Making It Look Great 6: Design and Production Techniques for Cinema 4D and After Effects is now available.

Work with me (Tim Clapham) through this 14 part, 8.5 hour video workshop. Jam-packed with techniques, tips and shortcuts, the workshop includes real-world techniques for getting the most out of the Cinema 4D Mograph module. Suitable for beginner and intermediate users or anyone serious about mastering Cinema 4D with After Effects at an industry level.

Visit Motionworks for a list of the subjects covered and an introduction movie.

Ever used the caching that is available in certain tags and objects for Cinema4D?

Here is an introduction to the Point Cache Tag and Point Cache Deformer.  For this tutorial I thought I’d record a short movie.

You might want to head on over to Vimeo and watch the HD version of this (so you can actually see what is going on!).

Introduction to Point Cache in Cinema4D from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

Let me know your thoughts, I hope you find it useful.

I often get sent Cinema4D files to look at, and one thing that I notice, is that a lot of you leave your vector tracks visible in the timeline. I’m not sure if you even know you can switch them off.  To me they just cause excess clutter.

If you have a lot of tracks in the timeline, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that screen real estate is a precious thing.

If you have Show Vector Track enabled, your timeline might look like this with the tracks folded.

Unfold and it looks like this… Where have all my tracks gone?

Now disable Show Vector Track. Your timeline will look like this with the tracks folded (the same as before).

Unfold them, and voila, you’ve saved yourself lots of space.  Even with only two objects in the timeline, you can see how much space I saved.

So give your wrist a break from all that scrolling.  Disable Show Vector Tracks.  For what it is worth, I have Show Vector Tracks disabled in my new.c4d file.  That way it is automatically disabled in all my new scenes.  (I also have Show Animated Enabled, but that is a different story.)

So I ask you, how often would you want to see the vector track when they are unfolded anyway?

Just a quicky as I have adjusted my standard layout a little.  Thought that I’d share it here if anyone is interested in using it.  It is designed for a widescreen monitor, but if you have 4:3 monitor then you can probably adapt it to fit.

I’ve included a r.10 and r.11 version as the render settings changed between those versions and as it they are docked in the layout it kinda made sense!

You can load it by double clicking the .l4d file.  Then if you want to save it, you can either choose Window > Layout > Save As Start Up Layout, or Window > Layout > Save Layout As.  If you Save Layout As, then you need to save it in the Library > Layout Folder.  It will then be in the Layout menu in the top left, whenever you need it.

Here’s what it looks like (click to open image in new window).

Download the r.10 layout

Download the r.11 layout

Did you know that it is possible to loop noise in Cinema4D?

This can open up many possibilities for you, not just with the use of materials, but also when working with objects such as the shader effector. You may want random motion, but need it to loop. So instead of using the random effector, you could use the shader effector with loopable noise.

The loop option works for nearly all types of noise with the exception of Electric, Gaseous, Random and Wavy Turbulence.  The different noise types will give you quite varied results. So experiment with noise type, size, octaves and also try adjusting the brightness and contrast.

Here’s how it works..

Firstly, you need to set an animation speed for the noise.

Then you set the loop period.  The loop period value refers to the number of seconds for the loop, so if you set this to 3, then the noise will loop after 3 seconds.

To make sure the noise does loop, the animation speed may be adjust slightly internally. The reason for this is that the speed will need to be a specific value for the loop to be possible. So if you use a value that is not loopable within the loop period (i.e. the speed is too fast or too slow), Cinema4D will internally adjust the animation speed so it becomes possible.

So the obvious use for this with MoGraph is with the Shader Effector.

Here’s a few examples using a Cloner set to Grid Array with varying noise types.

This uses regular noise

This uses cell noise

This uses dents

You can also use this method on non-MoGraph objects.  Using the sample effector node, you can sample the Shader Effector and then use the Range Mapper to apply the values to other objects parameters.

Here is an example where I have used it to control the colour and heading of a spotlight, and also the Z movement of an ExtrudeNURBS.

So there you have it . . . loopable noise.  Lot’s more you could do besides.  I hope you found this useful.

You can grab the files here.