Lessons

Lesson Info

Cinema 4D Lite with Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud

all right. This is something that I know a lot of people have been waiting to see is the workflow with after Effects CC with the new Cinema four D light application. And that's using cinema 40 models inside of after effects CC. Now, as I had mentioned before, our cops have to be in classic mood. So I've got a blank comp here with nothing inside it. And I'm just going to my composition settings, and I'm going to make sure that I am in classic three D mode right here. Classic. Three D. Sure enough, we are set to G O. So once I know that's going to happen, I can select in my project window I can right click and select New Max on Cinema 40 file. Once I do that, it's going to say, What do you want to save it? I'll just save it where it's going to send it. So, um, we've got this opens up cinema 40 light. This comes with the creative cloud. This installs the light version of Cinema 40 from Max on, and they've got a special relationship with Adobe to deliver this. The one thing I think you can...

probably turn it off in press because I know it didn't happen. Here is it always wants to prompt you to upgrade. So if you don't want to upgrade to a full version of cinema 40 I think there's a perhaps we can turn off those reminders. But that does pop up every once in a while. So if it does pop up and just give me a little warning that might be happening. So, um, what you could do is just start with a blank canvas and, uh, I want to start with a new model. I can come over here to my content browser and see if I've got something already in here, or I can create a new model right from here and let me see what my options are. This is something that I haven't used in a long time. I was a cinema four D user. Ah, a long, long time ago. Uh, probably version eight point something, and we're talking years now six or seven years ago, and I haven't done that much three D, because so much my three d have been able to accomplish in just Photoshopped or after effects or combination of the both Or I have somebody else do the three d for me Send me a fully rendered thing, and I incorporated. But this breathes new life into my desire to really get into cinema four D as well. So I'm just preface ing that. So if there are heavy duty cinema, 40 years is out there. Go easy on me in the chat room because I'm kind of rediscovering where everything is and what tools are accessible to me. So I just rediscovered where my my my objects are here. So I just want to come out with a primitive object. And I'm up here in the top panel with the objects and I can select different shapes uh, some different primitives. I'm just gonna grab a sphere here and your tools in the cinema. 40. This really isn't about being a cinema four d training class. So I do want to preface its with that, that I'm going to be lightly touching on some things inside cinema 40 just to get through to our after effects. Um, workflow. So this is a primitive, and I can increase its scale or its position in space or anything like that. So I've got a primitive here. I can move. I've got the move tool selected here. That's what this little cross with arrows is. And I can move it in three D space. Kind of like what we do in after effects. Um, I can then navigate around my model just by looking around with ease. Little tools here. This is a kind of a pan and move tool. You can see that I'm moving around just by clicking and dragging. My mouse doesn't really leave this area. I click up here to move it, even though it's highlighting down here for some reason. So I'm clicking here and just clicking and panning and moving that moves my world. This little icon here is a little arrow that lets you zoom so again I just click and drag while I'm zooming in here. Okay? And then this little icon right up here is our rotates. You can rotate around the world that way, but you have to click right on that and then rotate. You can't just click and then try to click out here. It doesn't work. You have to click on the icon to move around and these air really useful in looking at all different angles and all sides of your model scene, where is in conjunction with the ground plane, which is this grid down here. So when you're moving things around, you can see when it goes down below the grid or where it is in conjunction with other objects or things like that, or how you're surfaces, look and everything. So that's a really important thing to know how to navigate around your world in here, and we kind of get back to decent area. So I've got a primitive here and I can add a new material to it or create a new material or load a material so I can come here to load materials, and that will take me out to where I've got a, uh, a library of materials itself. I think I've got one here where load material preset. That's what I really wanted. So I see here the highlight that load material preset, and then it goes toe light. Another thing pops up to materials. And now here are my material options for the cinema. Four D light so I can pick something glossy. Let's pick Um oh, let's pick Green. Why not pick Green? And here we see is our material editor here. So if I want to just apply this as it ISS to this model, I just click on this objects tab up here in the upper right hand corner. Make sure that I've got that I see. Here's my sphere. That's my primitive that I've got out here and I can just click and drag that right to the sphere and it applies it, so I don't have any lights or anything in here. It's not really going to reflect much of anything, even though it's got a shiny texture to it. But it does give me some kind of a basic look to it. So I'm going to add a light just so I've got something that gives it a little more three D. So I come up here to my lights, which is right up here in the upper right hand corner of the main palette, and then I'm just going to select the average light. It's kind of like a spotlight, but it's not. Uhm, I'm going to move it out so we can see what it actually is. doing again? Our X y Z space. Um, the, uh x and y still indicated by red and green. The blue is rz space. And even though we aren't looking through a camera per se, we're just looking through the project window so I can spin this around, See that I've got kind of an eclipse going on there. It's just the dark side of the moon so I can bring this out a little more. I can just click it and drag it like I do it in after effects and that's going to just soften up my globe. Okay, so I'm going to save this, and I'm going to actually save say, that should just save it as the untitled that I made, and it should automatically bring it right back into after effects for me. So there it is. So I see it's up here. It's in my project panel. I just have to drag it to my comp and there it ISS. Here's my little globe ball green ball of something. So right now, it doesn't look like much. Don't really know what to do with it other than stare at it, don't stare directly at happy fun ball, so it it's just a kind of an ugly draft mode of rendering. If I go to standard final appear my software render that will render out with this really bright, shiny speculator highlight on it. And what that's doing is the sin Aware Software is connecting to the cinema 40 renderers, and it is pulling that information over to actually render within this environment. So we're using an actual Cinema 40 camera, which is the stock base camera. I don't have any motion going on in there yet. Um, and I, uh, am looking at it. I'm rendering it with their standard render as well. Now I'm not going to get in tow way too many things as far as multi pass or any that that's more advanced, and I don't really have good examples to show of that. But all of our general stuff that we're going to be working with is our render modes and our cameras that we're using, because we can also choose to use a comp camera, which means accomplice camera three D camera that we have in after effects. I don't have one yet, so I can't select that. But I've got plenty of examples of where we used them, so we will get to that. So I just kind of want to show that connection between aftereffects and Cinema four D. So now that I've done that, let me save this. I'm going back over to cinema four D light and what I can do here, it's set a key frame for this position. I just come down here to this little key frame, but here it records that that mode in time, this is my timeline and cinema four D. This is kind of like our timeline in after effects. Right now, it's up to 90 frames. I can increase the amount of frames right here if I wanted to go to a longer animation. But right now it's at 90 and I'm just gonna leave It'd that for this example. So here I'm going to come down to this point, and then I'm going to rotate Iran to the dark side of the moon, like so, and then set another key frame, and that should I may have done something wrong because it did not do what I expected it to do. So, um, good thing there Okay, so forget everything. I just told you something went wrong, So Okay. I did something wrong there again. I'm kind of getting back into the saddle with cinema 40 again here. So, um, we'll come back to that. I believe I've got another camera elsewhere. So when that happens, what we do is we go back to after effects and we can create our own camera. So go toe layer new camera, leave it at its default. And that's fine. Thank you very much. Um, so there's my camera in here, So if I click on that, this will allow me. This is my untitled blob, and I can choose now cop camera. I actually going to say centered cop camera, because that's going to center it on to the object, at least the object layer. So now I've got the camera in here. I can use this tool up here in the top, which is the unified camera tool. I rarely use that in any other instance, but in here it seems to work because it's a live update of what I'm moving around. And so we're just going to try to click and drag and rotate the camera around so I can rotate around the sphere just clicking and dragging, and I'm able to rotate around that sphere. Basically, I'm doing the same. Thing is I would with numbers in here if I was to change my numbers in here. Um, and you mess around with its position. If I just do that, drag the numbers, you can see that it's going to update and move. Move things around. I changed my point of interest. Should make a difference there. There we go. Orientation. Same thing. Should took it right out of the scene. So that's the danger of doing things with With that, um, Now let's see if my unified camera tool it's not that I don't have it in there. So typically, what I do here is let me see if here we go look through the camera that helps this uncharted territory, folks. So Okay, so here we go. I want to rotate this over time to pull this out. It will automatically key frame for me, and it won't. So we're going to go to a different model because this isn't behaving the way I wanted to. And I'm obviously missing something that I should be obvious as the nose on my face, and I'm missing it. So here's another thing boys and girls we can go into, Um, there's two ways we can do this. We can go back into cinema four D and I can just open another model. So if I go in here and click open, I have to navigate to my folder with the three D model in it. And, uh, in here, we'll go to here. Hey, look at that. That sphere converted to a cool truck, so I just opened a pre made model. This is, um, uh, free model from turbo squid. You can go to turbo squid and download free models for a cinema four D. Um, and you pull them out. This is their texture and everything. I've just gone in there, and I've tweaked some of the other elements in another project that I have done. Um, so with this one, I don't want to mess this one up, because I'm not sure this 1 may be the same model that I had before, so I don't want to mess it up too much. At least I won't save it when I do mess it up. This one has a lot of elements in it. It's got several lights that you can turn on and off. Um, does he actually turned it off this way? Appear we can turn, turn elements off and on so I can turn lights on and off in here and see how they affect the model. So I added a bunch of different lights just so I get nice reflections if I want to see what my render looks like really quick. Uh, because I'm just kind of looking in a draft mode here. I can click this little icon right here, the render view, and that just doesn't really quick render for me. It shows me what I'm looking at. So I've got a nice, shiny floor down here. Um, I've got nice reflections and highlights in the chrome A little bit attended glass, and it's quite beautiful, actually. So I can rotate this around. Look at it in different views. Look inside. It's got a really killer engine in it. Do a quick render in here. You can see the light is reflecting off the floor and you see the shadows cast by a couple other lights. It's got nice edges in there, quite spectacular for what it's doing with very little input for me. Look at the reflection in that paint, boy. It's on shiny paint job. I love that. I love seeing the lights actually reflect in there. And then you animate that. It's really cool. So we move that around, so I, um I can import this into after effects. I've already done that. So I'm going to close this file. I want to close it because I don't wanna save it. No, because I've already saved it, Uh, and used it in another cop inside here. This one right here. So what I've done here is I've got my camera moving here. I've got my effects here. So what I've done is I've got my final draft of rendering going on. I've got, um, Let's see here. Let's put that back on full where we can see it, actually render a nice, clean snapshot of this model. There we go. And this one, I've used a centered comp camera in aftereffects, and I've been able to animate my point of interest and my position on it. I just manually did that around the truck, so it starts in that pose, and then it ends up in this pose in the eases in This is another one of those that takes a while to render. I do have it already rendered. So let's take that frosted cake out of the oven here, and we'll hide that. And here it ISS rendered pull this out of the way. So that's using a cop camera in after effects rendered in after effects with the sin aware, uh, software. So I'm easing out of my camera move. I'm coming around the three D object and but all the renderings done through the Senate, where software In the end, it's pets that, I mean, that's the tie in. So our tie in is we create the model or we upload or or use the model. Our import, the model from Cinema four D. But we bring that into after effects. And so the marriage there is being able to go through the pipe from after effects into cinema 40 and back. Uh, do all of our three D work in cinema four D. That's where I worked on getting all the textures. That's where, uh, work on the lights in the reflections of every single item in there. And so let me open that model back up just to show you how in depth that iss So let me go back in here because most of the hard work the heavy lefty and is all done in cinema four D. So if I a just selected in here and come in here to edit original, it will open it up right here. So see all these textures down here. These air all, uh, modifications of the original model that I downloaded from turbo squid. What I have done is I've taken some of the black plastic. I made it a little bit shiny er, because it was kind of dull, and that is applied to this. This flooring material created a floor in here, so that's applied there. And also a couple panels on the on the truck itself. The color texture on the body. If I click on the body, it will show me body color is right here. So I've increased the shiny nous of it. There's a lot of things you can go into on this. It actually uses this body texture which is a ping file. Now, if I was to go into my original folder, let me do this real quick. Let's hide that. Hide that. And this one Here, let me duplicate that. And I'm gonna open that up in photo shop just to show you how easy it is. What's not Preview Quick preview and open with photo shop. Okay, so what, I'm going to show you here is a really quick way of making a major major change in how something looks. I'm going to select this green area here and make sure that I'm up on it all the way. It looks like I am. And I could do a global color change in there. So, um, actually, I just fill it with another color. Why not? It's just a solid color. So let me find another color. Let's make a red. Why not read? Make up bright red, and we'll just fill it. I just didn't and all delete and filled with the foreground color de select. And I'm going to save it because I saved it as a copy. All right, so now I can quit photo shop and go back to cinema 40 light I can select that as a different item. So I'm going to go to my folder going here. Select body copy. Open their Now I've got red with an ugly green interior, so nothing else has changed. Other than I changed that the bodies Do you still have all the speculum highlights? Everything's gonna look great in there. Let me do a quick render so you can see I just changed the color of the truck just by changing that one item. But I didn't change any of the textures. Highlights. Speculate arat e shining us any of that. So any time you've got a model that you buy, download, build whatever and you use a texture map that's the quickest way to make global changes without changing everything. You can duplicate textures and then change some global coloring as well. But if something is more complex like this because this is a two tone paint job, I could have made it all monotone and made the whole thing red just by changing it to get rid of the stripe and the black on the bottom. So, um, but just to see what this looks like from other angles, we still see the shining us here. I get excited about this stuff. Course I love cars anyway, so I could play. I get played like a kid in this all day, so But if I was to save that and go back Teoh to aftereffects, well, let's just see what happens. Let's go ahead and save and scare the heck out of ourselves by going here, and it's going to change that to a red truck there it iss okay, so now if I was to render it all my camera moves are the same. Everything is the same, except I've just changed the color scheme of the paint, and that's it, just with one change of a texture. And that's great, too, because there's there's times where you want to maybe have a like a diagram IQ background where you've got a fake environment or something in three D, and you want to be able to move around it, but you want the background to change. So I want to say I want to do is, um, around this truck? And I wanted to have, like, a like a sunset or something seen. I could have that on a physical texture back there on a physical model, like a semi circle back. There were even just a big, flat plane back there, and then I wanted to change it. Teoh, say a nighttime scene or something. I could just change out the texture map over and over again, and everything else stays the same. I just bring it back in here and do another big render. So this is another one of those that takes a long time to render if you're if you're in a hurry, because it does have to render every frame. And, uh, you know, this is a 12th animation or more, so it does take a while to get through all of that. But that's how that workflow works. Either build a model from scratch was obviously, horribly an apt debt or you you download a model that you can modify, um, and be able to work in that. Now, here's where I wanted to really point this out. I can't incorporate other three D elements easily into this, and this workflow is a little bit limited similarly to earlier versions of after effects. If people are using like 5.0 or earlier and you've got the workflow they had. I think they brought it out in CS four. Where Photoshopped three D. You could bring a photo shop three D, um, file into imported into after effects and manipulate it with with some limitations. But all of the lights and everything were glued to the model. You could move it around, but you couldn't do anything with it. And the problem was, is it treated like a snapshot? It would actually read recalculate where you're looking at it. The camera would move it, but it would, uh it would just basically treat it like it was a still a plane, a single plane. And this is a little bit like that. If I was to add another three d layer in here, let's just try it for giggles. Um, let me just put in here and that's really ugly eyes. Really ugly text. Okay, let's at least make it white and, uh, bleak. Nothing else. We got to do that, okay? And so I'm just gonna stretch it out here. Little whoa, There we go. And OK, so I've got this three D text now it's three D um, and say I want to move it in space. So let me scale it up first, okay? And now I can play with the position. And since this three D, uh, model isn't a three d layer, you're gonna notice that I can't really interact with it. It's just like it's being projected on a back, back, wall or screen. It's like a two d layer is in the three d world. It doesn't interact with my other three D stuff and again because I'm in classic three D mode. I can't extrude this text. I can't do any of that. So what I could do is render this out, or if I really wanted to kill my machine, I bring it in as a sub comp. I haven't tried that yet, actually. Bringing it in. It's a sub comp into a classic. Three are into a ray trace three D that may just, you know, punch a hole in time space continuum. I don't know, but I would I would can to be safe and render it as a video, then bring it in as another layer and then treat it like three D into a ray trace three d or use it as a background, that type of thing. So, um, so anyway, that that is one of the limitations here. Don't expect that you're going to be able to have interaction with Ray trace elements, extrusion ins, he bent footage, anything like that. You're not going to be able to do that and interact in the three d world in any way with this model. It's just kind of created is the background. Everything else happens in front of it. But with that said, if I did want to do something with this tax and have it fly in and all of those great things I could you animated over time and you have it. Have it fly on onto the scene. And it would still stay with, at least in a three d plane with my camera. So, uh, because my camera is moving around so I can move this in and let's grab it. Bring it back in here. Come on, Come on in. Come on in. You can do it. Okay. How far do I want to go? Let's go to 1500. See what it does. Let's go to zero. What does? Okay, So should be there. There, it ISS okay, so I can have it fly in as this is rotating. Let's go back out here to a fast draft mode. See what it does for that and half resolutions if we can speed that up so I can scrub here at least a little bit, and it may not be moving fast enough to really get much motion blur on that So and made a motion blur may not be working and fast draft mode, so let's go back to off and see if we got some motion blur. There it is. Fast draft mode killed my motion blur so I can still interact in that Z space with my text and other layers so they'll be positioned in. The same access is my camera is because again I've got a three D camera. It's really moving around. It's just that I won't be ableto have, like text go through the windows or, you know anything really interact with the model. And things aren't going to reflect on the floor the same way I would have to do all of those kinds of things in cinema. Four D light. That's where you have to work. And so to do all of that, you really have to get up to speed with cinema 40 light. Um, the light means there's some things that aren't in there. Obviously, there's no way to take, like, a character and do animation regain. You'll make somebody dance or whatever. Um, you can't do that type of thing in here. I haven't really played with any animation yet to see what limitations are hoping that I could get to that induce more advanced stuff later. But just digging into this, I still think this is very viable workflow between the two products. And I'm excited because it does allow me access to it. So let me close this project up, and no, I do not want to save it. And we'll close this one because that one just kind of It's nothing. So let's hide it. Um, let me also close this one up close project. Don't say can't hide. So let's see here. This was our cop camera. Okay, so now I want to show you actually going to this one here, so I do a lot of work for, um, some biotech bio science, engineering companies and manufacturers products, and I'm asked to do some fun animations from time to time. And, uh, sometimes we get some really crazy fund projects to work on. This was actually a more serious project because they wanted to show a d n a strand of DNA process things part of the animation got cut, actually, the unwinding of the Strand, but, uh, what I did was I ended up reversing this. Really? I have a cinema four d file here, which I got. Um, see here, let's go to edit original. That should open it up. Okay, plug ins are missing global illumination. It must have been in the original. So I'm not worried about that because I have a light on on it. That's what I'm using is my light. And, uh, this helix I've got actually spinning in here. And that was that was something that I got a tip for. How to do that code again. There's some some great code out there some great tips out there on just being able to plug in stuff. So again, I can't take credit for actually creating that helical animation. I could just spread out where it happened and how it happened A twat point in time in there. But that's the kind of stuff that you can get from the communities out there. Get some tips and help from the cinema. Four D communities forums. And that's where I'm going toe to learn a lot more about cinema and how to make better animations. But this is a three D helical model of DNA, and I've just got changed some textures to it, Um, and made a little shiny er just gave it a little more interest so that when I brought that into after effects, you can see I've got a background layer here. I've also added my layer style because I don't have another light in here giving me a drop shadow. So I had to create a drop shadow there so I can turn that on and off. That kind of gives it a little interest there. So let me render this out, and that might take just a bit. Let me go. That is at half resolution, right? Okay, well, we are doing it, So Okay, so let it let it render out it's again. It's rendering through the sin aware, um, software So if I click on this whips let me get back up there. Grab that layer. Grab this. And where? Software. There we go. So notice I'm using the cinema 40 camera. I'm using the final Render their and let me scale this because it was pretty big. There we go see the actual vignette too. And bring this down and render it. It might look a little better. So while this is rendering if we've got any people chatting it up in the chat room I've got probably a minute here that this is going to render. So if we've got anything comments or questions about this because I know this is a whole new world they were diving into here and I know this could be a ton of questions were getting everything from where do I get it? Todo, uh, Studio Modern asks three Is three d text possible in cinema 40. And can you do it with animated with key frames? Yes, you can. That's the answer. And that's answer. I'll give. I can't show that right now because I couldn't even get a ball to move in there right now with key frames. But yes, you can and you can animate text. You can make three D text, and I mean everything that you can do with extruded three D text in after effects. You can do that and MAWR in cinema four D because like this, the math that's behind this hell ical animation. Here you can take things and and twist and animate and do crazy things to them because everything is you know, has has actual shape. Has got polygons or spines or whatever the model is built out of, and you can twist things. You can move things, um, and you can do things. 23 D elements there that you can't do even in Ray Trace three D in after effects. So in the in the end, that's going. That's kind of the gateway into that world of riel three D modeling and animation. So if you don't think of that, is being in the limitation. Just because I couldn't get a key frame work, you can really do. You can do all that stuff, and it's so much more powerful, especially if you upgrade. I'm not trying to give Max on a plug here, but I know that I'm going to be upgrading. Just so I've got all of the tools in cinema four D made to my disposal. And, um and I'm just going to dive in and just learn by doing just like everyone's doing here with aftereffects on digging deeper. And then, as I dig deeper on, get be bringing more of it back say, Hey, here's what I've discovered So that's great. Well, I think that's what everybody likes so much about your teaching style as well they're seeing. They're seeing you go go through the process. And I think it's giving everyone else a little bit of courage to Well, it shouldn't be scary. I mean, you're gonna make mistakes. You're gonna forget where things are. You're not going to know where things are. Things move. You know, developers develop software, they move stuff and they tell you, and then you forget because you haven't used it. And thats like, OK, I know the buttons there somewhere and you can't find it. So there's there's a comedy of errors there, really. But, um, but here, this just finished rendering on you can see that the twist just happened. I've got something funny going on in there in the beginning, something I would clip out. But that's that's a real world practical application of a very simple model that I couldn't have done that realistically, in after effects by itself, without using either a really heavy duty three D plug in of some sort element three D or something like that. I couldn't do that just with after effects on its own, I'd have to use a three D app and this this allowed me to do that and very, very grateful for that. So let me go onto, um, another example project. Good. Save that one and close it. Hi. This Let's go ahead and close this one up, too. Two things. No, I don't want to mess that up. Okay. This one again for the same biotech company. Um, I did. Let's see here. This is the CC tested project, but this one's does now again, I had to really work on this one. I think this one eyed got another paid for ah, model from somebody, and it didn't quite work for what we needed. Let's see, it fit it up here because it was the wrong kind of test tube. What they wanted was a test tube that they used in the labs in this test tube was for blood samples, and it was the wrong kind of test tubes. What I had to do is go in and copy it, mimic it, do a bunch of stuff to it to try to make it, you know, the shape and everything more functional in, um in cinema four D. So I had to open that up. So let's open it up in cinema four D at it original and again the label and everything. That was just a generic thing that we created in photo shop. Just like I changed the texture on the truck or not the texture but the color scheme of the truck. I just changed this with it with a copy of a label that would work on the test to. But I had to go in here and actually edit the geometry of the test tube. And this was built with nerves and lathes, nerves and all this and again, I I'm nude stuff again, And people you know that are really heavy duty in the three d world. Think I'm nuts, but, um but I'm diving in because somebody's gotta learn this stuff, right? So I'm diving in and I'm deleting points. I'm adding points and making stuff work and some stuff, not work. And I'm kind of stumbling fumbling my way around in there. Um, but somehow I got through it and I was able to build a model that worked. And I've got that model here. Let me let me hide this for a second on close this model. That's not the one. The final one. Let's close that one. Don't save. And then let's see here. The actual test tube. That's the one with explosions. Yeah, we had to blow up, blow up test tubes. Um, let me see here if I've got the actual test tube. If this is right now, that's the wrong one. That's the one they said didn't work. If this is it here, that's the right one. I had to put a cap on the top of it. I had to change the material of it. Unfortunately, the model doesn't look like it made it into this folder, so I apologize for that. Um but I did get I did change the plastics. It wasn't clear. It's not glass. It's a plastic tube, has a flat bottom or squared off bottom of a little bit of a temple in it. I changed the plastic characteristics, so it's a little more translucent. It's kind of like you. Almost like a couple where plastic looking look and feel. And I stay on made sure that the label had enough shine on it. So again, you have to make things right. And you just keep working on it until it's correct. So, um, what I did you see? This is if this is right. No, that's not right. I already have this in another window. So let me do that. That's missing, missing, missing. So let me close this quick and close project and don't save. I've got the project in another folder. It's not what I meant to do. Okay, explosions right here. Okay. Okay. So what they wanted done here is to have a Siris of these test tubes to kind of blow up. And this was this was actually fun. Will probably show you a little bit of this finished piece tomorrow because we also did some green screen for the project. Um, but I'm showing the little more of the project next week when we get into premier because half the project was done in Premier, half of it was done in after effects, and this is kind of a fun spoof e infomercial over the top. Everything was crazy infomercial, and what they wanted to do is because they're eliminating how many test tubes you need in this process. And that's why this is Brand X, because it's not their brand. Um, so they wanted Teoh make these things blow up. And there's a couple things going on in here. Um, that because this was done with, uh, another third party plug in to make these particles go Khupe Louis. I tried to replace that plug in, which was a real smart motion blur our SMB from Ari vision effects, and I originally used that. But when I tried to apply the new, um, pixel motion blur that is in here, in fact, I'll actually show you what happens. Let's go to that test, too, but see which one it is. Well, that's an explosion. So I've got explosion layers and that's that test tube. Let's see if it's it's got to be the next one up, that one. Okay. So you can see that I've got, uh, in effect on that. So let's go take a look at that. Let's dig down a little deeper, because this is this is all cool stuff. This is all done in after effects. So I showed you the model that I came up with, um, and that was done and rendered right out of cinema four D. And this is about how big it is. And what I did is I needed it to do that little rotation, because I'm replicating them over the time and in three D space. So I've got that little test tubes just rolling around there, and then it comes to a stop, but that was the end of my animation. So what I had to do is duplicate this layer and then lock it freeze, frame it at that point. And that's what I've got done here. I go to time. Um well, I've actually got it at freeze frame on there. It's not showing is being, but I took one frame and I freeze framed it, and that allowed me to. Then you extended throughout the rest of this animation sequence. So that's just one test to since all test tubes were toe lookalike Only dad to do that once. I've got one instance of it, so I just able to duplicate it over and over and over again. But what I do have is several of these explosions and kind of like I did with the Bride Wars thing. I've got different explosions that are happening. These explosions, uh, we're against some stock, and they were just, um I used a track matte on it because it was a white explosions. I used a track matte and then colorized it and it gave me this cool orange explosion. So now I've got that on a transparent background of God. That's one explosion. I've got another one here. It's this kind of a poof of smoke. So I used those 22 explosions in here, and I think, what's come on? Catch up with me here. Here we go. So I just use those explosions over and over again, but I've got thes things. Thes test tubes are also exploding. So let me go back here where I had the one isolated again. They're all everything's in in in three D space. So that's how I ordered everything. I have everything lined up in order, so I've got stacks of these layers. So let me see. Find one that's exploding. That would be the previous one. So this should be the one that isn't full explosion mode? Nope, that's less Explosion test tube. Okay, that's the one back. There's let's take a look at that one and see what's going on here. I've got my effects in here. Shatter. This shatter plug in is built into after effects. It's ah, it kind of creates particles from from your your layer. So it kind of does the shatter things. So let me open this up because this is one of those projects where you pull out all of the things that we've been covering. So it's kind of fun to come to this point because it's like, OK, we're dealing with effects. We deal in the three D space. We're dealing with three D elements from Cinema four D. And you know all of this kind of works together here of everything we've covered today. So the shatter plug in effect double click. It opens up here, that is, I believe that's under distort. Um, no. Let me see. Where does that shatter shatter? Shatter? Okay, let me find it this way. This is what's great about being able to shatter under simulation. There we go. That's the areas under simulation. So if I go to layer effect, whips come here to my layer effect, and then I go to simulation. Then I confined. Ah, shatter. So they're shattered right down here and make a little highlight there. Simulation and shatter. So I've applied this shatter in what you do to animate that we scroll down here and zoom in. I've got two things going on here. I've got two different forces that air blowing that shatter apart. One blows it out from the center. The other one kind of scatters it a little bit more. Um, and it's just a matter of the radius over time as to how far it shatters it. But everything is moving fairly quickly here. So, um, and because it isn't necessarily a your actual physical that layers not moving, just the content of the layers moving. So we're not going to get natural motion blur like our traditional physical motion blur. So if we were to try to apply. Um, the physical motion blur to us. Let me go to that layer effect time and then did It's what am I missing pixel motion blur. There it is. So if I do that, it overrides my my shatter. So see it kind of like turns it off. Were originally it says here missing. That's my missing plug in. That's our SMB. That's really smart motion blur. I was able to add some blur to it. So there still a need toe have 1/3 party plug in here in this case because, uh, the pixel motion blur isn't working directly with this now. Haven't tried going to automatic mode to see if that helped, but I couldn't find any way to make it work with the shatter on. They're probably the only way I could do it is to, um, render out each explosion, each exploding layer, Then add the pixel motion blur that adds another layer to my workflow. What I'd really rather not have to do I could sub competent and then make you know the motion blur. But when I first built this, I had that rs and BiH plug in that is missing. And that works with C, C or C S six, by the way. So, um, so the motion blur isn't present here. But if I look down, let's look down the top of this project and let's zoom out quite a bit. Oh, that's probably a little too much. So six. So see all of these lines in here. These are all different layers is they're all different test tube layers. Um, the explosions aren't really showing up in their own. Yeah, they're not really showing up in there because they're probably too, too skinny. Oh, there's that was not in there yet. That's why. Let's see, it's come down here. It's not visible yet because it starts right here so you can see my explosions are there. That one's actually moving, so the camera is moving. See this little pink dot right here? That's our camera. Let me zoom in a little more 25% and we can see our camera. There's our camera right there. So our cameras moving in time. The explosion layers are kind of moving their kind of moving and scaling and doing crazy things because I wanted them to kind of move. That's pretty similar to what I did in that bride Wars example. Let's go back out to fit. So let's look at our camera here and again. I used the null for this because I really wanted to have control over where that camera was going, and I wanted to move it over time. So in this case, I wanted to start and stop scroll out of here for a little bit. So you can see I started here where I'm just kind of going down the line of these things. And then I end up down here where the last one here, we're going to see the whole animation fully rendered here in just a minute. Okay, so I get to this last one and instead of it exploding because the whole concept of the message of this waas they're eliminating eight of the nine steps that the competitors product does or whatever. And so the last tube spins off into the galaxy. Kind of like a tie fighter after gets shot, right? So again, I had this layer. I actually had a real smart motion blur at arson be applied to it too. So it has a nice motion blur out as well. So let's look at the final render here and let's hide this all right. And here's the final and to go full screen here so that it it's good. And of course, it had sound effects with explosions. And there's voiceover and everything as well. So I get sitting watch that all day. I love that so the you can see how important the motion blur is again, though I can't, you know, express that enough how important it is. Look how much more velocity those explosions seem tohave with motion blur in there. You know, they actually look like they're being forced in a direction. Doesn't just look like confetti, you know, they really look like they're blowing up or they're just they're being forced. And again, with the spin of this last guy going out, the motion blur really sells it. So that's why it's really important that you've got all the tools at hand. You figure out a workflow that makes it work, because that's how you get the results