by adding steps to our scene so when we go to see motion and go to the steps tab we can create all of the steps the spider makes so press create steps and as you can see these are all of the steps so they are a bit difficult to grab so what I will do is I select my landscape and I click here so I can add the landscape to a new layer and I will go to the layers manager and rename that landscape all right and the important thing is to lock it and as I lock it you can see it's greyed out around here and now I can click on my on my steps and it will automatically select the steps and not the landscape so this is a really cool workflow as well so yeah let's move the spider and let's see if there's anything we need to adjust well actually it's not so bad but I will show to you what steps can do so if you grab a step and you move it you can see that the position of the leg will change immediately and every time the spider is here at this position it will make this step and you can do that for all of the steps so again you are not you don't stick to the things that cinema4d does for you so you can adjust it to the maximum and you can create your own animations and your own stuff yeah I think that's it for the live demo part so let's switch back to my keynote and to some additional tips so if you have questions I will try to answer them later on so just write them down in the questions tab of the webinar software and I will do my best to answer them yeah first some additional tips and the first one is shoot reference so that's me by the way and yeah and I shot the reference for all of the of the shots in my graduation movie but this is the one which comes closest to the final result and what is important about shooting reference is that you choose the right camera angle and that you don't copy it for 100% and this is because yeah the character needs its own style it should not mimic your movement and that was actually the mistake I did here so when I showed the animation to others I said they said so wow the character moves like you do and I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing actually for animation it's a bad thing but I feel fine about it that they are that they saw me in the character or in the animation so the next thing is ask for feedback and this is really important ask your family ask your friends ask your colleagues for feedback for your character animation well sometimes the people you ask won't know why a shot is not your working so they will give you answers like well the animation is good but I can't feel it and don't be angry about that think about it why do the others don't feel it so and if you change it it may be better then organize your scenes and your timeline so when you have big scenes with lots of characters and lots of animation happening it's always important to keep an overview so in the timeline you've got the ability to create bookmarks and this is really cool so you can add a bookmark for for yeah every limb of your character or for every character in total what I want to say is that this will make you faster because you have an overview about your scene or a better overview and the last tip is keep your scenes fast which means why you're animate you need fast viewport feedback and to achieve that you should switch off all of the subdivision surfaces for example or you should remove or switch off any kind of heavy geometry you just look through your scene and try to find out which objects in your scene will slow it down okay so animation theory I will go very briefly through that so um don't worry it's just two slides and the first slide is about the 12 principles of animation which were developed by Disney animators in the 1930s and those were made for cartoon animation but they are valid to almost any kind of of animation and yeah just that you saw it if you want to go deeper I have some recommendations for for a lecture later and yeah let's head on to some acting basics and you need those acting basics for creating convincing characters or characters which your audience can empathize with and this is really important because emotion is the key to the audience and therefore you need to create empathic characters and you need to know the acting basics also regarding to your story well and the last thing I want to talk about is my recommended lecture first of all there's the animators survival kit by Richard Williams which is kind of an overview about everything regarding to animation the second one is stop staring by Jason or CIPA which is a book which is focused on facial rigging and animation and the last one is acting for any majors by Ed hooks and yeah he goes through all of the acting techniques and all that is important to creating convincing characters as I said and good stories yeah um if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask I try my best to answer them if I cannot answer them or there's not enough time left I will write you an email so there was one question about if it's possible to animate humans with emotion and of course it is so you can animate everything with emotion then I've got one question how do you prefer to animate eyelids with a joint or point or and my answer would be with point morph I would always prefer a point Moss for facial animation but it depends on your character of course this is no answer I can give for every character because some may have the need for four joints in the eyelids well here's another question which is is it possible to combine the motion and character object and yes it is so when you when you are finished with your character rigging and you go to to the animation subtype I showed you there you have a button called I think it was a create walk and if you press it it will automatically add your character to see motion and of course you will have to do all of the adjustments I showed to you but it's possible yes of course so are there any more questions so if not I want to thank you again for attending goodbye guys

Channel: Maxon

Views: 117,947

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r14, release 14, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, Character

Id: pBbb_lNXmyc

Length: 52min 18sec (3138 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2016