I started off today by intending to learn how to keyframe in Cinema 4D. I’m very familiar with the way it works in After Effects and have so far been very confused at the way it seemed to work in Cinema 4D; the keyframes all seemed to be bunched together on the same timeline, and it was really confusing. I searched up a tutorial hoping to find out a more intuitive way of keyframing and found this one which also covers rigging.
From the get-go, I noticed something different about the layout of the software in the tutorial. As it turns out, there is a whole layout dedicated to animation that I didn’t know about. As soon as I switched to this layout, keyframing made so much more sense, now I could keyframe in a very similar way to how I do in After Effects. This meant that I didn’t really need the tutorial anymore, but I decided to do it anyway and investigate rigging.
I started off by creating my own lemon- I found this really quite daunting, I’ve never really made such a complex shape from scratch before with absolutely no help, but I think I did a semi-decent job. I did have some issues with the geometry not lining up and had to stitch bits together, and this did end up leaving me with a few slightly noticeable verticies, but I decided that trying to fix them wasn’t worth it for this exercise.
I used what I had learned in previous pieces to create the texture on the lemon, and I’m really glad I did because I think it really helps to add a bit of subtle detail. If I wanted it to be more accurate, I could’ve spent more time on the displacement map, however, I just did this quickly using a bit of noise.
The rigging process was very logical and straight forward, and was actually quite similar to the puppet warp tool that I have used before in Photoshop, just in 3D space. For this reason I found the general rigging process to be rather easy, and decided to rig up another fruit next to the lemon and give it a friend. When I duplicated the lemon and made the duplicate smaller, there were a few keyframing issues but now having the dope sheet available, I found them relatively easy to fix.
Here is the finished looping animation, I really like how it turned out except for one thing. For some reason, both of the characters have twitchy legs. This issue doesn’t happen with the arms, and before rendering I thought I had fixed it by moving a point on the spline that warps them, but turns out that after rendering it isn’t fixed. Instead of spending hours trying to fix it though, I’m going to just accept this loss and move on to developing other skills more.
The lighting could also be significantly better, but that wasn’t the point of this piece so I don’t mind too much.
Findings:
- There is a specific layout for animating that makes it a lot easier.
- Rigging is simple with simple shapes, just use the spline wrap tool and IK tool.
- You can’t always spot issues until rendering
- Creating looping animations is easy with the dope sheet
Timelapse of work
Bibliography
YouTube. (2016). Cinema 4D Tutorial – Animate a Character Walk Cycle. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLknoRxi6tE [Accessed 1 Nov. 2019].
YouTube. (2016). Cinema 4D Tutorial – Rigging a Character Using Spline IK. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=50&v=4FZun6_bZjA [Accessed 1 Nov. 2019].
Jennie Hawkes 