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 »
