All right, welcome everybody. This is going to be Intermediate Cinema 4D. What I'm going to do is... My name's Kevin Aguirre, first of all. I'm with Cake Studios out in Burbank. What we're going to show for this next 90 minutes or so is Intermediate Cinema 4D. So, you know the basics of it. You kind of know how the program works. Now, how are we implementing that stuff into a pipeline and into a regular project? So, we do a lot of motion graphics design works, design, obviously. This is one of our typical logo builds that we have regular, logo resolve. So this is kind of our bread and butter. Build the logo on, just have a nice, smooth camera move that comes out, adding in materials, lighting, all that good stuff. So I'm just going to try and go through an A-Z, how we went through this whole project, the things we ran into, using the different tools in Cinema to come up with these things, different techniques, all that kind of stuff. So whenever we start with a project like this, we always have a meeting with the client first of all, to figure out what do they want, what direction do they want to go? And in this case, we had their logo artwork and this was kind of it. And they said, Okay, well we want a logo build, make it 3D, have a pull-out. The idea was let's have this ball, soccer ball that they have...let's have a stadium in there, and then we'll pull through the stadium, like you saw, pull-out as the logo resolves. And this all happens in 3 seconds. So we get a timing down that we need, and a kind of direction that we're going, and then go. Whenever we start with Illustrator artwork like this, it's easy to bring this in and start modeling it. So any other modeling tools in here...you can bring in Illustrator files if they're, I think, Illustrator 8. And just get the lines right off the bat and start extruding them. But Cinema's also got, as part of the Ciniversity package, this plug-in called ArtSmart, which is very nice. So if you bring in this ArtSmart object, this allows you to just come in here and select your Illustrator file. And it will load that up, and you can see it will already put all these different layers together, based on how the Illustrator project was built. And then you've got all these controls as far as how you're going to spread those out, how much depth you want on them, the off-set of all these. So it's a quick way to just get going with an Illustrator file. You don't have to spend too much time cleaning up the Illustrator pads and everything. You can do all that in the vector program. Bring this in with ArtSmart, and you're right here, ready to go. In our production house we have a modeler, who models in...he likes to model in Maya. That's just his own personal preference, that's fine, he's a great modeler. But we're able to bring in all his models, so while he will start embellishing the models that we get, a lot of times we'll get a base model for him, send him that, and then he'll start adding all these details. We use FBX to go back and forth from Maya. So you can use FBX to bring that in. So I'll open up the model that we got from him now. So this is the model that we got from our modeler through Maya, so clean out the cameras here. You can see he's added in just a little more detail, in the bevels, and the edges, some little clamps and stuff, just to give it some production value. When we start with a model like this, and especially if it's coming in from a different program, well the first thing you want to look at whenever you're starting a project is your project scale. And it's important to determine this project scale before you start working with it, and especially before you start giving it out to other people and other artists. Because, this scale is going to affect how you work it a lot. And a lot of times people start off by scaling different things in different ways. And if the scales are off, it can cause massive problems. So it's important to establish the scale when you first start the project. And what we like to do in Cinema is, we just create a cube...and you see this cube is humongous. And it immediately tells me my scale, that that object came in on was really too small. We like to have, kind of our hero object to be about the size of a standard cube. That works well. You're going to notice things if your scales are weird, that shadows aren't showing up, it gets real difficult to animate if you're working in micro-scale or huge scale. So again, I can't emphasize that enough. Get the scale to a point where it's easy to work with. The other thing to know about Cinema, is there are two different ways of scaling it in this program. So you've got here your model tool and your object tool. Now, the difference between those is subtle, and it has everything to do with scale. If I scale up these objects... I'm just going to grab my...move my cube out of the way so we can see my logo there. See? It's all tiny. So I want to make this much bigger, especially if I'm going to have a whole stadium inside that soccer ball, which is way down here. I want this to be much bigger. So I'm going to grab that. You can see in the coordinates here, my scale is 1:1:1. You can also see, if I look down through some of these objects, some of the scales are off. Just because of the way he modeled it in Maya, he might have squished it in one way or another way, and the scales come in not 1:1:1. Sometimes that's okay. Again, sometimes it's going to cause problems. So it's something to go through and check your scales. And an easy way to fix it, I'll get into right now. But first I want to show you this. So, Model tool, we start scaling up with that...there we go. See, my object's getting bigger, but my scale there is still remaining 1:1:1. Now, what this is doing is, it's actually moving the points in space. I'm actually making this model bigger. And I can go to about 5000%. It's about 50 times as big there. So that's what you...you want to use the Model tool whenever you're adjusting the actual scale of the model. Use the Object tool when you're animating the scale or you need to just have a scale factor in there. Now, you can see what the difference is. If I actually go to my Object tool and start scaling up, now you see my scale there, increase. And if you punch this in numerically, it's always going to be adjusting as if you were scaling up with the Model tool. That's what this is, here. It's giving it a scale factor. So those actual points in the computer are still saying, "They're only this far apart. " But they're multiplying it by 50 to look like it's 50 times as big. That's the only difference there. Just something to keep in mind of, because that can screw up a lot of your projects when you get down the line and your scales are all off. So now once we've got this set, as far as the size that we want, we want to go through and again, make sure we're at that 1:1:1 scale. So again, I've got things here that are off. My entire logo is at 50:50:50 here. And a nice way to do this, especially when you're starting, you don't have anything animated at this point, is to come into your Mesh commands. And there's a reset scale option here. If you go to the little Option box there, there's a compensate points. What this means is it will look at where the points are, how they visually look right there, and then reset the scale so it keeps everything at that size. So once I do that, it's going to reset my scale to 1:1:1. And also all of the children of that object, 1:1:1. All right, so now we've got our scale set. I'm going to go ahead and throw a couple lights in here, because now, when we're going to start setting up the look of this guy, which is established based on the art direction. In this case, they wanted this enamel, almost glass-covered reflection look on this whole thing, using the color palette from the artwork here. But whenever we start setting up materials, you've got to work with lighting too. Lights, the materials, and then the environment that this object sits in, all play together to establish this whole look. So it's something you've gotta take a look at as a whole whenever we do this. We like to start, when we're lighting something, not getting too crazy into too many lights at once. Too many lights, too many shadows. Keep it simple, keep it low-key, until we start getting into where you need extra lights in there, where you need extra detail. When you start it, start it simple. So I'm just going to bring in a single light. And I'll pull it out and I'll have this, just be like a general key light, three-quarters here. I also like to use the interactive renderer or the interactive render region here. If you do Alt-R, or it's also under render, interactive render region. This gives you just a little window, that will do kind of a quick preview render. Lets you see your materials, your shadows, how it's all going to look and a quick... You've got some quality control of two pentagon, where this is at your preview or that's really close to the final output. I like to keep this open when I'm working at this point, just so I can see how this is looking. So in my light, I'm going to go to general and just turn on some shadows, soft shadows. You can see, it gives me a nice, soft look there. If you want to increase the sharpness of this, you can go into your Shadow Settings and increase the resolution of that soft shadow map. I like to go up to about 1,000 or so. That's gonna crisp them up a little bit, but it's not so hard that they're like hard shadows. Get something like that. Then I can copy this light. I can just hold Control and drag to make duplicates here. Copy that light and just move it on over down here, so it serves as kind of a fill light. And I can turn Shadows off on that one, so I'm not getting too many double shadows. Okay, now that I've got a couple of lights set up, I'm going to start working with some materials here. So, we usually have a library that we'll pull from. But if you're starting from scratch, you'll pull all your materials in through your Material Manager, down here. And you can start creating from scratch. Or, Cinema's got a nice content browser that comes with, when you get the package, all these great preset materials you can work with. So there's a ton of stuff in here. You can see all these different surfaces, rocks, fabrics, glass, all kinds of stuff. Which is nice because you can also, in addition to just using these, you can bring them in and see how different techniques, how they were built. So for this I'm just going to bring in a regular silver metal here. And you just drag it into your Material Manager and there it is. And if you double-click on it, it'll open up a separate Material Editor. You can edit the materials in the Attribute Manager here also, but I like to use this separate Material Editor, It just gives you a little bit more control. I like the interface of it a little better here. You can see this material's only using the Reflectance Channel. Now, the Reflectance is new to Cinema version 16, if you're not familiar. If you're using an older version, this is going to be new to you. And this is a very powerful channel. It can also be very confusing. So I'm going to explain how this is put together and what you really need to know about it. With the Reflectance channel, most of what you're going to want to do is right here, in your Roughness, your Reflection and your Specular strength. That's going to do 90% of whatever you need for your reflection. You have all these other options, which makes this very powerful, but we're going to keep this simple right now. You can see also up here, I've got layers. You can have layers upon layers of different reflections, different types of bumpy reflections, specularity, all kinds of stuff to layer all of these materials together. Again, you can go crazy with this. Obviously the more you do, the more blurry reflections you throw in there, the longer your renders are going to take. So in this case, again, we want just a smoother, kind of a glassy surface. I'm going to go ahead and take my roughness down, so it's at nothing. This is going to give me a nice clean reflection here. And in order to control the reflection and the specular separate, I'm going to split those out so they're on two different layers. So this one I'm going to call Reflection. And then I'm going to take the spec strength down. You'll notice that the spec strength right now, if I bring it up, it's not showing up at all anyway. And that's because in this new system, you need roughness to have specular. Now, once I add roughness, you can see, now I can adjust my specular settings. Just the way it's designed. But it's also one of the reasons we split it apart, so that we don't have to have blurry reflections in order to have specularity. It's kind of faking it, but in this case, we're trying to increase the speed that we're going with. So we're going to take the roughness down again and just get rid of the specular on this. I'll turn my reflection all the way up. So really I'm going to control the reflection strength just with my layer strength up here, you'll see that's going to really be my strength control. And now I'll add a separate channel. You've got these different models you can look at, play with, but they're all pretty similar. Beckwin's a standard one I'm going to bring in. This one will just be my specular. So for specular now I'm going to need to increase the roughness so my specular's going to show up. But because I want this to be fast, I don't want to have blurry reflections necessarily in this one, I'm going to take my reflection down to nothing, and that will speed it up. So again, like I did with reflection, just bring my strength all the way up so it's fully there and then use this top-slider to control my spec. You'd also see that, when my spec is fully on, it's completely obliterating the reflection. That's because this layer right here is set to normal. I just want to set it to add, so that spec gets added in here. You really want to set this attenuation to additive also when you're doing just the spec. The spec's just getting added on top of your reflection. So I've got the spec and the reflection, they're way blown out bright. So I'm going to bring these way down. And then when you bring those layers down, what that's doing is it's just letting whatever you have in your color channel show through. So right now my color channel's off. But if I turn that on. See now, I get some blue that shows up in there. And in this case, I'm just going to make a black material, so take this down about 10%, a little grey in there. And go ahead and maybe bump up my reflection a little bit. Something like that. Again with this, you want to start simply and then build on it as we go. And add detail as you go, once you start establishing the look. So now I'll just call this "black glass. " All right. So once we have a material that we can start throwing on here, I want to put it on this rim, which is black. Again, we're just referencing this, that outer rim is black. That's on this outer outline. Just going to drag that material on there, and then you'll see it update in my renderer. Now what it's looking like right now, I'm getting some reflection in there. But the rest of it's kind of looking really flat, and that's just because it's reflecting. It's going to reflect whatever's in your scene. And if there's nothing in the scene, you're not going to see anything. So we want to create an environment that this can all reflect in. So you get some nice detail and variation in that reflective surface. So to do that, we can use... I'm just going to create a sphere and make it huge so that it encompasses my whole scene, something like 5,000. So now you see my sphere back there, and you can also see it affecting the reflection. Now, we don't want this sphere to be showing up in the renderer. We don't want to see it in our scene. We just want it to be there for the reflection. So to control that kind of thing, you can add tags onto these objects. All these tags just give your objects additional properties and additional attributes that they can control. So in this case, we're going to use a compositing tag. That's under Cinema 4D tags, compositing. And the compositing tag lets you turn on and off all these different attributes, casts and receives shadows, whether it's seen by the camera, seen by the rays, seen by the aim and inclusion, all these different things. So I'm going to turn off shadow casting. So the lights aren't affecting it. And I'm going to turn off scene by camera, so that the camera won't pick it up. Now, it's just showing in the reflection in the scene, so it's going to be just a reflection. So really, the only thing I want on is scene by rays. And the rays are what's going to be, since this is a ray trace render, this is what's going to be calculating your reflections, your transparencies, all that stuff. So you can see even with rays on, I have still options within those rays; transparency, reflection and refraction. And if we're going to have glass in this scene, unless you want your environment map to show up through the glass, you want to turn off scene by transparency and scene by refraction also. That tends to catch people a lot too. They'll set up a reflection map and then, middle-way through the project, they're like, "Why does my glass look weird, or funky, or there's something showing through it? " It's just because you're seeing that reflection map through the glass. You just need to turn it off here. So once we get that set up, now, I can create... put a different material on this sphere, so that I get actually reflected environment. We like to use HDRI maps for that, because they give a nice big range of color. And we'll just put that in the luminance channel, so that it's not affected by the lighting. It'll be its own self-lit thing. So we just grab...this is one of the old original HDRIs that came out, but we really like it. It gives a nice gradient of color here, it's the HDR probe. Now, with a lot of these HDRIs, and you take your own HDRI with a chrome ball, you're going to get one that looks like this. It looks like a sphere and you've got these black corners. And it's just...they call it a probe. So that's typically what an HDRI file might look like, which is fine. But when you map this onto a sphere, you're going to get those black corners in there. And what Cinema can do is...it's got, in its picture viewer, if you just go to the picture viewer, and under File, there is convert HDR probe. So if you have an HDR probe, you want to run this, just do convert HDR probe. And then under scene, I can select my probe there. And you'll see it unwraps it and puts it into a spherical projection. So now I can take this converted one instead of the probe and then load that one. It'll just be the same name, _con for converted. Load that one in. And now it will project correctly onto my sphere, giving me a much better environment projection. Okay, so we've got our HDRI here. I'm going to throw this onto the sphere. And you'll see, now we get some nice variation in that metal, or that glass. You can hide this in the editor. Top button is editor, bottom one's renderer. If I do the bottom one, you'll see it vanishes from reflection. And the nice thing about having that separate sphere, as opposed to loading this HDRI into the environment channel in the material, is If you're familiar with the environment channel, it does this. It tries to fake this. It puts a little sphere around... not literally, but it's like it puts a little sphere around your object, with whatever material you have in there. The problem is you don't have as much control with how it's oriented. So, the nice thing of having a separate sphere here is, I can come in and rotate the sphere around, play with its orientation. I can play with the tiling on here. If I want a lot more detail and reflection, I just tile this up a lot more. And it's going to affect that reflection. So you get a lot of control by having a separate external environment that you can control here. If you're reflecting something in your environment, you've got this blue tinge that you want to come through. You can definitely add that in. And in the material here, you have a filter effect and we do this all the time too. So you can run this through a filter and then click on that. And you can adjust hue in here, give it a little tinge. You can adjust the brightness and contrast if you want these to be much more stark, the reflection in there. You've got a lot of control over how that's going to look at this point. All right. So now, we've got something we're kind of satisfied with. Let's move on from here. We can start creating more materials and really texture this all up. And it's very easy to do. Once we establish where this look is headed, we can just start branching it off from there. So I'm just going to create a duplicate of that black glass and we'll call this white one, "white glass. " And I'm just going to change the color that's in my color settings. The reflective properties and the specular properties, I'm going to leave as is. Just going to change the color. And now, I can just go back and forth between my artwork and my scene, and just start applying this different texture to where it needs to go. You can just drag it right onto the object if you want. This needs to go on the interior here or you can find those pieces in your scene. A lot of times you'll have a scene hierarchy, you want to find it. You select the piece in here, Turn this off. I'm going to hide this grid too, so it's a little bit clearer. There we go. All right, so if I select a piece in here, you can come up. This is set as a shortcut key because we use it all the time. Scroll to first active, it's going to just pop you right to the object here in your object manager. So, in this one, I see all my inner pieces. I'm just going to drag that material right up there to cover all those. Going to find this one. That's in this group, copy, control, drag. Just start copying these materials all over. Now, this section here, is a glass dome that was added in. They wanted this soccer ball to exist within this glass dome. Again, this is going to be the stadium. This glass, I'm going to hide right now. The soccer ball on there, they had requested that the soccer ball kind of rotate and move in place as the logo resolves. Obviously with the 2D, the way the 2D vector was brought in, we can't rotate this, as it's going to be a soccer ball. So I'm just going to hide these patches for right now and worry about that problem later. All right. So I'm going to texture the rest of this real quick. That's going to be black. I'll make this entire section black. And then, I'm going to need a blue for this. I'm going to copy this material again, go blue. And for the color settings in here, we can just color-pick in after effects, just get the color-values from that. I'm gonna find the color picker. CM at 196-185 for my HSV. What did I say? I always forget. 196-185. You punch those values in. So we've got that blue, drop that in and a couple more things here. I think there is a dark blue on the edge, which is same hue, just a little bit darker, 60. My red here is going to be 357, 88/84. I'll copy this for dark. I'll do the red first. It's in my head, 357, 88 for red. And then dark blue. So you can see, once you establish the first one, get it going, it's very easy and quick to just start going down the line and start populating the rest of your scene with that same look. Oh, that dark blue, I need to change the color, 16. Then just find these sections here. There's my base. I'm going to make the base dark blue. My outline here, make that red. And this is going to be black, this section. Black and black. Here we go. And I've got these extra details out here. For this, we can maybe use a chrome to give it a little highlight, a little sheen. So I'm going to duplicate the black on that, and call this one chrome. For that, I'm just going to pump that reflection way up. Essentially, it's the same thing, only just much more reflective. It gives you a nice chrome. Extra details right there. That whole group is going to be all these brackets and everything. Drag that on. Now, we can come in here and see if that reflection looks okay. See them getting a big giant big specular on this. What we could do on that is if you've come to the conclusion that that spec is just way too much. Maybe I just don't want that spec on here. You can come in here and just turn that spec off. That's going to clean that up. Again, we're going to play with things like that, inclusion, exclusion, and having specs turned on for certain material, turned off for certain lights. The idea here, in this case, is not to recreate reality. It's to make this logo legible and make it read. Make it nice and shiny and look cool. But most importantly, it's got to be legible. It's gotta read. You don't want big squashes of light getting in the way. So we've got this set up here. Now, what I want to do is, I'm going to bring that stadium in that we need to set up. So we have a separate stadium model that we are working with here. We have some generic stadium models that we can bring in. The modeler can make something specific for it. In this case, we just want something circular, so we grab this. I'm going to copy this model in. So just Ctrl-C. Under window, this lists your open scene here. Go back to my model and just Ctrl-V, paste that guy in. You can see, it's off, it's big, it's not in the right place. What we want to do is first, just rotate this over in the right orientation. Model tool, doesn't matter in this case, about 90 degrees. And then when you're rotating, moving anything, if you hold Shift, you're going to lock that rotation to a whole number. Right now, it's doing anything. But hold Shift and it will lock it. Or you can do it numerically in here too. That's fine. And place things like that. What I like to do is I'll find something that's in the right place that I want. For example, this circle. We'll see, its axis is kind of off. And this is another thing that can happen when you import a model. The axis might be off. It's a good idea to just center the axis up for important elements like this, especially if you're going to be rotating it. The axis needs to be in the right spot. So you can control where the axis is with the axis tool here, if you turn that on. Or if you need to center up the axis, center it to the entire object, under mesh, axis center. This is where you have all your axis controls. If you just go, center axis to, it's going to pop the axis right to the middle of that object. There's a shortcut for that too, that's very handy. Now, with the axis in the right place there, I can use this as a parent and a guide for where I want to put any other objects. So with the stadium, I'm going to just drag the stadium as a child of that...whatever that was. What did I pick? Back click...child of that. And now, once it's a child of that, it's going to show me its relative position here. I can just right click on the little arrows and that's going to zero it out and pop it into the same position. There are transfer functions too, which let you transfer, using that...lets you do the same thing. But I like to do it this way. It's kind of a quick way for me to center objects to other objects. So we've got our stadium in the right place. I'm going to go ahead and scale this down. I'm gonna scale with the model tool, so my scales remain correct. And just bring this down so it's kind of in the position that the ball was in. And we also wanted to keep this profile of the stadium relatively squat, so that this glass dome that's on here, it can all fit in there and be contained. Right now, we've got this high profile, with all these lights up here. What I'm going to do is just do a little more modeling adjustment here and grab the rings, the column, the stadium lights, the different sections here. And just go ahead and move them down so that the profile's a little bit more squat. It's closer to what I want. All right. So once we've got that in place, we've got our textures and everything. And now, one of the other things we've got to build here is this field, the grass field that's going to be in the middle of the stadium. So to do the field, I'll show you how we use the grass in there and how you can set up grass fields pretty easily. We're going to set up first, just get an object in there that we can put the grass on. So I'll just bring in a disc. And the disc, I'm going to center it up to the stadium, just like we did with the other ones. So, center that. Set another rotation, that brings that right in there. I'm going to pull this out of the ball so that it's own thing. Move it up too. What you're seeing here is co-planing. You get these shading effects. It's when you've got two objects right on top of each other. You'll notice the shading effects. You want to make sure your objects are separated. See, once I raise it a little bit, I clean that up. Make it a little bit bigger so it's within the stadium here. And now, I'm going to throw a grass texture on that. So I create a new texture, call it grass. And fill that up. In this, I'm going to turn off reflectance, just have it in the color channel. And I've got different grasses here. We've made this grass one that already has soccer field lines on it. And has a nice, big high-res texture. I think it's about 5k, 3,500 by 5,000. That's going to let you up close and still maintain these crisp soccer lines within our texture. That, I'll throw on the disc. And you'll see, there are my soccer lines. However, it's nice and squat. And that's just because my soccer lines are huge, not huge, they're elongated along one axis. Whenever you apply a texture like this, to any object, it will go by default to UVW projection. So if you see, look at the tag here. See the projection? By default it's set to UVW. All these parametric objects that you've got in here, cubes all this stuff, they all have their own UVs already set up. Ahich is fine in a lot of cases. On some other cases, we need to adjust the UVs so that they are correct. Or sometimes you might not even go with UV projection, you can go with any other different kind of projection you want here. So in this case, instead of UVW, I'm going to move it over to a flat projection. You can see now, it's stretched and flat along there. You want to see how this texture is being applied, you can just come over to your texture tool here and you can actually see your texture gizmo and how it's applying to that object. So in this case, to adjust it, I'm going to go to the axis tool here and turn that on too. And we can now rotate the way this texture is being applied. We'll rotate it 90 degrees. Now, it's almost looking like my UV projecting was looking, but now, I can just scale this on an individual axis and adjust how that texture is applied. Now, get that circle to be nice and perfect in there. If in these cases you're working with textures and you can see it's all chunky right here. If you want to get a better representation, you can come into your material. And under editor, you get the editor display resolution, texture preview size here. So I think by default, it's 256 or something like that. We can bump it up to 2K, and that's going to give you a much nicer preview in your editor. All right. So now, we've got our texture on here but what we want, and especially the direction of this was, the camera's going to be pulling across this field. When we get close to the grass like this, the texture doesn't usually hold up, it doesn't sell that this is grass. We actually want to put grass onto this object. The Cinema has got a nice hair system so you can grow hair on it. And hair is very powerful, in that it can be dynamic. You can be just wind blowing through it, all kind of stuff like that. But it comes at a price. It's a little more expensive. It also has this architectural grass. I think it's under grow grass. Environment? Where is it? It's here somewhere. There it is, grow grass. So if I have my disc selected and go to create environment, there's just this grow grass option. And what this is, it's almost like a very simplified hair solution, I think. It just gives it like a nice fur. So your options are very limited. It's not going to be dynamic, but it's going to give you that same look that a nice hair system would. Just a more simplified version. And faster too. So to see how this is going to look, now I've grown hair on here, I can bring in my render region again. And you see these hairs are humongous. So clearly, we need to go in here and edit this a little bit. And scale...again, this is where scale's important. Again, this is after we scaled our object up 50 times. If we started at that micro scale that we were at, this would be almost impossible to work with. So to edit the grass, you see the grass tag on here. All that this is doing is linking to the grass material. The grass material, right here, is where you're going to control all your grass settings. You see, this is it. It's not much in there, so it's very simple to work with. All we need to do right now, let's adjust the length, bring that down to height of about 1. You see it update here. It's very quick too and very responsive. So blade width, set that down at .1. And now, we get small individual blades. And you see they're very sparse. And then you've got your density control here. We go all the way up to 100%, but they're still really sparse. You can go way over 100% here. The slider won't, but feel free to go up to 1000%. Once we do that, you'll see it start to... Okay, now it's taking its time, but it will respond and will come up. Now, you start to get some grass in there. Now, what we want to do is we want this grass to mix with the texture that we have on there. Right now, you see it's got this kind of bland-ish green color and it's contrasting with our nice vibrant green field. What we're going to do is load up that field texture in the grass material. And what is this going to do is, it will grow the grass according to the color that we have in that texture. The problem is, you see, oh good, we get white grass now, which is cool. But it's in the wrong place. And that's because this material now is going by the UVW projection that was squished, remember? So we need to go in and readjust the UVs so that this grass texture will look right. So I'm going to close this and we'll go in and fix the UVs real quick. I'm going to turn this off. Now, to do that, on all these parametric objects, the only way to adjust the UV is to make them editable so they become points and polys. You lose the parametric function of it but you can change it however you want at that point. So I'm going to make it editable over here. You see, it changes just in points and polys. Now I have access to the UVW tag, which is on there. This tag represents that squished projection. I'm just going to blow that away and delete that. What I wanted it to be is based off this flat projection that we have. This is good, this is the way we want it. So if you just right-click on that tag, you can say Generate UVW Coordinates and it will generate from that projection. So you go ahead and do that. Now, you see what it does, is it will put a new UV tag on there. It'll also switch my projection to UV. See, now its setting has changed the UVs based on that flat projection. And now, I can go back and look at my render again. And now, you see my grass grows in the proper places to align with the texture. Anytime we're dealing with a field or anything like that, where you need the grass growing along proper lines, you might need to keep going back and forth with adjusting your UVs. And a lot of times if we're dealing with a field, we might not necessarily be doing the entire field of grass. We might be just doing a little corner or a little chunk. And in that case you can cut it out, flatten out the UVs on that and really grow a nice, dense field of grass just on that one section. Now, at this point, you can start getting into...again, this grass is still pretty long, only at 1. I'll shorten it up a bit more, so it looks a little better. And then, at this point, we need to balance your quality with your render time, with the density number that you've got here. Obviously, this is still very sparse. It's not really holding up. You can go to 5000%. Now you can start looking at your render times and how things are looking as far as what you're getting with quality. It's still relatively quick. You'll see, this is going to give me something and it's only going to take maybe 20 seconds or so. Here is your render time down here, 16 seconds. And we're starting to fill that field out a little bit more. Now, what you can do is, you can get it to this point. That's looking decent enough. Maybe when I do the final render, before I set the final render up, I can afford to go up to a minute a frame. I'll go set this up to 20,000% . So, in the final render you'll know it's going to be a little bit more. But this is where you've got to do a little bit of experimenting between your render times and your quality. And that's just a constant balancing act. So I think the final number we settled on was like 20,000% or something like that. It's also good to do... I mean, the interactive render region is nice for this kind of thing, for doing quick ones. But when you are setting up what your final look is going to be, you're definitely going to want to come in and just do a really quick....what's your final render going to look like. For that you can set your render settings. I'm going to turn off save. I'm going to set this to a 960, 540 frame. Then, if you do render to picture viewer without that on and set the current frame, this will just give you what your final frame is going to look like. It will give you an accurate time of what you're going to look like too. All right. So now, we've got our grass laid in there. What I'm going to do now is set up remember basic camera moves. So we've kinda got the scene set up. Now, I'll run a camera through this. So we get this camera that comes through the stadium and gets to our logo resolve. And again, whenever we start animating with these cameras, we try to do it in big, broad strokes. Just get the basic beats down and then fine-tune from there. So I'm going to bring a camera in the scene, just a regular camera. It's going to come in from wherever my view-point is, so I will turn the cameras on. See, I've got all these other scene cameras in here too, which I can just get rid of. They came over with the file. Pick those. So what I know for sure is this is going to end with the logo resolve. I'm going to set up the camera to just be in the final position right now. So I'm just going to center up its X, its Y. Z is just going to be pulled back from the center and then zero out its rotation too. That's just going to center my camera kind of directly to the logo, as is. Now, I can look through that camera, and I'm going to just pull back on the Z until I get this within my tile and action safes. This will be the final position of the camera. That's pretty good. Now, I want to set up the timeline for this project to be right. We work in 60 frames a second. You can set up whatever FPS you're working in, in your project settings. I just hit Control-D, it's also in edit project settings. This is where you set your frame per second. You see, it changes my timeline down here. And then in your render settings, you also need to change your frame per second. Now, this allows you to do...you have two different controls over your frames per second. In case you want to do high speed render or something like that, or try to do some kind of slow motion thing, you can set up your project to animate 30 frames per second. And then you can render it out at 300 frames a second. So it'll get that slow motion effect that you want. It lets you do that by changing your frame rate in your render settings. Now with this setup, I'm at 3 seconds, which is what I need. This whole animation needs to resolve by 3 seconds. Then we're going to hold for an additional 10 seconds or something like that. I'm just going to set this to about 240 right now, so I can see it land and hold for a bit. Frame 180 is where I'm going to want that camera to stop and resolve. So I'm going to move my time slider to 180 there and go ahead and just key-frame my final position for the camera. Actually, I'm not going to key-frame it yet because what I need to do first is set up the other motions for the camera. Now, a lot of times when you're animating camera, you can just do a free floating camera, just on its own, where you're animating all the different parts, X, Y, Z, the rotations, it's all within one camera, which can work fine. But when you are dealing with...you want smooth orbits, a nice smooth arc in your animation, it can get difficult to balance all of these different curves on a single object. So what we like to do instead of animating all these different movements on one object is to kind of split your movements out into separate objects. So, if we look at my scene, and just break down what this camera's going to do, we know it's going to pull down from the stadium, the top of the stadium, through the stadium as the camera is arcing like this. And then pull back from the logo. Right now, I've got the camera and I've got the pull-back kind of set-up here on my Z. What I want to do is have a separate object to control my arcing and then another one to control the up and down translation that we've got going on there. So, we usually just use a null objects to create the null object, drop the camera inside. You'll see the null object when it comes in. It's going to be right at the center here. This is nice because now, it allows me to animate this object and create a smooth arc for my camera. You'll see if I move my pitch, just animating the pitch of that null there, it's giving me a smooth arc for that camera move. It would be very difficult, might not be very difficult but it's kind of a pain to animate the camera on its own to get that nice, smooth arc, if you're controlling this movement and this movement back, plus its rotation, it's much easier to put it in a null and let that control your arc movement. So we've got one for the rotation. I'm going to call this camera rotation. And then create another null for the Y translation. Since it's pulling down, I want a control for that too. This would be camera translation. Now, this isn't necessarily how all our cameras are set up all the time. It is going to depend on the project and what your camera really needs to do. If all your camera's doing is coming out, rotating around your logo, you probably only need one of these. So, depending on what you think your camera is going to need to do, that's going to determine how you set your camera rig up. Now that I've got kind of all of my animations in place here with all this, and start laying down some keys. With all this in place again, this is all going to settle at 180. So I'm going to key-frame my cameras, pull back just at Z position right here. The rotation, again, is going to be the pitch, so I'm going to key-frame the pitch only. And then this one is only going to be for my Y movement up and down. You can see, I moved it there, it's not moving. That's because I'm still in the access mode. Make sure you're not in access mode. And then you can move that. So key-frame the Y there. Everything is going to settle in this position at 180. I'm gonna go to the beginning, first frame. Now I will start just getting this to where the initial position is going to be for this animation. So, I'm going to push my camera all the way in, to about zero. Key-frame that. I know my rotation's going to be 90 degrees looking up. I'll set that to 90. And I know this translation is going to be up, looking past here. So I'll key-frame that about there. Again, we just want the broad strokes. Just get my first and last keys in place. And then from here, we can start adding in more keys and more detail. A lot of times you run into people who have trouble with animation. That's because they're trying to do too much. They're trying to put too many keys in there, trying to re-correct themselves as they go. This doesn't look right, let me key this. Blow that away, start simple, get the first and last, let the computer do what it does by going in between all of this. From here, you can start tweaking to get it smooth. This what the camera's doing now. You see it pull back, sweep out and settle. We look at my view-port. You see this is what we get. I always see them rushing through, breaking through this stuff as we go. But it's kind of there. I'm pulling out of the stadium a little too soon, too. I want to drag through the stadium a little bit more, too. Now, from here, what we can do is, we can go into the timeline and start just tweaking with the curves of the animation. So if I look in my curves mode, this is keys mode here. If I open this up, you'll see my three tracks that I've got going on. If I go to curves, now we can see each curve of that animation. Again, I'm going to pull out here, so we can see what this is going to do with the camera. So my first Y position move that I've got, I don't want to kind of ease into that stadium and then pull out. I wanted to shoot right down through it. So I'm going to take this tangent here. It automatically by default comes in as a smooth ease in. And just pull that tangent down so we get a nice, straight shot there. I always do sound effects when I talk. Is that helpful or distracting? Okay. So, I can get rid of this tangent all together if you go under key, you've got different options that you can punch in for your tangents. Zero length on your tangents is gonna knock that down to zero. So, you get a key that shoots right out like that. Now, we can see, just by doing that, we've already delayed...we haven't really delayed the sweep o