January 23, 2010 by Ross
I have been exploring Cinema 4D more and more, and I have really become excited about the MoGraph Rigid Body simulations. The Maxon people have made is extremely easy for users to add physics simulations to your scene. This in combination with the already powerful MoGraph module really makes for some really cool possibilities. In this tutorial I run through quickly how to get physics up and running and interacting with the hair module.
The hair module is a really powerful generator. You could easily generate hair, grass, etc and create very realistic behaviors. Like I was saying this is just a quick look at how to setup a scene with MoGraph rigid bodies falling into hair. The MoGraph bodies will interact with the hair.
I will also take a look at a cool utility called Clone Info Hierarchy, this will allow you to attach null objects to different MoGraph Instances. For example if you have a cloner object with 15 spheres, you could quickly create 15 nulls that follow each instance exactly. These nulls can then be exported into an external compositing tool, like after effects, which can then be use to track items with your cloners or maybe attach a particle emitter. In the tutorial I mention color correction on an object but really that isn’t very practical, using object buffer would be much more useful for that. Regardless there are all sorts of possibilities for using nulls.
So if your interested in dynamics and hair interactions then definitely check out this tutorial. Thanks a lot for stopping by and we hope you find this useful!
Watch the Tutorial: Cinema 4D – MoGraph Physics and Hair Interaction
Tags: cinema4d, motion graphics, motiongraphics, physics, tutorial
Posted in Cinema 4D, Tutorials | 4 Comments »
December 29, 2009 by Ross
So I have been working a lot in Cinema 4D over the last few months, and I decided to take advantage of this holiday break and fill my head with as many tutorials and article’s as I possibly could. Overall I can say it is definitely worth it Cinema is an awesome program and is going to be an extremely helpful application in my Motion Graphics toolbox, if not the go to tool itself. I want to make sure to thank Nick Vegas of Greyscale Gorilla and Rob Redman of Pariah Studios for all there tutorials and openness with support. Seriously the work they are doing is awesome and saving me hours of headaches. Thanks to them I have a huge jump start on Cinema 4D.
Now into why you are here, Global Illumination or GI. GI is consider an effect in a C4D render but it really is a dramatic one. The quality of lighting, reflection and overall look of an image can be made by using this and some basic understanding of materials and lights. The downside to GI is render times. A normal render time in C4D can quickly blow up when adding GI, and the more lights,, materials, reflections, etc you have the crazier those times will get.
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Tags: cinema4d, motion graphics, motiongraphics, tutorial
Posted in Cinema 4D, Tutorials | 4 Comments »
December 20, 2009 by Ross
I recently taught a class at the MGFest in Washginton on animation with Actionscript. In doing so I had to find a good way to teach students using both windows and OSX how to program AS3 in an External Editor. For windows I was very comfortable showing FlashDevelop, a free open source editor, and personally my favorite to work with. Having started to work at home on OSX and having to teach this to other I decided to research a good editor.
The obvious leader is FDT from Powerflasher, who has an eclipse based solution that is well tied to the Flash IDE and the mxmlc compiler. Having used Flex builder for a while now I felt pretty comfy in this environment. the problem is I don’t like eclipse. the program itself is made to accomplish so much and I see this as its advantage and its downfall. it has always felt a bit bloated to me, and I have had slowdowns and simple problem with just color schemes I would like to use.
So with that I started to look at easier solutions. TextMate has always been a big favorite of mine for editing all sorts of documents. From PHP, HTML and CSS, and now to ActionScript I have found TextMate to be lightweight and simple, yet powerful. So I started a hunt for a bundle to help do As3 Development. that’s when I cam across a Blog post by Simon Gregory which included his Actionscript 3 and Flex Bundles which have since then been placed up on github.I ended up forking this project and started to work on some variations of my own. Nothing too amazing, just simple things I was use to in FlashDevelop, now I could accomplish in TextMate.
To make this easier I decided to do a Video Tutorial on getting everything setup. I apologize in advance as I have been sick and still decided to record this thing, so if there is some sneezing and stuffy nose madness, well I am sorry. Either way, the following is a link to the tutorial and all the assets I used. I really hope this is helpful for people getting started in Actionscript programming, and stay tuned for more on why I see Actionscript and Flash in general starting to push its way into Film, Motion Graphics and Television!.
Watch Tutorial : TextMate for Actionscript 3 Tutorial
Links
Tags: actionscript, textmate, tutorial
Posted in Programming, Tutorials | 12 Comments »
March 14, 2009 by Ross
We just snagged ourselves a new piece of hardware known as the Elgato Turbo.264. It is a USB h.264 hardware encoder, allowing compression offloading to this device instead of your computer. We have been testing it out for the day re-compressing a number of our own videos and looking through the pros and cons. This is that we have come up with.
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Posted in News & Updates, Reviews, Tutorials | No Comments »
March 10, 2009 by Ross
The Popcorn Island Final Cut 2 After Effects Script is a simple way to move sequences in Final Cut into Compositions in After Effects. Not only does it allow you to work faster, it also saves storage space. The normal work flow of rendering out from Final Cut and opening in After Effects causes one to create temporary files to pass back and forth between the programs. The Final Cut 2 After Effects script will allow you to bypass that and simply use the footage that has already been imported into Final Cut.
NEWS: Gerard over at strypesinpost.com has put up a tutorial on using this script to move over project to windows! check it out
Links:
Features 1.0.9
- Marker Import
- Cross Dissolve Transitions (v1.05)
- Basic Editing Translation
- Segmented Clips
- Basic Keyframes
- Time Remapping
- Nested Sequences
- Multiple Frame Rates and Aspect Ratios
- Audio Channels
- Name Length Error Checking
- Support for PAL25 and 60
Version Info
- Version 1.09 Update
- Center Point bug Fix, footage of different sizes using center point effects now import properly
- setValueAtTime bug Fix, Rounding errors in speed changes addressed.
- NOTE: I could use any community help debugging
this problem, though I now have a fix in place, I cannot be sure of the 1:1 frame matching between FCP and After Effects when using speed changes,
if anyone can run tests it would be extremely helpful. thx!
- Version 1.07 Update
- Markers are now imported into a marker layer in after effects. Name is used for flash events, comment for comment (thanks @Guillaume)
- Version 1.06 Update
- Updated Frame Rate bug for 50fps (and other unknowns) thanks @daniel
- CS3 Version 1.05 Update
- There is an issue with scripts compiled for CS4 using Extendscript toolkit CS4 that causes problems in CS3, the script will fail instantly. So I have had to split this project into 2 scripts. You will now see a script built for CS4 and one for CS3, these have been been confirmed working. Thanks to Kevin Brock for going back and forth with us on a couple scripts as we don’t have a good CS3 work flow here. We hope this helps everyone out! Thanks!
- Version 1.05
- FIX: Rounding Error on 23.976 footage causing Single Frame difference from original.
- UPDATE: Top Level Folder will now follow XML Filename, and not “FCP_Import”.
Posted in After Effects, Final Cut, Tutorials | 132 Comments »
