I decided to sketch out some ideas on my iPad for things that I could create. I haven’t had a chance to read Motion Graphics (Crook and Beare, 2015) yet as its shipping has been delayed, however, I decided to just generate some initial ideas from what I’ve read in Light for Visual Artists (Yot, 2019) and my previous knowledge of motion graphics.
Instead of just taking screenshots, I have exported a timelapse of my work, which hopefully will help to show the thought processes behind my ideas and how they might work together.
After coming up with these initial ideas, I was keen to get into C4D and get creating, so I decided to create the cloud as an experiment, to see where my skill level was and investigate how I would demonstrate one of the tools.
I thought that the tool I would need was the subdivision surface tool however it was actually the metaball tool.
I experimented with using the meshes within the metaball parent and moving them around, then used my keyframe knowledge from animating in 2D to make the cloud switch between a group of spheres to a cloud and back again. I like the general idea of the transition that I have created but I will need to do some research into easing and adding motion blur (if those tools even exist in C4D). The material is just the default plastic material because I don’t know a lot about material creation- this is clearly something I need to research. I also don’t know a lot about rendering in Cinema 4D; I know to add ambient occlusion and global illuminations to make it look nicer, but these make it take a lot longer to render, so for this piece I rendered it out very small. Finally, my lighting set up isn’t great. currently my default is to just drop a physical sky into the composition, which makes lovely realistic lighting but takes a long time to render and isnt as versatile as learning to use the other lights.
Findings:
-Need to learn more about materials
-Need to look into keyframing and easing
-Need to look into optimum rendering settings
-Need to look into lighting setups
Bibliography
Crook, I. and Beare, P. (2015). Motion Graphics. Fairchild Books.
Yot, R. (2019). Light for visual artists. 2nd ed. Laurence King Publishing.
Jennie Hawkes 