My first self-initiated piece created using Cinema 4D R13. Hundreds of striped marbles colliding with one another while being stirred up by an Attractor force.
Finished in After Effects CS5 with a simple color grade and a touch of Trapcode Starglow.
AUDIO:
freesound.org users suonho & willc2_45220 & lsprice
Though not by any means a groundbreaking mograph short unto itself, this scene was meant as a sandbox for me to experiment with a small number of C4D's tools, including Mograph, Dynamics, materials, camera animation, and the Physical Renderer. One major lesson learned from creating this short clip is that even a workstation-class notebook (a Lenovo Thinkpad W701) isn't really enough horsepower to unlock all of Cinema's amazing abilities if you're on the clock; each frame of this piece averaged around 100min to render.
The scene's elements began as a quick-and-dirty business card design.
Switching the scene's purpose from still to animation gave me the opportunity to learn an awful lot of new things about Cinema's workflow. To optimize the scene for reasonable render times (hah! reasonable!) I needed to learn how to get a look similar to what I'd achieved with GI in the business card, using standard lights. Tim Clapham's Light Dome preset was an enormous help in that regard. I also did a lot of experimenting with the Physical Renderer settings in order to balance a sharp result with less strenuous processing times.
A couple tidbits of wisdom I've come away from this project with-- leave focus pulling and motion blur to post in After Effects whenever it's even remotely possible. Don't let 500 clones interact in a dynamics simulation scene when 100 will suffice. Using blurry reflections is the fastest way to justify the purchase of a faster computer.
A couple tidbits of wisdom I've come away from this project with-- leave focus pulling and motion blur to post in After Effects whenever it's even remotely possible. Don't let 500 clones interact in a dynamics simulation scene when 100 will suffice. Using blurry reflections is the fastest way to justify the purchase of a faster computer.
With the scene's dynamics sim baked out, I definitely intend to have more fun with what I've created here. At the moment I'm learning about the Tracer object and some of the neat things I can do with the motion information I've recorded already. Stay tuned, and thanks for watching!
