Making It Look Great 7 – Now Available

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph, News on February 11th, 2010 by Tim

For more information and to purchase this comprehensive collection of Cinema4D tutorials please visit Motionworks

Here is the final teaser for Making It Look Great 7 – MoGraph Unleashed.

Making It Look Great 7 – Flourish from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

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Making It Look Great 7 – MoGraph Unleashed

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph, News on February 6th, 2010 by Tim

Making It Look Great 7 – MoGraph Unleashed will be available on Motionworks next week.

Comprising six unique collections of tutorials on the Cinema4D MoGraph Module. In total almost 8hrs of professional training.

Follow helloluxx or Motionworks on Twitter to hear news of the availability. As soon as the download is online it will be tweeted to you all.

Here is a brief description of each series to whet your appetite.

Starting with the creation of a simple logo model, then breaking it apart polygon by polygon, a techni-coloured interior is revealed. Lit using Global Illumination and powered by dynamic forces, watch thousands of tiny letters, each an individual light source, falling, colliding and bouncing. After studying this collection, you will control the power of dynamics with your fingertips.

Subjects covered include:
Rigid Body Tag
Plain Effector
Random Effector
PolyFX
Global Illumination

Whether you wish to recreate a realistic print style halftone effect or build a giant stadium jumbotron structure, this set of classes explores the numerous options available when working with image based source material. Combining the power of the MoGraph Cloner in Grid Array mode, explore the potential the Shader Effector has to offer. Once integrated with the Color Shader, you will unleash unlimited possibilities for your own projects.

Subjects covered include:
Sort Clones
Shader Effector
Color Shader
Formula Effector

Based upon the popular theme of heraldry, this series of tutorials will provide you with a variety of strategies to assist develop your ideas into real world projects. Link Effectors to regular Cinema4D objects to harness the power of MoGraph within your established animation techniques. Deform objects along any path with the Spline Wrap deformer. Animate multiple objects in sequence by utilising the Time Offset feature. This class is jam packed with a huge combination of techniques you will use on a day to day basis.

Subjects covered include:
Spline Wrap
Time Offset
Random Effector
Delay Effector
Xpresso Sample Effector Node
Stacked Materials
Stick Texture Tag
Step Effector

Working with Motion Capture files such as the FBX format, this series of tutorials take you step by step through various techniques for creating animated elements from captured motion. Watch your motion design advance to new grounds with many possibilities to create natural flowing movement with your graphic components.

Subjects covered include:
Spline Effector
Random Effector
Tracer

Need swarms of bees? Shoals of fish? Maybe you simply want to move with the crowd? This collection will point you in the right direction. Streaming with an abundance of opportunities, control the crowds of parameters with ease as you guide them towards your goal.

Subjects covered include:
Spline Effector
Step Effector
Delay Effector
Random Effector
Target Effector

Attach visible lights onto multiple object vertices and watch as your clones move to the rhythm of the beat. Channel the power of the inheritance effector as your objects morph from one object to another, leaving a trail of ever decreasing light that flicker through the falloff. This workshop will guide you through the intricacies of some of the often misunderstood and rarely used MoGraph tools, such as the Matrix Object, Instance Object, Sound and Inheritance Effector.

Subjects covered include:
MoGraph Instance Object
Matrix Object
Inheritance Effector
Sound Effector
Beat Shader
Displace Deformer
Multi Shader
Sketch & Toon

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Making It Look Great 7 – MoCap

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on January 25th, 2010 by Tim

Not long now…

Making It Look Great 7 – Coming Real Soon!

Thanks to Selcuk Can Guven for the sound design.

Making It Look Great 7 – MoCap from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

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Making It Look Great 7 – Flocking

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on January 14th, 2010 by Tim

Making It Look Great 7 – Coming Soon

Thanks to Selcuk Can Guven for the sound design.

Making It Look Great 7 – Flocking from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

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3D World

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on January 13th, 2010 by Tim
3D World

3D World

The new 3D World magazine is on sale from today in the UK. I was offered the exciting opportunity of creating the cover artwork and a twenty second animation for this months issue.

3D World from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

Working with Mark Allin, an old friend and my ex-business partner from HYPA. We both developed the concept and design of the piece. I then took the designs and worked up the 3D animation in Cinema4D and completed the composite and grade in After Effects. Thanks to Mark, who also created the sound design for the animation.

As part of the project, I wrote a 36 step tutorial that walks you through the processes to create something similar yourself. Please visit the 3D World official website to find out more and order your own copy.

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Making It Look Great 7 – Dynamics

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph, News on January 9th, 2010 by Tim

Making It Look Great 7 – Coming Soon.

Many thanks to Selcuk Can Guven for sound design.

Making It Look Great 7 – Dynamics from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

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Sorted — Using the MoGraph sort options

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on December 8th, 2009 by Tim

In this short tutorial, I show you some more of the features available in the Cinema4D MoGraph module.

By using the Sort option in the Cloner, you can use Effectors to determine which clone from the hierarchy is displayed.

The Sorted option in the Random Effector allows you to use each child of the cloner the same number of times, or in combination with the multishader you can ensure the shaders are distributed evenly across your clones. Great for things like playing cards where you don’t want duplicate clones.

To find out more visit Vimeo and watch the tutorial.

Sorted! from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

You can download the project file associated with this tutorial by clicking here.

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Cinema4D Light Dome

Posted in Cinema4D Misc, Cinema4D MoGraph on November 22nd, 2009 by Tim

Hi everyone and welcome to helloluxx, the new home of my blog.

As a thank you for all the continued support, I’ve created a Light Dome scene that you can download for use in your own Cinema4D scenes. You will need MoGraph to use the setup and I created it using Cinema4D r11.5, but it should work fine in r11, and maybe even 10.5.

Light Dome - Basic Render Result

Light Dome - Basic Render Result

The Light Dome is fairly straight forward to use. Here’s a screenshot of the available parameters.

Light Dome Parameters

Light Dome Parameters

I’ve also created a short tutorial that gives you a quick overview of the controls. You can check this out on Vimeo.

Light Dome Introduction from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

Download the Cinema4D Light Dome scene as a zip file here.

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Randomness with Lights?

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on October 20th, 2009 by Tim

Alex from aenhancers (awesome site by the way) asked an interesting question regarding the More Randomness post. He was interested to see if the same principle could be applied to lights.

So I decided to do a quick test. The answer is to use the MoGraph Color Shader in the Transparency Channel and add this to your lights. Then use the Random Effector on your Cloner Object.

Random Lights using the MoGraph Color Shader and Random Effector

Random Lights using the MoGraph Color Shader and Random Effector

Download an example scene here.

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Custom Forces with MoDynamics

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on October 16th, 2009 by Tim

The new Cinema4D MoDynamics is great fun, and is such a vast improvement over the old Dynamics Module.

One of the things the original dynamics offers is the ability to have several independent dynamic worlds all within one scene. This is made possible by placing elements under a solver object. This gives you the opportunity to define specific forces to each solver group. For example, you can have one set of objects with low gravity and another with high gravity.

The MoGraph Dynamics has the Gravity control in the Project Settings, this defines the gravity for the entire scene. There is however a little trick you can use which offers more control and lets you set custom gravity for your dynamic objects.

From the Edit Menu, open the Project Settings, switch to the MoDynamics Tab and set the Gravity parameter to 0.

Set Gravity to zero

Set Gravity to zero

Then from the Objects Menu, choose Particle – Gravity. This will add in a Standard Particle Gravity Force.

Add a Particle Gravity Object

Add a Particle Gravity Object

Select one of your Rigid Body tags and switch to the Force Tab.  Here there is an Include / Exclude list.  You can drag the Gravity Object into this list and switch it to Include.  Choose another Rigid Body tag and then Exclude the Gravity from this tag.  By doing this you can assign gravity to different dynamic objects.

Drag to the Rigid Body include list

Drag to the Rigid Body include list

It is a pretty simple, but useful technique. You can do this with many of the standard particle forces and this allows you to add another dimension of control. Simulations are tricky to setup when you have a specific vision in mind. If you have one object that is not moving to the place you want it to, then why not employ this trick and use an attractor or gravity assigned to the problem object. Maybe that’s all you need to get the result you are after without disturbing the rest of your simulation?

You can download a simple example of using two gravity forces with MoDynamics here