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Filed under: 3D •Motion Graphics •Training •

Making It Look Great 6 Review

Integration

Since this series is all about using Cinema and After Effects together, Tim thoroughly explains how to render the Cinema project so that you have access to the camera data, lights, and the XYZ position of various objects in After Effects. It’s also common to separately render various special passes (such as the specular highlights and reflection passes) so you can do a final mixdown in After Effects. And if you want to effect individual objects in After Effect (to apply glows, color correction, etc.), you will also want to render additional grayscale animated mattes.

This is the Project panel (right) of the After Effects project that Cinema created automatically. Note the Composition (see next figure), and the various render passes. The five “NewsToday_object” movies are grayscale movies that can be used as track mattes (these were created by adding various text and graphics elements to different object buffers in Cinema).

This is the starter composition that Cinema creates for you; note the camera, lights, nulls, and special passes (which are automatically set up using the proper blending modes).

Fortunately, all of the elements you need for the final composite can be rendered more or less automatically by Cinema 4D using its multi-pass rendering engine: Cinema outputs an After Effects project, which includes a composition with the final RGBA render, the camera, and the lights. Also included are any special render passes (ambient, reflection, specular, etc), as well as null objects placed wherever you’ve created External Compositing Tags in Cinema. Any mattes you rendered are imported into the After Effects project file, but not added to this starter composition. The only thing I’d like to see is a way to place named markers in Cinema that would transfer to After Effects named layer markers; these could serve as a “to do” list among other things.

Bear in mind that you only see the big picture when you get to the end of the tutorial. You might think halfway through that you are creating a great animation in Cinema, but the backgrounds and other graphical elements added in After Effects really finish it off.

Of course, part of the learning curve is figuring out which elements are best done in 3D and which are best done using 2D effects in After Effects. Accommodating client changes is also a factor: If you can quickly change something in After Effects, all the better, but you might need to be able to isolate this object with a track matte in order to make these changes.

Organization & Optimization

Apart from learning concrete techniques, I was very impressed how Tim manages to sprinkle good working practices throughout the tutorials. You’ll find advice for reducing the number of polygons in a scene (which speeds up rendering and allows you to render with less RAM), as well as optimizing the level of detail so that the scene is easy to manage and edit.

Tim also names all his objects in Cinema and assigns them to layers in the Layer Browser. This allows him to target groups of objects easily if he needs to solo, hide, or lock them.

By adding objects to Cinema’s Layer Browser, you can solo and lock layers, as well as turn on/off visibility, rendering, display (in Object Manager), animation, generators, deformers, and expressions.

In After Effects

If you’re also looking to improve your After Effects skills, the last two movies cover more than just assembling the Cinema renders - there’s also lots of tips for using the built-in effects efficiently and creatively. Tim uses Fractal Noise (for backgrounds), Minimax (to create a border on text), CC Circle (for a vignette), as well as Turbulent Displace, Colorama, Hue/Saturation, Roughen Edges, Box Blur, Directional Blur, CC Light Rays and CC Image Wipe.

In After Effects, the background is created with Fractal Noise and Colorama, and still image graphics of the wireframe globe and the NewsToday title are added. Trapcode Particular and the wiggle expression join forces to create wiggling electricity and animated dots above and below the main title.

I was also glad to see Tim use Trapcode’s Particular 1.5 to add additional graphical elements (version 2 is shipping July 2009). If you don’t have Trapcode Particular, you can download a demo from Red Giant Software. If you are using Cinema and After Effects in a professional environment, Particular is highly recommended, though expect a bit of a learning curve (I often joke that if you master Particular, you’ll guarantee your job security!). Tim does a great job in a short amount of time to demonstrate some of its more powerful features. I’d love to see him cover Particular in a full series, as we could all use more help understanding this mega plug-in.

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