Monthly Archives: May 2010

The Making of Motion 2010 #C4D #Ps #Ai

2 Replies

This piece of work is one of my favorites. For one thing, I love doing media for Youth Camp…. especially for my very own youth camp in North Georgia. I was very (surprised) honored when my friend Phillip Medlin down in Atlanta called me that night and asked if I could do some animating on a logo the state office had gotten designed. So here is that back story. Hope everyone in GA enjoys. I’ll try to keep it not-so-much technical and more realistic…. I mean short.

So here is the original design I was sent….

Original Motion Camp Logo

Original Motion Camp Logo

I had to keep the original design as much as I can. So that is no problem. I actually do like the swirl in the back.

So the first thing I had to do is to separate the swirl from the rest of the picture. Easy enough since both sides are identical and one side doesn’t have anything meshing with it. Then I just had to guess the font. Being on a mac this was kinda hard to do. However, I thought to myself, “This was probably done on a windows.” So, my first guess was the default font for Windows XP…. Arial!

My next step was to trace the paths of the swirl and export it to Illustrator. From there I finally was able to get into my program of choice, Cinema4D.

After editing the spline points, extruding and adding text (also extruding) and a few other polishing tasks I had a wire-frame draft of the 3D version of the logo.

Basic Wireframe

Basic Wire-frame

You would think the hard part was done, but this hour of work was only the beginning! What did I have left to do? Well, since this wasn’t just a still logo reconditioning, I had some animating to do. You would think that a 5-10 second animation wouldn’t be that much work for just a few objects. But believe me, I only got the basic animation how it was going to be after about 4 days of work.

So, after a few more days of getting the materials (colors) on everything and adding a little glass here is the final product and a few of the stills we used for print and other places.

Hope you enjoyed this first look into my workflow. And if you have a flat logo you would like me to work on, I am still young and cheap. Let me know if you have anything you want turned into a good graphic or animation!

draft_0_0002

draft_0_0002

Frame_0094

Frame_0094- Yes, it is actual glass

Next Week, I will unveil the concepts the client didn’t like. But the draft renders might inspire mine or your next project!

HINT: Cloth

Basic Intro to Global Illumination

1 Reply

A while back when I was just starting to get into the 3D scene, and trying to get good looking renders from my application, I had a hard time getting started. I had no idea what I was doing, and rendering was no exception. My preferred application (right now) is Cinema 4D R11.5 from Maxon. Getting images and sequences out of that program was totally a different monster than Compressor or After Effects.

But this isn’t an article on rendering. It is about Global Illumination or for short “GI.” I posted a few weeks ago an article on some good GI presets, but I didn’t go into what GI was or how it is successfully used. Well, this is everything I should have already posted weeks ago.

I can’t even begin to explain what GI is without showing exactly what it does and looks like. To the people close to me, you know how big something is when I call it my “easy button.” and this sure is one of them!

With GI

With GI

Just notice how much better the picture with GI looks than the one without.

No GI

No GI

I call GI my easy button because it basically lights my scenes for me! Now that doesn’t exactly reflect what the feature actually does, but it sure does seem that way most of the time. Lights still have to be placed in the near-right places; the GI just adds the realistic shadows, reflections and the light depth.

Hopefully later I will be able to go deeper into explaining GI. But for now, I’ll just leave this intro article at my simple illustration!