Here I will display all of my work within Cinema4D for my event, from start to finish. This includes time lapse process videos, screenshots and explanations for steps, processes and final outcomes. To create a succinct motif throughout, I aim to use a spline of my Gemini Branding logo in each animation that I can modify with depth, texture and size. This will also allow me to interchange different assets, text faces and logos where need be. These motion graphics will be used for the brief [explained in project overview], depicting one of the four elements; following the style of event graphics, heavily stylised to create more appealing/eye-catching outcomes
Creating animations in png. Format within C4D allows for better animated backgrounds in AE (as found through Common Ground animation last module). This requires a lot of time, as each frame is rendered as a singular image. However, with the Cinema4D plugin 'C4DImporter.Plugin', the resulting images are collated as one aep. file which can be imported straight into After Effects which combines all the frames and creates one fluid animation. This works well with my workflow as I use After Effects to focus on lighting, visual effects and other aspects that can be digitally programmed, then collate the final outcomes from this in premiere pro for cropping and composition and for the final render.
[All tutorials I have used for the creation of these graphics are referenced under 'YouTube Tutorials' section of my blog: https://airahman.wixsite.com/lauvc602/post/youtube-tutorials ]
Octane Render
"Octane Render is an unbiased rendering application with real-time capability."
Essentially, Octane Render is an app that can render Cinema4D scenes in much better quality and often in a much shorter time. This will help my work drastically as it is an industry-standard app that I noticed everyone uses and is expecting to use; confirmed on my visit to Potion Pictures and seeing the incredible work they do for huge clients.
Update: it requires a Nvidia graphics card – it cannot be run off the default integrated graphics of my laptop. This means I’d either need a self-built computer [See Event Organisation] or something of much higher standard that may already have the needed software and components built-in already. A lot of artists that I follow and that inspire my work also use Octane Render, so when I can afford to build a PC, this will be one of my first purchases on top.
TurbulenceFD, Thrausi, Nitroblast, etc. are very expensive plug-ins and I am unable to find any free versions/duplicates
Inspiration
Ezra Cohen
Researching event visuals and tour visuals, a name that kept recurring was Ezra Cohen. A creative director, creating unique visual environments for films, commericals and live concerts.
"I believe that achieving incredible cinematic textures in your videos shouldn’t be difficult, so I’ve made it easier than ever to get incredible results in your projects". Cohen boasts a very impressive range of visual elements that can be downloaded and modified by the user. His style is something I want to focus on as it demonstrates a very interesting and appealing aesthetic which, for me, immediately connects to event visuals.
AbstracPack
MadebyStudioJQ
Jon Quintin is an art director, illustrator and 3D artist. Working predominantly in a mix of Cinema 4D, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator just like myself; his work often consists of minimalistic scenes with one focal point with a lot of negative space to create a concentrated image in the middle. Creating abstract pieces with simple titles as an overlay creates a consistent aesthetic, making it very clear what work is his; something I aspire to.
Lestron
Lester Tron is other art director and also XR designer who inspires and motivates my own work. Mainly created looped animations and quirky, abstract pieces, his creativity is something that really inspires me as all of his creations are really original and require a lot of detail, attention and skill.
Earth Animation 1
Working on my first 3D motion graphic, I incorporated some assets that I had bought from AbstracPack in order to compose something more fitting with the theme of Earth. 24 hours to render 20 second clips where 5 seconds didn’t render properly
Process Time Lapse
Where possible, I have screen recorded whilst I create an outcome, then taken the recording into premiere pro, changed the speed/duration to make it under a minute, added music and created a time lapse of my working; demonstrating my workflow and how I arrive at my final outcome. I will then display my final outcome beneath.
Earth Animation 2
Creating the basis of this animation in Cinema4D, using key frames to develop cinematic camera movement, I then enhanced the colours, camera movement and transitions in After Effects using adjustment layers, key-framing effects and learning various transition movements such as the motion-blurred spinning transition.
Earth Animation 3
Earth Landscape
Creating a succinct relation between all the motion graphics, I decided that there must be some form of geometric shape/repetition in each loop/graphic; coherent with my original Gemini Branding star-sign collection where all designs were geometric. This could be accomplished through use of Cel renderer in C4D or using repeater tools in After Effects to ensure a clean and clinical aesthetic to all the work.
Working with voxels in C4D
Learning to use object buffer tags and renders in order to segregate parts of the composition when editing to ease/remove the need of the masking process in After Effects. This is similar to saving separate assets within Illustrator that I learnt last module. This is a very effective method for me as it will shorten my time spent editing as I am used to spending ages creating a tedious amount of anchor points and other paths in order to edit and screen various components.
Fire Landscape
Process Time Lapse
Water Animation (Cube Drip)
13-hour render created 160/360 frames, so I ended the render early as I was unable to do anything on my laptop whilst it was rendering. This equated to around 2.5 seconds of the animation
Water Animation 2
Water Animation 3 (Fluid Text)
Frustration as rendering of each animation varies and can take hours (and working doing other work whilst it renders makes it take even longer) so I’m having to leave my laptop to stand by itself for hours, delaying any other work I want to be getting on with (attempting to render animations overnight where possible to minimise time wasted during the day) using any ‘wasted’ time to carry on reading list.
Water Landscape
Recording snippets of the show to edit and use as overlays over graphics to help embed the story of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender. Relate these snippets directly into my motion graphics by taking symbols of each scene and replicating them in Cinema4D
Process Time Lapse
Aang Glider
Air Landscape
Process Time Lapse
Cube Loop Poster (B&W)
4 Element Loop
5 Hour Animation
Allowing for my whole event, I had to organise a 5 hour reel, matching the time slots of each DJ representing their own element. After attempting to put this together in After effects, I wasn't able to due to the limitations in length in the software. I decided to tackle this task in Premiere Pro as it's easier to edit and connect clips together. However, this took a long time to do as it required repeating an 8 second clip over and over to make up at least an hour per element. I tried to make a rendition in after effects as it was the first editing software to pop up, however it makes each video clip a different layer and is generally used for motion graphics and editing so wasn't a good match for what I was attempting.
Nearing completion of the 5 hour animation, compiling it all into one ProProj. file, I attempted to render it out and leave it going after night. I woke up to a note saying that there was a failure whilst rendering. Researching the error code, unfortunately because of the length of the video, my laptop is incapable of rendering for that long without the hard drive over-running and not being able to compute it's next step. This meant I would have to use uni's resources and see if a mac could potentially do it instead.
Colour testing
To ensure interest in the 5 hour video I began experimenting with gradient 'ramp's in premiere pro to mix up the colours. However, when playing through in premiere pro it shows a block colour, so I thought it best to render out a small segment of text faces + colour corrections to see how they work once rendered before carrying on. This example also gave me a good idea of how the overlay clips of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' render too, which I am happy with due to the subtle nature how they effortlessly blend in. I might change the opacity and blend mode in order to make them slightly more prominent, as within the air landscape scene there is a large section of white space.
This will mean I'll have to experiment with pre-renders in each element segment, to ensure the blending is similar, as it will vary from scene to scene depending on composition, colours and sizing.