C4D Live SIGGRAPH 2018 Rewind – Round 7

David Koss and Matt Milstead: Projection Mapping in Cinema 4D

Matt Millstead and Dave Koss of Nexus Motion and brograph.com demonstrate aspects of two separate projection projects completed with Cinema 4D. Matt first shows how they designed an animation used by Deadmau5 in his New Year’s Eve countdown. The animation project features the characters from Rick and Morty and was animated in Virtual Reality with the help of VRChat. Dave talks about the process they used in creating a projection for Busch Gardens Williamsburg. You’ll learn how they were able to derive a model of the building using a Mavic Pro and Agisoft Photoscan, and how they achieved a number of the gags in the animation using various plugins including X-Particles and Greyscalegorilla’s Signal. Finally, Matt and Dave announce a new upcoming community resource, mograph.com.

02:11 Deadmau5 NYE Countdown
06:47 NYE: Modeling the Box
09:07 NYE: Wires
12:18 NYE: Countdown Timer
17:10 NYE: Lipsync Mouth Animation via Sound Effector
21:12 NYE: VRChat
24:17 Busch Gardens Projection Mapping
25:48 Photogrammetry with Mavic and Agisoft Photoscan
27:50 Spotlight Effect
31:59 XP Comet / Star Trails
37:13 GSG Signal BPM
44:02 Simulating Projections with Camera Mapping
46:40 mograph.com

David Brodeur: Creating Rocks And Terrain in C4D

David Brodeur (Locked and Loading) demonstrates his techniques for creating ground terrain and rocks in Cinema 4D. Through his presentation, David will briefly show how this can be done in the Physical Render engine with no additional tools. After he will go more in-depth using Octane Render with this technique. David will show a combination of techniques inside Cinema 4D utilizing Displacement, Clones, Displacer Deformer. You’ll also see how David uses C4D’s Sculpting tools to model rocks and scatter the rocks around a landscape.

04:09 Creating Landscapes with Displacement
09:28 Building Textures for Physical Render
15:54 Sculpting Rocks
24:32 Texturing Landscape in Octane
35:31 Cloning Rocks onto the Landscape / Octane Scatter

Al Heck and Jon Weinberger: How to Create Game Art for Unity using C4D

Al Heck and Jon Weinberger from GameDevHQ show how to create game art assets in Cinema 4D, and use those assets in Unity to create a playable game. Al demonstrates key skills for game asset development, including UV unwrapping and texture painting in BodyPaint 3D. You’ll also see how to use C4D’s Sculpting system to add details to the model and bake the sculpted detail into normal maps for use in a game asset. Al also talks about how Mixamo can be used to rig and animate a character, and how you can apply various Mixamo animations via the Retarget tag. After Al brings the asset into Unity, Jon shows how to define various animation states and use the assets in a playable game demo.

04:16 UV Unwrapping
13:57 Projecting Concept Art and Painting with BodyPaint 3D
18:09 Painting Multi-Channel Textures
21:01 Sculpting
24:52 Baking Sculpt Normals
27:56 Character Rigging and Animation with Mixamo / Retarget Tag
30:37 Importing C4D Game Assets into Unity
34:13 Voronoi Fracture – Breaking Crate
35:37 Setting up Animations in Unity
39:11 Setting up Crate Dynamics in Unity

Aaron Sorenson: VFX & Compositing with Redshift & C4D

Aaron is the founder of and an instructor on vfxcentral.net. He has created products and training for the VFX artist. He is also a full-time senior VFX artist and compositor for THE VOID. He has had to opportunity to work with ILM, Lucas Film and Disney. You can see some of his work at the VOID centers (a location-based VR experience) across the world, including Downtown Disney and Disney Springs.

In this presentation, Aaron gives you a taste of his VFX Crash Course on VFX Central, taking you step-by-step through his process of creating a photo-realistic 3D environment and cinematic matte painting for a live-action SciFi film shot. He shares some great tracking tips and techniques, shows you how to add a “taking camera” for a cinematic perspective, paint and add a complete 3D environment, add lighting, and finally shares his tips for rendering and setting up multi-passes with RedShift to finalize your composition.

00:17 Demo Reel
02:01 The Void
05:35 Workflow Overview
08:44 Tracking in Cinema 4D
19:12 Using the Tracked Footage to Create the Cinematic Camera
28:07 Using ProjectionMan to add a 3D Environment

You heard right! Purchase Cinema 4D R20 is Now Available!

Some new features in R20:

• MoGraph Fields – Offer unprecedented content creation possibilities to the procedural animation toolset in MoGraph. The Fields feature in Cinema 4D R20 makes it possible to efficiently control the strength of the effect using any combination of falloffs – from simple geometric shapes to shaders and sounds to objects and mathematical formulas. Fields can be mixed and combined with one another in a layer list. Effects can be re-mapped and grouped in multiple Fields to control Effectors, Deformers, weights and more.
• Volume-based modeling – The OpenVDB-based Volume Builder and Mesher in Cinema 4D R20 offer an entirely new procedural modeling workflow. Any primitive or polygon object (including the new Fields objects) can be combined to create complex objects using Boolean operations. Volumes created in R20 can be exported sequentially in OpenVDB format and can be used in any application or render engine that supports OpenVDB.
• Node-based material system – More than 150 different node-based shaders offer customers a new and streamlined workflow to quickly and conveniently create shading effects from simple reference materials to highly complex shaders. The existing standard material system’s interface can be used to get started with the new node-based workflow. Node-based materials can be made available as parametric assets with a reduced interface.
• CAD Import – Cinema 4D R20 offers seamless drag and drop import for common CAD file formats such as Solidworks, STEP, Catia, JT, and IGES. The scale-based tessellation feature of the import function offers individual control of the level of detail for impressive visualizations.
• ProRender improvements – The GPU-based ProRender in Cinema 4D lets customers utilize the power of the GPU to create physically accurate renders. In R20, key features such as Subsurface Scattering, motion blur, and multi-passes are now available. Other enhancements in ProRender include updated code, support for Apple’s Metal2 graphics technology and the use of out-of-core textures.
• Core Modernization – The modernization efforts of the Cinema 4D core architecture and foundational technologies MAXON announced in 2017 are now more tangible and mature in Release 20. This is marked by a series of significant API adaptations, the new node system, and the modeling and UI framework.

Learn More