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Cinema 4D / AE Integration
Hi All,
I am a newbie in Cinema 4D (9.6) working on a WinXP PC.
I am struggling to bring Cinema 4D video into After Effects (6.5).
I have two issues.
(1) I cannot seem to get an alpha channel in my quick time videos in Cinema 4D. “Millions of colors +” does not appear as an option in the Quick Time render section.
More importantly, my second issue:
(2) For the life of me, I cannot figure out the multipass section of the render settings in Cinema 4D. The only thing I can generate is the AEC file, which when imported in AE 6.5, gives me color bars (I did install the Cinema 4D AE plugin).
I realize I probably have not posted sufficient info to provide a solution, so I wonder if one of the experts in this forum could post a tutorial to explain Cinema 4D Integration.
I searched the cow on this topic and many answers refer to Angie Taylor’s tutorial which is not available anymore.
I appologize in advance if this question was answered already and I missed it in my search.
I did read the Cinema 4D manual on this topic and did not get much out of it.
Best Regards,
Leor -
6 Replies
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http://www.creativecow.net/articles/thorn/c4dtoae1/index.html
Hi.
maybe this tutorial gives the answer to your question(s)Cheers
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Leor,
If you just choose “Quicktime Movie” as your output source it will set the Quicktime to Animation codec. If you turn on “Alpha” it will behind-the-scenes make it a Millions of Colors+ for you. It defaults to a premultiplied alpha. If you want it a straight alpha (I usually do) then click the “Straight Alpha checkbox”.
Create a folder and set the save path for your movie, multipasses and the AE file to all go to the same folder. So when you bring in your AEC it should see all the correct files.
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Thanks to coverbee and Chris for quick helpful replies.
They both helped me with problem #1 (quicktime with alpha).
I am still working on this so I will update later with any additional problems I might have.
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Each object you want an extra pass for, you must give a compositing tag in the object window. Then you choose : object 1, objectbuffer 1 ; object 2, objectbuffer 2 etc.
In the rendersettings go to Multipass check the box that says enable multipass and make your extra passes by clicking on the little arrow on the right en choose object buffer.
make as many objectbuffers ( with corresponding ID numbers) as you have given compositing tags to your objects. The will appear as different layers in After Effects.
You can also choose extra passes for other things Shadows, reflection,refraction and so on.Good luck..
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Thanks again guys. Problem solved!
In the hopes that this will help some other newbie, I will share my mistakes with you. One of the problems I had was with the C4D rendering. For some reason, I did not realize that in order to get the multipass to work, I had to use “render to picture viewer”. I use “render to picture viewer” for still images but for animation, I was using “Make Preview”. This, clearly was not causing any of the multipass rendering to work. Also, when I saved from the “Make Preview” window I was not getting an alpha channel.
When I followed the advise you two gave me AND used “render to picture viewer” then everything worked.
By the way, I am generating QT MOV for the main animation and QT MOV’s for each object (instead of TIFF or JPG sequences as in the tutorial) which I use as a Lume Matte in AE. This seems to work fine. Am I dong this right?
I am able to open the .aec file from AE and it brings in my composition (as an MOV) and the special passes (as MOV’s) just as I wanted.
Thanks again!
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I used to use just QT movies like you describe. But since AE7 went 32 bit float, I always render out OpenEXR so I can relight everything in AE.
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