Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Moving our Camera: 
We are now ready to move our camera through the 3D space (our room).
The most important thing to do, is to make sure you have your camera pass over all the other animations going on around your room.  First thing you should do, is write down where all your individual animations start. Secondly, when moving your camera through your room, mark down key frames in a limited manner;
let Cinema 4D fill in the gaps, as this allows for smoother camera movement; the more key frames you have the faster and jerkier your camera movements will be.  Third, focus on telling a story with the camera; fly around the room and spend time looking at every object with the camera.

Call me over when your done and we will render your movie out.


Monday, December 7, 2009

Game Of The Day:
http://www.vivalagames.com/play/idiottest/


Questions:
- Describe your experience playing the game. Was it challenging?
- What were some of the things this game was designed to test?
- Describe some of the ways the game tries to 'trick' you.


Today we will take a break from our rooms and focus on special effects. I gave you a bit of a lecture on "PARTICLE EFFECTS" and their purpose in 3D cinema. Cinema 4d offers us the power of using "Particle Effects" without having to go to another application like After Effects. The first things we need are "Emitters", these can be reduced in size and made to flow at any angle. Emitters are essentially ready to go, but first you need to parent an object to them before you can actually see the emitters working. You can even parent lights to these emitters for explosion or fairy dust type effects, just don't forget to add a lens to the light by looking in its lighting attributes. Effecters are contained in the same menu as the emitters, and they help direct emitter particles in specific ways.
Last thing we did today was create text by going to the spline menu and grabbing the text tool. Everything for the text can be controlled from the attributes menu (font change, size etc). Just make sure you parent the text to an extrude nurb after that, to give it 3D depth.