These 2 videos show my early endeavours into Cinema 4D, they showcase my learning about how to animate objects, frame by frame as well as how to place lighting and set a camera on a track. When it boiled down to it, it was a simple exercise that introduced me to a number of different tools and abilities that you have whilst using Cinema 4D. I had to place a sphere, create a ramp through the use of extruding a 2D spline, set textures on everything, place adequate lighting around the scene and then finally animate the balls. The animation can be tricky to get a hold of at first. You have to stamp each object you wish to animate in the timeline at integers that when ultimately linked together will give it linked movement. You have 3 different options for each integer change on the timeline, a change in the x, y, or z direction, rotational change and change of scale.
The picture above shows a model of a character that I made using Cinema 4D from a picture I found on the internet. In the screen shots you'll notice that there's a visible skeleton which was created with the joint tool in order to animate the model. To do this it was a simple case of creating a spine in the centre of his body by clicking at relevant points along his torso then toggling reflection and placing the joints in his extremities. It was simple and only took a couple of minutes to do, making sure that each point matched up with the character in both the front and side view to avoid it animating poorly. By doing this I'm allowing myself to animate his body in as similar a way as possible to a normal human being. After placing the skeleton, however, I had to link it to the body before I could actually animate at all. I did this through use of the bind tool. After this it was a case of creating a chain for every extremity that I wanted to animate, so I made a link for each arm and leg.
The video above is my take on a basic walk cycle featuring my very own model. Animating him was really very simple, it was a case of moving each individual IK chain (extremity) and hitting the record button when I'd found a position I liked. I had to do this for each arm and leg for each frame anchor-point or else the body part would stay static where it wasn't recorded. Unfortunately, possibly due to where the joints were placed, the arms and legs wouldn't always bend as humanly as I expected them to and as a result I decided to go for the more outlandish and comical walk cycle. I feel like it still came out alright though, it was a good exercise to introduce me to animation in Cinema 4D
I used a fair few techniques whilst remaking my bowling animation with varying levels of success, above is an image to hopefully help show the usefulness of setting the anchor point. I did this as the bowling pin was to tip over and without doing this it would be a real hassle to not only rotate the pin for every animation marker but also alter the coordinates. Unfortunately the software wasn't ready for me to alter the anchor point a few markers in which would've made things a lot easier for me so I did some damage control and worked with what I had. The end result is a pin that tips straight over rather than bouncing on the edge of the platform.
In my revisited attempt at this animation I made use of multiple camera angles which I compiled on Final Cut Pro. One of these camera angles had the bowling ball set as a target. To do this I simply right clicked on the camera in the list of objects and went Tag>Target, followed by dragging the sphere item into the relevant box. This is an incredibly easy way of getting accurate pan shots that don't jitter or jolt at all.
Similarly to my last animation I also made a fair bit of use of lighting, I used a sunlight to illuminate the whole scene slightly then implemented a few spotlights where I felt the scene needed further brightening. One was placed on the bowling ball start place and one on either side of the pin, as well as one looking down on where the pin would fall. In doing this I made it so there wouldn't be any major shadows and therefore a lack of detail.
Above are a couple of screenshots of my Final Cut Pro file, as you can see it's all very basic, I just imported my 3 videos which I rendered from each of my camera angles in Cinema 4D and trimmed away the unnecessary parts of each clip so when compiled they would flow and look less clumpy.
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