#24 Morphing Setup with PoseMixer

A long time ago I used this tool for an animation that required my character to move his lips in accordance to the lyrics of the song in the background. Back then I actually thought that this was the only purpose of the PoseMixer, but by experimenting with it I found many more. For now, I am just going to show you the basics. 

To get things started, create an object in Cinema 4D(PoseMixer is part of Cinema 4D) and make sure it has more then just a few polygons to it, so if you created a cube, increase the number of subdivisions in all sides by at least 2, so you have something to work with.

A cube with all the subdivisions increased to 3. Make it Editable so you can work with its shape. Right click on the Cube’s name and navigate: Character Tags –> PoseMixer.

Something to keep in mind is being organized in you projects. I say this because we are going to create more Cube objects, and we don’t want to keep them named the same. So, make two more Cubes so that you have 3 of them now. Move them away from each other and rename them as follows:

The MorphCube(the one with the PoseMixer Tag) is the one that we will use for our animation.

The Default Cube is just the basic shape of the MorphCube when no Pose Mixing is applied. It should be the shape you want for the objects “rest” position.

The TwistCube is what shape our MorphCube will be able to animate to. Things will become clearer as we progress.

Select the PoseMixer Tag and add the Cubes to their corresponding text boxes:

Using the slider next to the TwistCube now won’t do anything, so let’s set it up. Go and mess with the TwistCube a little, but don’t do the things that add new points, like Extrude or Bevel. Instead, just move it’s points around, or resize it, to make the shape you want.

Once you are done, select the PoseMixer Tag and try sliding the TwistCube slider. See what happens? The more you slide it, the more the MorphCube becomes like the TwistCube.

To make it look better, put the MorphCube as a child to the HyperNurbs object so you get a better looking shape. The various results are as follows:

Now you can easily animate your box changing shape by just adding keyframes to the timeline track of the slider for the TwistCube. Make more different shapes that start form the Cube object, and add them to the PoseMixer so you have even more control. Later on I’ll show you more tricks involving this, including how to make your animations lip-synch to the song.

#23 Assembly, Show the Process Of Your Creativity, Step by Step!

There are always more ways then one to do a certain task. Most of them fall into “the easy way” category, or “the hard way” category. As always, I am going to show you the easy way.

First thing we need is to set up the foundation of our creation. For the sake of practice, I suggest you use an image, with some text, and some room for modification. Something like this:

I used PhotoShop to make this, but you can make this with even the most basic of software, or even Gimp. If you want, you can use my image to get things started.

We need at least two images to do this, so two can be enough. You have your foundation image(or my image) , now add some more colors to it, or anything you want. Add text or shapes, or anything that you think fits it. 

The Final and easiest part is putting these two images into a video editing software, and combining them with a transition of your choice. My result:

I used the two above images and a left-to-right soft transition. Depending on what you have in your images, you might want to try different transitions.

I exported this into a .gif file, but you can just go ahead and make it an .avi file, depending on what you need.

As with all my tricks, this one is simple enough and leaves a lot of room for experimentation and combination. Try using more stages between the foundation and final image. Try different transitions for varying results. You don’t even have to use images. For a quick transition setup, check out this post.

My favorite use for this trick is on videos. A video that you can repeat is a good choice for this to work. The best would be a 3D animation. Render it a few times, but always with different settings. Now, slap some music on, and play with the footage to make an interesting intro:

Unless you haven’t heard, YouTube is muting videos that have music that is copyrighted to WMG. So you should either make your own music, or find some tunes that you can use.

I used music that is under the Creative Commons License, which makes it free to use, under certain conditions. The song used is Lost In Space by Sonic Mystery, that I found on Jamendo. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments!

#22 Ghostly Apparitions

You may, or may not be a believer in ghost stories, but either way you should be aware of how easy it is to fake a ghost in a photograph. 

Get yourself a few photos to mix up. I just happen to have a Christmas angel figure, and an eye photo from one of the previous posts.

Now that you have something to work with, you can start by fading out the “ghosts”, using the opacity slider for the layers. (click to enlarge to see where the opacity slider is)

 

Select the Eraser tool and reduce the tools opacity and set the hardness to zero, so you don’t have hard edges. You can also use one of the techniques in my previous post for soft vignette edges.

Work with what you have, or get better starting photos of course.

This isn’t perfect, but, if you manage to do this, then you will have no trouble making more convincing ghosts. Mess with the curves a little so you get bloody or pure white ghosts. So now, the next time you see a “ghost sighting photo”, think about how easy it was to make. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t real, but I will believe it when I see it with my own, non-edited, vision.

#21 Easily Make 3D Chess Pieces In Cinema 4D

I do realize that I have been posting 3D more then a few times in a row, but my choices are limited, since I don’t have all the apps reinstalled yet since my Hard Disk died on me.

This is a pretty straightforward tool to use, but it' can help you model more complex shapes in minutes, or at least give you a better start then the basic box modeling start.

Lets start by modeling a custom chess piece. It’s actually a lot easier then it seems at first thought.

In Cinema 4D, set your camera to Front.

Now use the spline tool to make a shape that looks like the left half of a chess piece outline, like this:

Now all you have to do is add this spline object to a parent Lathe NURBS object. You should see the desired chess piece. If not, then fiddle with the points, and you can even get real time results like this.

Note that this way you can only make shapes that are created when the spline is rotated around the position of the NURBS parent. If you want some different modifications to the objects(such as horns, or spikes) you will need to make the NURBS object editable, and then proceed to use other modeling techniques.

The Chess Piece still needs some work from where we left off. Fiddle with the points till you get the shape you want, add a material of your choice, and set the scene. This works for most of the chess pieces, but it doesn’t work for the Rook or Knight pieces though. In other words, you need to hone your skills a little more before you can model a full set, so get to it!

#20 Quick Animation Path, Flying Disc

From time to time, you’ll come up with an animation idea that involves an object flying around, randomly or not. One way is to use the Vibrate Tag. Another way is to set the object on a path.

If you want the objects motion to be in your control, you would probably go with this way.

Using Cinema 4D, create a Cubic spline. Don’t make a Freehand spline because that can make for shaky movement. Your path could look something like this:

It doesn’t have to look nothing like that, but it should at least be curvy, because sharp edges don’t make for a smooth animation, unless the aim is bouncing of walls or something of the sort.

The next step is adding an object to the path. Create a disc for the sake of practice. Add an Align To Spline Tag to the Disc. Click on the Tag and drag the Spline object in to the Spline Path field.

Now you control the position of the Disc with the Position slide in the Align Tag. Check the Tangential checkbox for a different way of moving on the spline.

Use keyframes to animate the Disc motion on the Path. Use different speeds on the path to kill the monotony.

You can always move the Spline’s points to change the motion of the Disc. The Spline is not visible.

I used a curvy spline, but that is just one of the choices here. There are many possibilities here, along with choice of object, path and speed.

If you want you can even use a SweepNurb to make the spline visible, but more on that some other time.

#19 Light Through Objects, The Resulting Shadows

On a side note, my hard disk dropped dead this morning, and it took all of my data with it, it seems. But, I am not giving up on this blog yet! I pulled an older picture from my deviantArt account for this post.

Playing with shadows can wield some interesting, and sometimes beautiful results. I'm short on time now, so let's skip to the trick at hand.

(Cinema 4D guide)
Create a cage like object first. It's easy to do this in Cinema. Just put any object you have as child object to the Atom Array object, and Cinema does the work for you.

Now all you need to do is put a light source with it's properties set to show Visible Light and Illumination right inside the object. Combine this with yesterdays post, and put all of this into a huge sphere, with you view from inside. Play with the colors, add some noise to the light and you have yourself:

Caged Light by ~NebojsaC on deviantART

Again, use different shapes, colors and settings. Combine more objects in such scenes, and lastly, share your results! I am thinking of setting up a Submission's Sunday, so that I put up some submissions that are related to my posts, so that me and everyone can see what you made!

#18 3D Abstract Image Creation, A World Beyond The Mirror

Why go to the fare to enter a house of mirrors when you can make your own?

Again, really simple to make, even if you have zero-to-no experience in 3D software. Just Create one huge object(sphere or cube) and make sure you are viewing it from inside. Now put some other objects inside it, rotate them around, resize them etc…

If you are using Cinema, create a new material and make sure it’s Reflection checkbox is checked. Add this material to all of your objects in the scene(or at least the biggest one). Here is what I got:

All I have here is a big Cube object and a sphere inside it. The Material on them has the color you see, and the reflection set to 77%. So there are only 2 objects in the actual scene here.

You could try adding some lights to the scene, or give different colors to your materials. Try different things:

In this scene the outer Cube has a Cyclone effect applied to it’s material. A simple 30s scene.

Something to keep in mind when creating Abstract images from 3D shapes, is the fact that there aren’t many rules. So try lots of things. Add some light, play with the lights settings, add various objects, maybe add an array and use different materials on the objects:

It’s easy to do, and takes absolutely no time at all. If people don’t like what you make you can always say that it is Art. That term seems to be tossed around pretty loosely these days, so hop on the bandwagon!