Chris Smith
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I just got C4D a few weeks ago. I just hunkered down with the ref manual and went through it trying each function in the program to get acclimated as I went. Not a hoot of a time, but you really get to know it by the end. Also the duck race tutorials on the discs that come with it give you a practical sense in how to use the tools.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Well I was a Maya user for 3 years till I played with a Demo of Cinema 4D 9.1 last month. Blew me away. So elegantly designed. I love Maya, but according to your description, I think you would love C4D. I bought the full Studio Bundle of C4D and know how to use it in the last 2 weeks of owning it better than the 3 years I spent with Maya.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Yeah, PI is the same thing in Combustion. We needed to do a dust trail effect in a spot once and using Combustions’s particle sprites (PI) was the best looking by far. Of course if you use Particular, you can always just assign little smoke puff layers to the particles and get the same effect.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Believe it or not you can get some pretty nice results with the bulit in CC Particle world. I had to do a steam effect coming out of coffee but it need to be stylized where it had a long tail that floated thru the air. Track the source, Then apply that data to the emitter. Then set the settings right and you can get some amazingly realistic whispy tails of steam. You’ll just need to add some blur and tint the color to your liking (like from using colorama). Also I suggest when you dial it the way you like it, duplicate it and change one of the physics parameters slightly so that it creates two similar tails that are close but not on top of each other. Blur one more than the other.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Maya can do it okay because of it’s vector renderer. South park doesn’t use Maya to create it’s look though. The show is animated in Maya, but the look of the show is done before Maya in Corel draw and PS. They scan in textures (often construction paper) and other things then just map them to the characters. Then they flat light it.
The sketch & Toon in C4D is pretty amazing though. As far as AE, there are a few recipes I’ve seen if you search the archives, but none I think will get you near as close to hand animating or setting up 3D geometry for a specific toon renderer.
But this has been asked many, many times so I’d peruse the archives with keywords like: Cel, comic, vector look, MK12, etc…
and you should find a handful of nice tricks.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Well ideally you shot you’re guy with a real camera that matches your animated camera (vice versa actually, lest you get into difficult motion capture issues). Short of that, you don’t have any perspective to work with for your guy.
So in C4D or in AE, you can have the guy layer auto orient or point at the camera. This works in many situations and ppl often won’t notice the lack of perspective change.
So first I’d set a tag on the guy layer to always orient to camera and try your animation and see where that gets you.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I suppose theorhetically it could have been a camera that stayed at the origin and just was keyframed to look around. Then “scenes” were grouped together and positioned in certain areas in space as the camera turned and looked at them. Then those scenes were not used next time the camera was looking that direction.
As far as the rest of it, good ol’ fashined great artistry, pre-planning, and animation talent. Not difficult for you to do technically speaking. Imagine if someone gave you a folder full of all the files you needed: the palm trees, the skiiers, the mountains, the ink drip, etc. It wouldn’t seem so insurmountable then. Put them in 3D space and use masking and changing scale etc. to make things move, reveal, etc…
Like Steve said, it’s not difficult technically, it’s just a lot of man power, original ideas, and great design.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I think a lot of the times it comes from a vision first. When you say it needs to look like this, then you go testing all the things you can think of and weeding things out. I think to a certain extent though one will never understand every possibility and that’s what makes works by ppl so awesome and varied. One of the talents is thinking about plugs or filters in a whole new way.
Especially when reading about FX in the early days. PPl would do jaw dropping visuals with just a few tools because they stretched and pulled what was available.
Some fool somewhere said that poetry without a rhyme scheme is like playing tennis without a net. I wonder if FX are the same way. When you set creative boundries, we find ways to overcome them by firing up the brain in a new way.
just some thoughts. I will add that the Ayato tutorials do impress me when it comes to using basic AE tools in very creative ways.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
He shoots with white pro mists on the lens so when the light is strong, the diffusion becomes much more obvious.
In C4D, I would try the post effect called “Highlights”. That should be similar if set right. Meaning less lens elements and more of the glowy part.
Although for most control, I’d render the specular pass separately and in the comp stage Do a diffusion effect (i.e. copy the layer, blur the duplicate and SCREEN or ADD it back over the original specular layer). Then change the blur amount and opacity of the duplicate to taste.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
If you are looking for the dust effect used in a lot of moGraph and music videos lately (i.e. the dust in the Jet video where they’re in the forest).
From what I’ve read, It’s not digital dust. But ppl are setting up a DV cam and shooting real dust against black in a sunbeam, then comping it in.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com