Create Sports Matchups Quickly with the Take System

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Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 07:49
  • Views: 3420
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Powerful sports graphics templating via the C4DR17 Take System.

The Take System in Cinema 4D Release 17 makes it easy to create multiple variations of a scene, like all the possible matchups between football teams in a league. In this tutorial, you'll see how you can quickly build variations by copying overrides, modifying attributes in the Take Attribute Section, and taking advantage of Take hierarchy.

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Transcript

In this quick tip, I'm going to show you how you can easily build out all of the variations for a sports motion graphics template using the Cinema 4D Release 17 Take System. And this is the kind of thing that you've probably seen a lot in sports graphics or probably even done yourself, creating the different match ups for the football teams in a league. You probably have tried to just do it all in 2D because setting up in Cinema 4D prior to the Take System was a little bit tricky, and you do incur a render penalty when you render all of this in 3D. I can't do anything about the rendering speed, but the Take System makes it super easy to set up these variations. And this is handy because here we can have the ability to have the 3D text. And you can't see it right now, but when we render this, there's actually grass that interacts with the text and the helmets and it looks really nice. So let's take a look at how we would build this out in the Take System. I'm going to jump back into a scene where I've removed all of the visitor takes as well as the home take for the Bears, and I'm just going to show you how we built this out. I didn't do anything super tricky in the scene, except that I have created an Xpresso setup here on the null, and all this is doing is moving some of the parameters out of the individual materials and into some user data just to make it a little easier to get to. I could have just as easily overridden those parameters directly in the materials, but this allows me to access them more easily. So here in the Take System, we're going to go ahead and create another take and we're going to name this H_bears because this is going to be the take for the home team as the Bears. And in fact the Bears is already set up here as the home team, so all we have to do is going here to Team 1, which is the home team, and we're going to select all of the attributes here in the user data and we're going to choose override. And we'll do the same thing on the text. What we want to do here is grab the text itself as well as the font, the height, the horizontal spacing, and the kerning. And this is because in addition to the changing the text of the team name, we're probably going to change the font, and because we changed the font, we might need to tweak the height and the kerning. So I'm going to go ahead and override those parameters. So now we have individual takes that set up on the home side for the Eagles, the Dolphins, the Cyclone, the Lightning and the Bears. So now all we need to do is create our takes for the visitor's side. And to do this, all I have to do is simply take all of the takes I've already got created, and I'm going to control drag to create duplicates. But I actually want to put these duplicates in the hierarchy because I want them to inherit whatever home team is set up. So I'm going to drag it under the home Eagles, and we'll go through and rename these quickly. So I'm going to call this V_Eagles, V_Dolphins, V_Cyclone, V_Lightning, and V_Bears. And there is even an easier way to do that with the naming tools. Stay tuned for a quick tip tomorrow on that. So now here we have the Eagles, Dolphins, Cyclone, and Lightning and Bears. But they're modifying the wrong helmet. We're modifying Team 1 instead of Team 2. So now we just need to copy those overrides to the Team 2 objects. So I'm going to go into the object manager and we'll select Team 2 and we'll override all of these parameters. And we'll go to the text, and we're also going to grab the same parameters, the text, the font, the height, the horizontal spacing and the kerning, and we'll override those. Now we'll jump back into the Take System, and you can see we have Team 2 overrides here as well as Team 1. So to make this the visitor Eagles, what I'm going to do is go in and copy the overrides from Team 1, and I can do that by selecting Team 1 here, and I'm going to use the attribute section specific to the Take manager. If you don't have that visible, click this button right here on the upper right of the Take System. And the nice thing about this is it just shows the attributes that are overridden. So I'm going to select all of those and choose copy, and I'm going to select the Team 2 null, and we're just going to choose paste identical. And we'll do the same thing with the text. We'll select these attributes and choose copy, and we'll go to the Team 2 text and we're going to choose paste identical. And paste identical will automatically put all of those attributes on the attributes that have the same name or the same attribute on the other object. Now we want to go ahead and blow out the Team 1 overrides here in the visitor's take. We don't want any Team 1 overrides in the visitor's take, so I'm just going to select them and delete them. So we'll select these Team 2 overrides here, and we're going to drag them into the Dolphins. And just hold down control as you drag them over the Dolphins take, and those overrides will be copied into the Dolphins take. Now again same deal. We're just going to take the Dolphins text here and copy it, and we're going to select the text here for the Team 2 and we're just going to choose paste identical. We're going to choose Team 1's user data, copy it, and paste identical. And again we're going to select Team 1 and clear out those overrides just by hitting the delete key. Now we're going to do it once again. We're going to just copy Team 2 over to the Cyclone, and we're going to select Team 1, copy, Team 2, paste, Team 1, copy, Team 2, paste. And once again we want to remove the Team 1 overrides. We're just working on down the line. We're going to do the Lightning. We're going to take Team 1 and copy, Team 2 and paste, Team 1 and copy, Team 2 and paste. And blow out those Team 1 overrides. One last time, we'll take these Team 2 overrides and drag them into the Bears take, and I'm going to hold down the control key so they're copied. And we're going to go ahead and copy the values from the Team 1 overrides and paste them into Team 2, and do the same thing with the text, copy and paste. And so now as easy as that. Once I blow out the Team 1 overrides, we have the Eagles versus the Dolphins, the Eagles versus the Cyclone, the Eagles versus the Lightning, and the Eagles versus the Bears. But what happens when the Eagles aren't the home team? Well, this is where it gets super cool. Because the Take System is hierarchical, all you have to do is take these same takes and control drag them underneath the Dolphins, and control drag them underneath the Cyclone, and control drag them underneath the Lightning, and control drag them underneath the Bears. And now I have the Eagles-Dolphins, the Dolphins-Cyclone, the Lightning-Cyclone, the Lightning-Bears, the Bears-Dolphins. I can make any combination that I need to make out of these five teams, and we are ready to play ball with the Cinema 4D Release 17 Take System.
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