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

HYPA Strings

Posted in Cinema4D Misc, Cinema4D MoGraph on September 17th, 2009 by Tim

Uploaded a short test animation I created using Cinema4D Thinking Particles and Tracer.  Visit Vimeo for the HD version, although the compression destroys it some what!

HYPA Strings from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

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Making It Look Great 6 – Review

Posted in Cinema4D Misc, Cinema4D MoGraph, News on July 8th, 2009 by Tim

I’m sure all of you out there are familiar with the fantastic work that Trish and Chris Meyer offer the After Effects community through their website, Pro Video Coalition, the AE List and of course their awesome Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects books series.

I studied Creating Motion Graphics Edition One years ago when it was first released and it is incredible the amount of information they pack into those pages. I still have a copy of CMG Edition 4 sitting here on my desk right now. It is most definitely the bible for any Motion Graphics artist who uses Adobe After Effects.

Trish has recently posted a review on Pro Video Coalition of Making It Look Great 6, the latest Cinema4D training that I have released as part of the Motionworks Making It Look Great Series.

So if you are interested in buying the training and are looking for a review then head on over to Pro Video Coalition for an in depth review that spans three long pages.

Many thanks to Trish for spending the time to go through Making It Look Great and writing such a glowing review.

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Cloner Visibility through Effectors

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph on June 23rd, 2009 by Tim

When using MoGraph in Cinema4D, the effectors can be used for several things other than affecting the position, rotation or scale.  Another option is to control the visibility of clones. If you switch to the Parameter tab of an appropriate effector, scroll down and you will see an innocent little check box labeled Visibility.  Now you won’t find this on all the effectors as it just wouldn’t make sense on some of them.  On the effectors where you can use it however, this check box  . . .  believe it or not  . . . makes clones visible or invisible!

Visibility Checkbox

Visibility Checkbox

You can use this to simply control which clones are visible and which are not.  Of course you can use the Falloff to control this too.  I’m made a small example scene that demonstrates this using the Random, Shader and Step Effectors.  Although the Step Effector is only really using Falloff as it’s control.

Here’s a preview of the result.

You can download this example scene here.

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Making It Look Great 6 – Now Available

Posted in Cinema4D MoGraph, News on May 28th, 2009 by Tim

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.

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