Group Project Development and Techniques!

 Development

After sitting down and get a few ideas from the group down on paper we decided on doing a ident for MTV instead of E4 this was for a few different reasons one of the main ones for myself was just wanting to do something different because I had already done a ident for e4 and they are much more set on how they like there logo to look so we wouldn’t have been able to do very much with it apart from put it onto something but with the MTV logo they are more than happy for you to destroy distort and completely change there logo so this gave me many more possibilities. We also discussed what we think of when you see the MTV logo and the consensus was sport and music this was the thing that we all associated with the most when thinking of MTV, from this we decided that we would have sport as the main element for our ident but what sport and how we would implement it had not been decided yet

So we started talking about what type of sport we wanted to have in our video, we first ruled out the sports that we wouldn’t be able to get any footage of first by going around the members in our group and asking them if they or any of their friends do any sports to a decent ability that we would be able to record for our ident, we quickly got a rather good list of different things that we could possibly have in our ident these included skateboarding, trials biking, inline skating, mountain biking. From here we started to talk about what our story line was going to be for the 10 second ident this was by far the hardest thing to get settled on because we all had different idea that we had to decide on which one was the best for many different reasons some of the elements that we looked at was which idea was the most practical that we could all have input on and wouldn’t be to difficult to get everything done in the time frame that we had available.  The main ideas that we had was to have a skateboarder to skate for abit then perform a trick then skate off more so we could comp this person into the scene then add some 3D and 2D elements using probably using cinema 4D and flash.

The second main idea that we had was to have more people doing different tricks for example the skateboarder the trials rider and the inline skater but instead of them just riding in the shot doing a trick and riding out again we thought about them having a sort of competition style event where they all hit the same spot but trying to beat the score of the previous person got on the spot so for this we could have added a score point mechanic like you would see in a game where the number build up the either shatter or break apart if the previous score isn’t beaten. The only problem that we were having with this idea was getting everyone together to film in the same location on the same day because of some people having other responsibilities so we decided to go with the first main idea and keep it slightly simpler. After this main decision’s had been made we moved on to dividing up group on to the sections that we had to be done for the hand in this wasn’t rather simple we just identified peoples strong points and allocated the things that required those skills.

·      Looked at emitter’s

·      Looked at different mographs explain!

·      Researched different styles low poly and that sort of thing

·      Influences

·      Mograph text

·      Textures

·      Colour

·      Lighting

·      Compositions

·      Camera calibration cinema

·      Displacer

·      Polygon reduction

·      Hair in cinema

·      Atom array

·      Cloner object

·      Randomizer

·      Sound effector

·      Delay effector

·      Cloner to object 

After I had looked at a few different things in cinema I started doing some test and seeing what I could produce with the things I had been learning about for a while looking at tutorials and different things on the internet I knew that we wanted to have some sort of scoreboard in one of our ideas so I started putting together a test to se if I could make a neon score streak with a combo sign and number incorporated into it this actually proven more difficult than I first thought, getting the neon texture for the different element proved very irritating and time consuming but in the end I managed to get something that look pretty reasonable. From here I moved onto how I would get the thing to break apart this again took some time but after a few times of messing around I got something I was pretty happy with.

From here I went onto improving the break apart section which I slowed down a large amount because it was just happening way to fast and you could barely tell what was going on, I also added some really simply rigid body tags to the cubes that I had bouncing off the floor to add something extra to the test. 

But after discussing more the group we decided to go against the scoreboard thing where we had the three people competing against each other and came up with a more simple idea because of people’s obligations. 

 After this we put together a test shot of what we wanted the final work to look something like this image here represents that idea the first main element was going to be the rotoscoped skater riding along then doing a trick landing and riding off again this would then be taken from this person and given to the two people doing the 3D elements that’s why they are missing from this sections because they had not yet been rendered out and finished but from this section of the build it would go to lima who would go in and add these flash elements the image which are the cool spirals and blobby things that could just be added quickly but add a lot to the finished piece and from here we would add sound and whatever else the final person wanted to add in.

From this image and the talks with our group I knew what they wanted from the 3D it was something really abstract colorful and fun so I started to mess around in cinema with different simulations tags basically what these do is allow you to change the way a object react to a certain thing in real time my first test somewhat failed as when rendered out the reverted back to standard

 spheres this was not the effect I wanted having them look like the had pushed into each other was not how they looked before I rendered it out, they bounced squashed and dented on impact from different angles and interactions with different objects but for more information please see either my test or tutorial on soft body tags. But as you can see in this image I fixed the problem, which is, explain in the tutorial.

After solving this problem I went on to do many more tests with the soft body simulations tags with great effect they really helped me to understand the different things that were possible if I changed just a few of the parameters with the tags themselves each creating a very a very different effect on the object itself or a object it was interacting with the test show in the pictures can also be found in video form and also have tutorials to go along with them.

I tried to change up the elements of the tags as much as I could to get varying results but keeping the images colours much the same so you could see the different between them clearly at a glance.

This last test was very similar to the first one but using just the objects simulation tag and no a emitter this is the only real different apart from the shapes used in the two images are different.

 After looking at the simulations tags for so long I decided to have a look at the mograph effects and came across a one that was named sound this captured my attention straight away and was already thinking of the possibilities that would more than likely be possible when using this effector and much to my glee I was not disappointed at all if anything I got more than I was hoping to get I will only give a brief description here because I have again created a tutorial for this sound effector in cinema where I go through the whole process from start to finish in detail. But the basics of this effector are that you can ad a sound effector to a object and choose some music and that object will be directly effected by the sound.

after this I started to look at different styles I could produce my work in and while looking one really caught my eye and this was the low poly look, if someone had told me this without me being able to see any visuals I probably would have just dismissed it without even getting a slight interest but it popped up on one of my preferred sites for cinema 4D work and I loved the style the second I saw it so I set out to do a little of it myself. I again have quick tutorials on how to achieve this low poly look. But for now I will just show some screen captures and images of some thing I quickly produced. 

This image was made using the low poly style mixed with the sound effector with a little bit of my own flavor to it.

 This was another thing that I put together in cinema 4D I’m not to sure if I’m going to make a tutorial for this just because it involved a lot of on the spot problem solving even more than I am used to so this would probably make the tutorial hard to follow and very long where as some of my more simple ones run for 15 minutes anyway so this would definitely take much longer than that but this was basically taking my platonic cage idea that I had for adding to my sound effector and put some simulations tagged objects inside to see how they would react to different effects and this is how it turned out! There is also a video of this.

 This was a image I created from a sound effector using the platonic and atom array that gave my inspiration for the image above.

One of the last stages I had for my work was the eyeballs filling up the letter m to make the mtv from this idea came from my work with simulation tags like rigid and soft body but also the large amount of time I was spending using emitters and such things so the idea of having a emitter pushing these eyeballs from to make the m seemed really simple I did encounter a few issues along the way but nothing to serious and again I have said many a time but there will be a tutorial for this I may make two separate ones maybe one fro the eye texture and another for the emitter into my mo graph text. But ill put in some more images of the results I get from creating these.

This lists is basically just a list that comes up when you press one of the hot keys in this case the M and N keys I used this a lot for almost every test and comp that I did with the work for the MTV ident, it just made me so much faster instead of having to go through the drop down bars looking for the thing I want I could just quickly press a key and this would pop up so that I could quickly look through for the tool I needed, it also came in very handy for my work using mographs and emitter and such things because I could change the display type to shading to see the object as you would expect but also quickly change to things like hidden lines or wireframe so I could see what was going on inside the object, and also being able to view the object in shading mode from the three other views that normally show skeleton or wireframe.

 These are probably some of the my most commonly used tools for giving a object some feel and by this I mean without sky turned on with a floor in the scene and of course global illuminations which is just a must for anything being done in cinema you will only have a bland object no matter what you do to it but these give it some texture and feel and the very beginning’s of something useful.
 

This is just a quick screen cap of how I got my basic look for my low poly looking objects that I have used in a few different tests, I have put this in here to show the basic setup of what I used to get this look very simple but with some tinkering produces great results.

This screen cap is a list of all the different effectors that can be used to enhance and change something you have used in either a emitter or something like that probably the most used one would be the random effector its rather simple and to the point whatever you apply it to the effect will be to either make the objects distance and orientation different from or the size very effecting and quick to make changes rather that going in and manually changing different cubes or whatever is being used.

            The other effector that I had some experience with was the sound effector and delay bother of which I used on the same test for some of my work, the sound effector is pretty amazing and you can get some really brilliant results from using it and basically what it does if being used with a cloner and spheres of any other shape really is that when I sound effector is added to the cloner and a track has been

Selected it will look at the different sounds elements in the track and animate the objects to that, at first it will just make all the objects move in the same orientations so many different things have to be changed in the settings for this particular effector, the final one that I used a lot was the delay effector this didn’t really much adjustment to get the desired effect all it was used for was to slow the sound effector down where the music would go from load to quiet the objects it was animating would just jump suddenly but the delay effector would make this transition much slower and give a nicer feel to the whole thing.

 These are the different particle selections that you can choose from in the drop down bar I only really messed around with a few of the fro this project but I will definitely be trying to master the rest of these in the future, but for this project I mainly used the basic emitter and this I by far the most useful I think you can use it for almost anything when you want something to be projected in a realistic way you can change almost and the variables to get it to emit the way you want it to and also change a great deal more thing, you can have it emit anything you choose from a square to a more complex sot body shape with other rigid bodies inside it’s a very useful tool.

 Just a quick description on this particular section as I didn’t really use it very much the array I sometimes use to create studio lights you can add a plane and add luminance to it to create a sky light effect or even make the plane round and have a sort of spot light like you would see next to the camera they are very useful when you object has reflection on the texture. The final one I used just once I think was the atom array this was to add a little something else to one of my test by giving my platonic and cage look it worked very well, also all of my tests will be on cd for viewing.

This a huge list of things must I have never even pressed once in the whole time that I have used cinema 4d but a few of them I have very briefly used this time and I was surprised by the different effects they can have on a object, I have already used the bend and simple ones like that which just have one easy effect on the object but the ones that I touched on this time were the polygon reduction and displacer both of these I used to get my low poly looking test that I personally liked more than the organic looking perfect spheres that I am so used to and like the look of anyway but this was something very different for me and it worked out very well. The displacer allows you to add a shader which you can then choose a one that gives you the desired affect I personally went for the noise as it directly change the overall shape of the object quite a lot giving it bumps and indents but all looking natural like the shape is supposed to be that way. The other one was polygon reduction that basically does what t says on the tin really it reduced the polygons to give you shapes a more angular look.

 This camera selection is used in basically every single test and completed work that is done in cinema 4D it allows you to fix the camera in one position then pop out to make changed without moving you preferred camera position that you want for the final piece,

But adding this tag to it after allows you to do some very interesting and useful things for example you can add a image directly to it which it will then work out the correct aspect ratio of the image which can be changed if needed but the major thing that you can do is calibrate the image to the camera so that when you place object into the scene they will be calibrated properly so when you move them around the look right. You do this by adding lines these directly correspond to the Y Z and X-axis, once you have clicked the add line tool you move each edge of the line to a place you know is either a y or z-axis once you have done this for them you will hold shift and then click the center of the line this will change the colour to correspond with a axis green for Y blue for Z and red for X after doing this cinema will solve the XYZ vanishing points then you click add pin then more it to one of the points you set before this will solve camera focal length, orientation and position.  Then you can create your camera mapping tag and background tag.

These are just you basic preset shapes nothing amazing here but it saves you a lot of work I don’t think I could be bothered to model a sphere every single time I wanted to use one in a emitter or cloner it would most definitely send me crazy.