David Drayton from Maxon Computer has started a new personal project called the 99 frames project, he asked if I’d give it a shout out here on helloluxx, so here it is David!

It looks like a really great idea and hopefully it will showcase some exciting new work as well as highlighting some of the awesome features of Cinema4D R13. Here is a little bit of info from David’s site.

The 99frames project is designed to encourage people to try out the new CINEMA 4D R13 features. Since CINEMA 4D R13 is such a huge upgrade in terms of rendering, character animation and workflow, it’s almost a must in my opinion to get this project started. I really do invite everybody to this very first neosushi68 project, no matter which skill level you have. It simply doesn’t matter. It’s about having fun, learning and sharing your work with the world.

Please head on over and take a look. Could be the inspiration you are looking for?

Well first of all apologies for the tardy upkeep of this blog.  The posts are becoming quite rare lately.  I’ve been incredibly busy on some really exciting projects and had no time to eat sleep or post on helloluxx.  Let’s hope I can remedy this as soon as possible.  I’ve got lots of new ideas for tutorials and tips that I expect you’re all keen to see.

Luxx created with Form 2 and an obj from C4D

I recently had the privilege of beta testing the latest incarnation of Trapcode Form 2. This is a fantastic upgrade and well worth looking into if you are an After Effects user.  The biggest new feature for me is that Form now allows you to import OBJ models.  If you use a 3D program that means you can bring your models into After Effects and then use the mesh to place particles.  Of course all of this is already possible (probably) within your 3D application, but the joy of working with Form 2 is that it offers a much faster feedback.  You have real time results (well almost, depends on how quick your machine is!?).  We all know that rendering in After Effects is generally a hell of a lot quicker than rendering from a 3D application.

Form 2 UI

I always thought of Trapcode Form as a similar beast to MoGraph in Cinema4D. Especially similar to using the Shader Effector.  You can create layer maps and use those to control all sorts of aspects of your particles.  So the luminance or colour of a layer can be used to control the postion, orientation, scale, displacement, colour, etc of your Form particles.

In fact Form is the perfect partner for your Cinema4D animations.  Using the C4D to AE export, you can export your camera move to After Effects.  Export the obj too and use that with Form.  So the camera will match your 3D render, you can use Form to add new elements on top.    Think of the possibilities!  Imagine you have a landscape that you need to populate with trees.  You can export a mesh of the landscape and the camera move, then add the trees in post.  Use random particle sampling to have a variety of trees, you could even have the trees animated too.  Of course this is a boring and simple example, but the possibilities are endless.

Form 2 Layer Maps

If you work with animations then Form 2 offers a feature which allows you to import obj sequences.  This is an incredibly awesome new feature.  Not only can you import an obj sequence, you can also adjust the speed of the playback and also animate the offset parameter to retime the sequence. So this makes it easy to create basic speed ramps and bullet time effects right within After Effects.

The obj is referenced in After Effects just as any other footage is, so you can update the 3D files and then refresh or relink to another version with a couple of clicks.

For those of you out there working with Cinema4D who are looking to invest in the Form upgrade, I’d recommend taking a look at Riptide Pro. To be honest the native obj import and export with Cinema4D is about as basic as it gets.  However Riptide Pro is a fully featured obj import and export plugin.  It works great.   This will allow you to export your animations as obj sequences, which can then be loaded into AE and used with Form.  I’m sure you can imagine how useful this can be.  Not only can you export the camera from C4D to AE for matching your cameras, but you can export animated mesh too.  Total freedom to add loads more particle effects right onto your models.

Anyway, enough already.  If you want to read all about the full feature set of Trapcode Form then head on over to Red Giant Software. You can download a demo and try it out for yourself.  If you are using C4D, then the Riptide Pro plugin can be downloaded and tried for 30 days with no restrictions, although beware …  once you’ve tasted this sweet concoction, there’s no going back.

Oh, and there’s also an old Form tutorial on helloluxx if you are new to the plugin and want some pointers.

A wooden world…

It has been a while since the release of Cinema4D r12 and I must apologise for the lack of blog posts. To be honest, I’ve been absolutely snowed under with work. Lots of really great projects that will hopefully be online at the Luxx website as soon as I have time to update it.

Exclusive!

I worked with TWP on a long piece that is all about a wooden world for GE Fleet Card. Created some cool jellyfish animations that were projected onto Queens House in London for Bombay Sapphire via Ultrascope in the UK.

Jellyfish

Spent a few weeks with the lovely people over at MTV Networks Australia working on their promo for the Aria’s. Worked on a typography and infographic based animation for another great client who I cannot mention yet (shhhhh!)  Soon I’m off to spend some time working with the talented crew over at Umeric for another exciting new project.

Pollution!

In between all of this creative mayhem, I’ve been planning and recording my next set of training. You are gonna love this! Release 12 saw the addition of some exciting new Dynamic features, possible one of the greatest additions to the application for a long time. Lucky for me, I was involved throughout the development process helping to beta test the new features along with the other members of the Maxon Beta team. During this period I managed to develop some awesome tips, tricks and techniques for working with Dynamics and I thought it would make an ideal subject for my next training series. This new set of training will be based around several complete projects that cover many of the aspects of Dynamics. From the initial creation of simple rigid bodies, through soft bodies, connectors, springs, motors and of course plenty of Xpresso to compliment the toolset. We start with an empty scene and develop an animation using Dynamics from start to finish. Not only is the dynamics toolset covered in detail, but I also discuss workflow, materials and shaders, tons of mograph, caching and rendering the projects.

I’m in the process of proofing all of the new tutorials and will be sending out a few teasers soon. I have a huge free tutorial recorded and set to go live as a taster of what to expect in the new training. So follow me on Twitter for updates and don’t forget to check back here regularly.

In the mean time I have been digging about in my hard drive to find some interesting presets to share… I posted this Thinking Particles preset earlier today and I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks.

Have fun!

R12 Splash Screen

Well it’s that time of year again. The new release of Cinema4D has been announced. What an amazing release it is too. I have been fortunate enough to be part of the beta team and have been testing the new features for a while now. It is difficult to know where to start, but the most important update for me has to be the new dynamics module.

Restructured GUI - Dynamics Menu

Dynamics is incredible! The old dynamics module was slow, unreliable and quite honestly an unpleasant experience to work with. The new dynamics is an absolute joy to work with. In fact work can quite easily become play!

Those of you familiar with MoDynamics, introduced with r11, will be pleased to hear that the new dynamics is a huge extension beyond this. Maxon have taken Dynamics to a whole new level. Instead of being restricted to rigid bodies that only will work with MoGraph objects, we now have have the addition of Soft Bodies, Springs, Joints (hinges, etc) and Motors. They all work together, and even better they all work with or without the MoGraph module. If you want a stand alone dynamics simulation you can easily create this, but if you want to then duplicate it 500 times, drop it in a Cloner and away you go.

Rigid and Soft Bodies working together - click for movie

Dynamics will function as a fantastic feature in it’s own right, it will also work with MoGraph if you desire. For instance you can create a Soft Body, but you can also create a Soft Body of clones. Imagine virtual springs between all your cloned objects. You can link Soft and Rigid bodies together with the huge number of connector objects, these allow you to create hinges, cardon joints, ragdoll, sliders, the list goes on. Springs can be linear, radial or both, expect to see a lot of bouncing around in your scenes when you get hold of this.

Rigid Bodies, Soft Bodies and Hinges in action - click for movie

All you Xpresso heads will be pleased to hear that Dynamics comes with some new Xpresso nodes, so you can link Dynamics to other elements in your scene, such as Thinking Particles, allowing you to create particles upon collision and plenty more besides.

All in all Dynamics has finally received the upgrade we have all been waiting for. To be honest, I’ve just touched upon the features, you should really check out the Maxon webpage for full details of the new featureset.

Alongside Dynamics there are plenty of other improvements to be in awe of. We have now got a bundle of new deformers and a new morphing system. The new Pose Morph is a hybrid of Pose to Pose and Morph. So you can mix and match between position, scale, rotation and point level morphing. On top of the obvious morph parameters, Pose Morph supports UVs, Maps, Hierarchy, Parameters and User Data. Yes! I did say UVs, now you can morph your UV maps as well as geometry.  How awesome is that?

New Deformers

The Camera Deformer allows you to deform objects from the Camera viewpoint, some crazy stuff is going to come from this deformer alone. You set the grid resolution and then you can drag and keyframe points on the grid looking straight out onto your scene (and it has falloff built in too). If you link Pose Morph up to Camera Deformer with some Displacement and Cloth in between, then you can start to understand the power that can be harnessed.

Mesh Deformer is another new deformer. Take a low poly cage and use it control a high poly version. Something I know a lot of users have been asking for. You can even set your low poly mesh deformer work as a Dynamic Soft Body and as the low poly cage deforms, it then passes that deformation on to the high poly mesh.

I cannot finish this without mentioning Linear Workflow. Cinema4D now has the option to include Linear Workflow in your projects. Those of you who have been using DeGamma will be glad to see LWF as part of the core application. The new openGL (which is a fantastic improvement) supports Linear Workflow, so you see an accurate preview of your lighting and materials in the editor. We can use Colour Profiles for input and output now. This means we finally have the ability to work in Linear, and use Colour Management.

An alternative use for the new MoSpline L-System - click for movie

Well I really have only touched on the new features. I haven’t mentioned the new Render Queue, Smoothing Deformer, Correction Deformer, Surface Deformer, GUI enhancements, Freeze Transformations, IES lighting, Weight Manager, L-System (OMG!), Python…

I love this release, it is huge and I am sure you will all love it too. Check out the Maxon website for the full details and visit Cineversity for all the video highlights.

As for learning those new features. Watch this space, helloluxx will soon be updating our tutorials, to offer you an intensive and comprehensive collection of training that will cover many of the new features in depth. Something you definitely won’t want to miss out on.

Vortex.A

Take a look at this cool little app that has been developed by Peder Norby from Trapcode.  As well as the incredible plugins that Trapcode produce for After Effects, Peder has also written a few apps for the iPhone / iPad that are definitely worth checking out.

Vortex.A

In Peders words “Vortex.A – touch-interactive generative art. I am experimenting with fluid dynamics: how liquids and gases behave – a classically difficult problem in physics/maths. Most agree that fluid dynamics is described by the Navier-Stokes differential equations. There is no known all-case solution for the equations, but there are solutions for specific cases and approximative methods to find numerical solutions.” – For more info, you should check out the Trapcode -Blog.

You can buy the Vortex.A app here

Making It Look Great 7 and HDRI Light Kit Pro are now available in a THREE day sale.

For only 3 days, Motionworks and Greyscalegorilla are getting together to bring you a bundle designed to help you get the most out of Cinema 4D. Learn real-world Cinema 4D MoGraph techniques and workflows with MILG07 and light your scene with realistic lights and studios with the HDRI LightKitPro.

Get both of these products for only $129 which is over 20% off. This bundle will expire this Wednesday, April 28th. Watch your mograph skill set jump and your lighting shine with the Making It Look Great 7 and HDRI LightKitPro Bundle.

Buy The Bundle Now

Learn More about HDRI LightKitPro

Learn More about MILG7

It has been a busy few months since the doors closed over at Hypa HQ and my new company Luxx was born.

The new Luxx website has finally gone online. There’s an eclectic mix of projects that I’ve been part of over the years, and a few more pieces in the pipeline right now that will be added when they go live.

Luxx Site

Those of you familiar with the work I’ve been involved with over the years will probably recognise some from the projects realised at HYPA. A huge thanks to Mark Allin for all the work that we created together over the years as HYPA.tv and best of luck to Mark with his new ventures at 2020x.

There are also a few projects that I worked on as part of the team at Umeric. Fantastic bunch of really talented people and an absolute pleasure to be invited to join them on that creative rollercoaster! Ash Bolland is an incredibly talented guy and if you are not familiar with the work he has directed then be sure to check out the Umeric website.

Thanks for all the support to everyone that visits helloluxx. I know I’ve been a little bit slack with the updates over the last month or so. Now the Luxx website has finally gone live, I’m sure I can rustle up some posts to keep helloluxx as active as I’d like it to be!

Recently released from Greyscale Gorilla.

Real Studio Lights for Cinema 4D
HDRI Light Kit Pro turns Cinema 4D into a professional lighting studio. Quickly light your scene with realistic lights directly in Cinema 4D.

What is it?
HDRI Light Kit Pro is a collection of lights, studios and objects that lets you quickly light your scene with realistic soft boxes, spotlights, ring lights and more.

What’s Included?
10 Light Types
including, soft boxes, ring-lights, spotlights, light tents, dome lights, window lights and more.

2 Hours of Video Training
including a bonus “How to Make your Global Illumination Renders Shine” tutorial.

10 Hi-Resolution HDR Images
to instantly light your scene with photo-real light.

6 Studios Pre-Lit
Just add your models and hit render for perfect, studio-lit renders.

6 Test Models
to use to help light your scenes.

Visit Greyscale Gorilla for all the details.

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.