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Filed under: 3D •Motion Graphics •Training •

Making It Look Great 6 Review

Unless you’ve spent the past few years hiking the Appalachian Trail, you’ll be aware how much 3D animation has infiltrated the broadcast motion graphics world. Not so long ago, being an accomplished After Effects artist was enough to land a good job, but now employers and clients are also looking for good 3D skills (and in this economy, anything that increases the chances of landing a plum job can’t be ignored).

Surveys by us and others indicate that Maxon’s Cinema 4D is the 3D program of choice for After Effects motion graphic artists. In case there was any doubt, Cinema’s MoGraph module sealed the deal. In our report from NAB, we blogged how small studios are successfully integrating Cinema and After Effects, so how fortuitous for us that Cinema master Tim Clapham has released a fabulous training series on just this subject. Making It Look Great 6: Design and Production Techniques for Cinema 4D and After Effects is the latest release from John Dickinson’s company Motionworks. As Company Director of LUXX (and before that, HYPA), Tim Clapham’ credentials are impeccable - so you know that this will be the best $89 you’ve spent in a long time…

The MILG6 series consists of 8 hours of training: 6 hours spent in Cinema, the remaining 2 hours in After Effects. There is a long list of exactly what features are covered on the Motionworks MILG6 page, so you might want to peruse that first. Be sure to play the 2-minute introductory movie linked at the bottom of the list. (Spoiler alert: the Cloner object did it…)

When evaluating any training series, it always helps to know where the reviewer is coming from. After all, how much one learns always depends on how much one already knows! While I’ve used After Effects since version 1, my experience with 3D consists of a few years using Electric Image in its heyday. As Chris and myself got more involved writing books on After Effects, it’s been hard to find the time to master a different 3D program. So despite several years of poking Cinema 4D with a stick, and even taking a Maxon hands-on workshop, I never did wrap my head around its user interface. What I needed was to look over the shoulder of a true Cinema master as he/she creates a complex motion graphics project from start to finish. This meaty MILG6 series fits the bill perfectly.

Finding Treasures

If you have some experience with another 3D program, you probably won’t be too intimidated by re-learning how to use cameras, lights, primitives, materials, F-curves, and so on in Cinema. Many of the concepts are very similar. The danger is that you often try to adapt your old skills without discovering the strengths of a new program. Nothing beats having an expert show you where all the best treasures are hidden deep within a complex interface. After all, there might be a new or better way to do something, no matter how basic the task.

For instance, Tim is very fond of the Fresnel shader (previously known as the bhodiNUT Fresnel shader), which I hadn’t used before. This shader changes depending on the angle of the polygons pointing towards the camera. It’s useful for models needing realistic reflections or transparency, or for any materials that look different from an angle. Tim sez: “Think of a pane of glass: looking through it, it’s transparent; but from the side, it becomes more reflective.” I also wasn’t familiar with the Lumas shader, which can create cool brushed metal looks and elongated specular highlights.

Illustrator text is imported and extruded and placed along a spline; later on, the text will rotate as it animates around the spline.

An expert guide can also help you avoid gotchas, and show how common problems can be worked around without panic (me, panic?). I particularly valued the advice for extruding Illustrator text files, starting with setting up the Illustrator file, combining the compound shapes, and extruding text. The workflow for aligning the text along a spline is something I would not have figured out on my own in a million years!

MoGraph

If you’ve looked over the list of topics covered in MILG6, you’ll notice that Tim spends a fair amount of time covering MoGraph objects (namely the Cloner, Fracture, Matrix, and Tracer objects) as well as various Effectors that influence the clones (including the Random, Shader, Spline, and Plain effectors).

The Cloner object is a masterpiece and Tim puts it to good use in various parts of the project; he’ll often add an animated Plain Effector to affect the visibility and transformations of cloned objects. (If you’re familiar with using text animators in After Effects to affect the scale and rotation of characters, in Cinema you’d move the characters through the Plain Effector to achieve much the same result.) Tim also shows how to use luminance maps to affect the size and visibility of cloned objects.

Apart from creating the main globe and text elements, Tim also creates lots of graphical elements whizzing around using MoGraph. Despite that, you’re left with the impression that he’s only scratched the surface of what MoGraph is capable of. MILG6 includes a 5-minute bonus movie comparing the Cloner and Matrix objects that only whetted my appetite for a complete series on MoGraph tips and techniques.

I was particularly interested to see how MoGraph objects are organized in a project’s hierarchy (see figure below). By the end of the series, I’d just about grasped why some MoGraph objects need to be a parent (or a child) of another object, and why some effectors can seemingly be placed anywhere in the hierarchy. However, I would still have liked an overview at the beginning explaining the logic behind Cinema’s Object Manager, as I did find the hierarchy a bit of a “miss-me.” *

The Cloner object is used to duplicate thousands of cylinder objects around a sphere. Note how the Cloner is a parent of the Cylinder, and the Shader and Plain Effectors are loose in the hierarchy. (The Shader effect is toggled off right now; a b&w world map image is then used to effect the size of the cylinders.)

Expressions = XPresso

Tim is not shy about using XPresso in Cinema (or expressions in After Effects) when he wants to maintain an efficient workflow. If you’re familiar with using the basic pick whip expression in After Effects to make one property follow another property’s value, the concept behind XPresso in Cinema is very similar. You select the property that will “drive” the expression, and then connect this to the destination property. You can also scale the expression instead of using straight values, or reverse it so that it goes in the opposite direction.

The XPresso editor window in Cinema let you control how one property drives another, not unlike how expressions work in After Effects.

Later on in the After Effects section, Tim covers the basic pick whip expression along with the wiggle expression, so you get to compare both approaches.

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