[Michael Szalapski]

There’s no such thing as a LUT that’s a simple drag and drop to get you a particular movie’s look. Even when there are LUTs that are built for recreating Hollywood looks (and there are many), they won’t necessarily work on your footage until you do color correction to get it to be the way the LUT-maker expects it to look first. You will ALWAYS have to do some color correction first.

But, there’s so much more that goes into the look of a film like on-set lighting, camera movement, lenses, and atmospherics (like adding fog or haze) among other things.

[Michael Szalapski]

I wasn’t talking about an add-on. C4D’s viewport might not be as powerful as Eevee, but it can do some pretty nice stuff.

Example: https://twitter.com/sternfx/status/1337400799807348737?s=20
Example: https://twitter.com/JakeVardaman/status/892059748190875649?s=20

Video about R19: Cinema 4D R19 Sneak Peek – New Features – YouTube

Video about S22: Cinema 4D S22 Viewport Improvements – YouTube

Use the viewport render in Cinema 4D, to render your model in almost real time for mockup purposeshttps://t.co/LSouVgOgC2 pic.twitter.com/N3IRMFcmdh

— Eran Stern (@sternfx) December 11, 2020

[Michael Szalapski]

You can also do it by control+clicking the timecode in the timeline panel (cmd+click on Mac). Same as Graham, I THINK that was how to do it in CS4, but it’s been a loooooooong time.

[Michael Szalapski]

Note, some of this can also be done in compositing later. That is, the characters and bg might be rendered seperatly and then you can do a light wrap in post to really help get that light to bloom around the edge of something.

I use Red Giant’s Supercomp for this – it also has a bunch of other handy tools for compositing in AE. You can do light wrap with native tools, but (again), it’s just a bit more tedious and precompy; I prefer the faster, more flexible way since time is money in this biz.

[Michael Szalapski]

I see some very subtle use of blurs/blending modes or glow effects. That is, dupe the layer, knock the exposure down for the bottom layer a bit, blur the top layer and set it to add or screen (in a 32-bit color space, of course) and knock it’s opacity down. Or use something like Optical Glow from Red Giant or Deep Glow from aescripts + aeplugins or…whatever Sapphire’s glow is called from BorixFX – again, this would be after knocking the exposure back a bit and then lowering the power of the effect.

Personally, I use Magic Bullet Looks from Red Giant for a lot of stuff like this. You can emulate film stock, add subtle diffusion, add grain, and all kinds of handy things like that all in one GPU-accelerated effect. Most of it is stuff you could do with AE’s native tools, but it’s soooo much quicker to get to where I want to go with Looks.

Whatever way you’re doing it, you may need multiple versions of it. That is, use a couple of different diffusions at varying radii to really get it. Looking at your example, there looks to be a very subtle diffusion at a high radius and a somewhat more obvious (but still rather subtle) diffusion with a smaller radius.

There’s also work on the “shoulder” and “knee”. That is, nothing is pure black or pure white. Better to get this right in your 3d render (because you can’t really pull detail out of nothing), but you can enhance it even more with color grading.

[Michael Szalapski]

You CAN get something similar in Cinema 4D. The viewport updates in the last few versions have really made it possible to get beautiful looks in the viewport without having to do any rendering. The latest version even gives you handy options to quickly get the viewport cleaned up to do playblasts without UI elements so you can quickly kick them out.

[Michael Szalapski]

The first example is a composition marker with a duration.

The second example looks odd to me.

[Michael Szalapski]

That’s rim lights and, in some cases, sub surface scattering which is all done in the 3d app. Yes, there’s some post color grading (and some diffusion in post), but the qualities you’re describing are stuff you’d get right in your 3d render first.

[Michael Szalapski]

Any chance you can share some examples of what you’re talking about? A lot of it is done with tweaking your lighting in CG and stuff like Global Illumination (or more realistic renderers like Cycles 4D, Redshift, Octane, etc.).

And then, yes, you can really tweak stuff in post in AE.

[Michael Szalapski]

The pen tool now shows you if it’s going to be creating a shape layer or a mask. If you have no layers selected, it should show you that it’s going to make a shape layer (star). If you have a layer selected, it should show the thing you’re seeing.