Chris Smith
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, I did it the other day. Are you going to the Animate tab and having it calculate the frames so the movie animates?
Also make sure that the movie is mapped to your object correctly and not way to big or way to small. Like drop it in the color channel first to get the mapping right, then drop it back in the alpha channel.
I did notice that it won’t show the alpha cut out in the viewport like an internal shader will. You will have to render to see the effect.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Come to think of it as a quick test, use the Danel shader first and see what you can get out of it.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Just riffing off the top of my head here: I think your reflections will be very important, very subtle, but definitely needs to be a factor. A hard specular area. A hint of Sub-surface scattering so the very edges have some transmission through the material. I also wonder if it doesn’t pay to do it as 2 pieces of geometry.
Like you’ll find in the better ‘eye’ tutorials. Where there is a sphere for the iris and such, then a seperate larger sphere to have a glassy outer coat. I would think the iBooks would be similar. Where there is a simpler white layer, then a more reflective outer layer with very subtle abrasions added in. I’ve never seen an iBook (even a new one) with a pefectly flawless outer coat. It always has some small variation like finger prints or subtle scratchces here and there.
Just some thoughts.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
[mcvideo] “How hard it it to learn the 3d world?”
I guess it depends on your expectations. There are so many areas of 3D that it seems few people become experts at all of it. For example I cannot and will not model anything more complicated than basic shapes. It’s confusing and boring to me. But ask someone else and that is their passion. If you just wanted to animate some objects here and there, than it’s not too much different than AE. If you just want to do motion graphics where you treat it like an extended AE with different functionality, I don’t think it’s hard at all, quite rewarding really. But if you are expecting to make a Pixar film than it will seem insurmountably hard.
It also depends on the software. Maya took me quite a while to get a good flow going (like a few years). C4D took me 3 days to get through the ref manual then I could sing on it because it’s so elegantly designed.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
[mcvideo] “How hard it it to learn the 3d world?”
I guess it depends on your expectations. There are so many areas of 3D that it seems few people become experts at all of it. For example I cannot and will not model anything more complicated than basic shapes. It’s confusing and boring to me. But ask someone else and that is their passion. If you just wanted to animate some objects here and there, than it’s not too much different than AE. If you just want to do motion graphics where you treat it like an extended AE with different functionality, I don’t think it’s hard at all, quite rewarding really. But if you are expecting to make a Pixar film than it will seem insurmountably hard.
It also depends on the software. Maya took me quite a while to get a good flow going (like a few years). C4D took me 3 days to get through the ref manual then I could sing on it because it’s so elegantly designed.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
First of all, Max is a great app, but I want to personally push Cinema 4D instead. It is fantastic.
Of course I don’t know too much about the whys and whats of his work, but I did spend a while reading online articles about him. From what I can tell, he does them in 3D because it easily allows the text to be manipulated whithin the 3d world. For example, it occludes when it should, it gets displaced behind objects with displacement, etc. Can you do this in AE? Yes, albeit with a lot more work on your part to render out a bunch of passes from 3D to make sure it all composites correctly.
Every once in a while you’ll see in his work, normal flat text layed over the whole animation and not in the same perspective of the rest of the work. It is my understanding that that is done in AE.
With a lot of thought and preperation, you can do 3D in a 2D world and vice versa, but there is clearly an advantage to the person that uses the strength of both and doesn’t try to cut a steak with a spoon.
Like Steve pointed out, you can get an old version of C4D for $99 from Maxon. Since a lot of what Joost does is an extension of his creativity and artistic vision and less from odd technical tricks, you could probably do almost anything on his site with that $99 version of C4D. Not to mention the wealth of free or damn near free plug-ins available for it.
my .02
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
First of all, Max is a great app, but I want to personally push Cinema 4D instead. It is fantastic.
Of course I don’t know too much about the whys and whats of his work, but I did spend a while reading online articles about him. From what I can tell, he does them in 3D because it easily allows the text to be manipulated whithin the 3d world. For example, it occludes when it should, it gets displaced behind objects with displacement, etc. Can you do this in AE? Yes, albeit with a lot more work on your part to render out a bunch of passes from 3D to make sure it all composites correctly.
Every once in a while you’ll see in his work, normal flat text layed over the whole animation and not in the same perspective of the rest of the work. It is my understanding that that is done in AE.
With a lot of thought and preperation, you can do 3D in a 2D world and vice versa, but there is clearly an advantage to the person that uses the strength of both and doesn’t try to cut a steak with a spoon.
Like Steve pointed out, you can get an old version of C4D for $99 from Maxon. Since a lot of what Joost does is an extension of his creativity and artistic vision and less from odd technical tricks, you could probably do almost anything on his site with that $99 version of C4D. Not to mention the wealth of free or damn near free plug-ins available for it.
my .02
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Sorry, to answer your other question, Jenna was a suite of plug-ins:
Iterator: This was an object that you dropped another object into then had many controls in how it created realtime copies of the object. You can animate the offsets so it created organic shapes or what ever. If you everwanted to create a bunch of instancies of something and have real time control over how it grew, offset, etc, then you could use iterator.
Allie: Man is ALlie powerful. So many uses to explain here. But basically you input a texture map and based on the maps luminance, color, or other properties you could change the parameters of instances of objects. For example if you wanted to make one of those pushpin things where you can press your face against it and all the pins stay in place and retain that shape. You could take a movie of your face and use allie to convert the brightness with the offset of the pin copies. Once again, so many uses it’s hard to begin to explain.
Mesharray: Easiliy assigns object instances along the mesh of an object.
Gridarray. Easily create grids of objects in all 3 dimensions
and many more. In addition, there are common parameters on each that randomize things so that objects will do their own animations based on your settings.
Basically with the Jenna plugs, you couls just think artictically and have quick, simple tools to do complex animations without a huge amount of time animating and instancing.
It also had other cool tools like the ability to see material displacements in real time in your view port without rendering out. Saves a pound of time when tweaking.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I’m in shock. I just read the monster thread at CGtalk about David “Darf” leaving C4D. He was the developer for Jenna and a few other tools. It looks like everyone in the thread is going through the stages of loss. So that being said, Is Jenna public domain now? He acts like he could care less what happens with it. I’d like to put it up for people to download, but if it is still protected obviously I can’t.
For me the Jenna plug-ins make C4D twice as strong in the mograph area. This is killing me.
Here’s the thread:
https://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=228989It seems strange to me because I left Maya for C4D because it seemed a hundred times better for mograph stuff. The first time I went through the C4D manual, I learned how to use more of C4D then I did in the 3 years of using Maya. I even knew MEL scripting enough to do what I wanted.
I weep.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Of course there is a ton of advice waiting for you in the archives with a search for ‘roto’.
But basically, Start at the first frame of your clip and use the pen tool to draw a shape around your subject. Turn on your keyframe burron on the ‘mask shape’ parameter so it will start keyframing your changes. Now go to the last frame of your clip. Move and readjust the points on the mask to reconform it to where your subject is now. Now go the the very middle of the clip and correct it there. Then go to the 2 points in between the 3 keys you now have and correct the mask some more. Keep halving the time between keys and readjust. At some point the mask will be close enough.
Additional tips:
-Don’t try and make 1 mask work for the whole person. Use one mask for the head, another for the torso, etc.-If you are rotoing only to get a general shape for a cutout effect, don’t go crazy trying to get a flawless roto. You only need a flawless roto when you are pulling an object out of one environment and trying to seamlessly put it in another.
-use the ‘rotobezier’ option when after clicking on the pen tool. It uses B-Splines instead of bezier which in my opinion is far easier to deal with than bezier when animating masks.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com