Creating a MoGraph Sports Intro Animatic: Blocking Out Shot Two

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 21:09
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  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we’ll model the main driveshaft and the trench it sits in along with the leg assembly that the holds up the conveyor belts.

In this video we’ll model the main driveshaft with a cylinder primitive and a spline cogwheel extruded using CV-Extrude Splines. Next we tackle the trench with a CV-Extruded spline mask that was made with the help of another CV Tool, CV-Boole Tools. The trench’s lower floor will then be made with a plane primitive. Next we’ll set up the conveyor leg assembly with some cubes, a cloner and an instance object. The leg assembly then gets converted to an xref and we create a row of them with another cloner to make the trench “roof”.

CV-Extrude Splines can be found here.

CV-Boole Tools can be found here.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll build a driveshaft and gears under the conveyor belt. We'll also construct the trench it lives in, and the conveyor belt legs and spinners which make up the roof. So, let's go ahead and jump into Cinema. And save out our file. This is going to be shot 023DV1. Hop into your render settings with control-b, and then just right-click this render setting and you can load your preview preset right here. So that sets all this stuff up. I'm just going to delete this old one. You don't have to do that, but I just like to keep it clean. So, here's our render token. So, all that is set up. And then I wanted to show you a reference. Now, this is just something that I used for the concept of those gears. It's just something that could run a conveyor belt, and I thought would look visually interesting. So, that's about all I used for reference on this thing. So, let's go ahead and start building it. And we'll start out with just the main drive shaft and we'll use a cylinder. And we'll use -z to point it down the z-axis. We have a 20-centimeter radius, 2400 length, 40 height segments, and 12 rotation segments. And you can't really see the segments until you go into hidden line. So you can see, we just added some detail there so you'll be able to see it as you fly by it. Go ahead and group that, rename the cylinder driveshaft, and then null driveshaft master. Now, let's start our gear. So, create a cogwheel. And then over in the teeth, give it 30 teeth, a root radius of 45 and an addendum of 50. So, there's our gear profile. Jump over to the inlay tab, and raise up the center hole radius until it's just a little bit bigger than the driveshaft. So, there we go. If you want to, you can use a cutout. That'll just give it a little bit of extra detail. So we'll do that. Rename this gear cog1, and then I'm going to use CV Tools extrude splines. And you can accomplish the same thing with a standard extrude, but the CV Tools already take care of a lot of things for you. You can find those on Cineversity. We're just going to jump into the extrude now. And in the caps, I'm going to constrain it. I'm going to drop the radius to one, steps to three. And then in the cog, let's go over to subdivided, and then just crank the angle up to 90. And five's probably okay on the distance. So, that gives us some detail but it doesn't go crazy on the polygons. Also, let's give this three subdivisions in the object tag of the extrude. Just to give us a little bit of a detail. Okay, so let's group, gear cog1 extrude. You also notice the CV Tools renamed our extrude automatically which is nice. So, rename this gear, and then we're going to add some deformers to it, a taper. If you hold shift while your master is selected, it will automatically make this a child of it. And then we'll just see which way it's going. Okay, that's not what I want. I want to be able to do that to our gear. So, we just rotated it 90. And then, I'm just going to turn off the strength, and adjust this box to fit. And then I'm going to drop the curvature down. But I'm just going to give it a little bit of a taper. That's a good-looking gear. So now, with the taper selected, I'm going to add a twist, and then I'll just put this right where the taper is. And the twist, I think, yeah, it sets up just right. So now we can add a little bit of twist to the gear if we want as well. So, let's play around with those a little, until you see something you like. We'll give it a little bit more taper. Now we're going to add some nubs. So, create a sphere, hemisphere mode, and drop the radius down to, I think five will work. I'm going to hide the driveshaft for now. And then we'll rotate this to get it on its side. We'll call this nub. So, let's make this a child of the cloner. We'll go, radial cloner, and xz. And that'll put us in the proper orientation for the gear. Drop the radius down. And since we have a cutout in there, let's crank up the count a little. You can play with your start and end angle, and then you can just rotate it to line that up. So, now you can count up as much as you want and your gap will remain. And let's drop the nub down to 12 segments just to keep the polys lower. We call this cloner gearnubs. Let's move it out just a little so you can see the borders. And turn our driveshaft on. Now we have a gear. So, select gearnubs and gear, group them, and rename this gear01. And then let's instance this. Move it down and then duplicate that instance a few times. And we'll make those render instances to help speed up the scene. So, I'll just give it a few copies. And then on some of them we might want to make them a little bit different. So, let's say this one, uncheck render instance and hit C. And now you can come in here and play with those angles. So, let's say, just turn off the twist and lessen the taper. And you've just got, you know, a little bit different looking gear. You could drop the count. So, on your own, just kind of play around with those and give your driveshaft a little bit of variety. And once you get them to where you like them, grab all your gears and drop them into the driveshaft master group. Okay, now we're going to model the trench that the driveshaft is living in. And to do this, we're just going to go into the top view. So, what we're going to do is draw a linear spline. So, I'll go to the pen tool and use linear. And it's going to be an angular shape. So, I'm just going to start drawing away. And it's going to be a trench, but it's going to have these jets going in and out like so. So, I'll fast forward here. Doesn't have to be perfect, I lined up a lot of these, but I mean, it doesn't have to be rock solid. It'd probably be a lot easier to do in illustrator, but this will work for now. And now what we want to do is make sure that all your splines are in the same object. So, depending on whether or not you jumped out of the tool and then jumped back in, you may have several splines over here, and if so, just grab them all, go to mesh conversion, connect objects and delete and that'll bring them all together into a single spline. And then we want to rename this trench, wall spline. And let's go ahead and grab these endverts here. And just pull those up so that way the driveshaft is extruding past them to kind of finish this thing off. Now that we have the trench outline, we're going to make a border around that with a rectangle. We can just scale that up, something like this. We're going to combine these two splines to make the upper floor. And then we will extrude the trench spline down to make the trench, and then we'll put just a plane down there for a floor to finish it off. We just want to take our rectangle, which we're going to name floor_boundary. And I'm going to use another CV tool, this is Booleans. I'm just going to open the palette. You can get this off Cineversity as well. And this is based off of Illustrator's pathfinder palette which is really nice. So, if you just grab these two, union, it kind of goofs up because of our floor boundary. If we set that to subdivided, then we're good. So, what's that's done is made a spline mask in union mode. And then it renamed it for us up here, too. Okay, now we can use CV extrude splines, to extrude that. And you can see it extruded up, so if you hold alt, it will reverse that direction, so it extruded it down now. Let's just turn the caps to cap, and none on the bottom. So, if you look underneath, there's nothing down there. And then we can give our trench some depth, and we'll go 150. Okay, now let's create the floor. And we're just going to use a plane. You can just drag that out, and push it 150 down, and that'll line it up with our trench extrude. So, now we have a trench floor. So, rename that trench floor. And then let's move the driveshaft master down 60, just to drop it down there. And that doesn't have to be exact, just get it down in the trench. And that does it for our trench. And it's all still editable, so you can come in here, and we will come in here later, and goof with these splines and it's no big deal. So, now we're going to move on to the conveyor leg. And I want to show you another reference. Here is the conveyor leg I ended up going with. It's pretty simple. I was just looking for some kind of reference so I didn't make it all up in my head. And after I played around with it a little bit, I realized that I wanted to be able to see through the legs more than this because it was kind of blocking all the view as we flew around in the scene. So, I ended up using a cloner with six little columns that you could see through and that way I kept the same look of this, but you can see through the legs better. So, that's what I was after. And I obviously did not all these numbers before I started this, but now I can tell you exactly with the plugin just to speed us up and we can move along. So, let's go ahead and start with the leg. So, let's go ahead and create a cube for the foot, rename it foot. And then for a size, 45 10 100 coordinate, move it up 5 in y and 15 centimeters in z, and that is the base of our little foot right here with the bolt in it, and then we'll just make the columns. So, to do that, let's create another cube, leg column will be the name, 10 by 200 by 10 will be the size, and then we'll place that in a grid array cloner. Count 2, 1, 3 in x, y and z, and size 20 50 50. So, that gives us that basic shape of the leg, but you can see through the little columns which open up the scene a lot. So, we need to move it up 110, and rename the cloner leg_columns. Okay, and we're going to create a new null, so that'll be at the origin, 0, 0, 0. And we're going to name it conveyor leg and then we're going to place the columns and the foot in there. So, here's the start of our conveyor leg, and we're going to move it over -195 in x. And you can see, that puts us right on the edge of this trench, so you create an instance of the conveyor leg, and then we just flip the x-value on that, and that puts it on the other side. Yeah, I tell you what, we can just grab that trench spline and move it over. There, fixed. Okay, now that we've got our legs, we're going to make the rollers that go across. And again, I have a reference for that, and this was kind of the look I was going for when I created these scenes. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, I just thought it looked cool, and since we're going to be spinning out, I just thought it would look visually interesting. And, we're just going to rough that in with a couple of cylinders, and then later on in the project you would add all those bearings and everything. But, we'll just make a cylinder, positive x, with a 45-centimeter radius, and a 350 height. Drop the segments to 12, and just bring that up 235 in y, and that's our main roller. So, call it roller01. And then just control-drag this guy out, call that roller02, and drop the radius to 20, and just move him in place somewhere around here. Control-drag another roller down, and this will be roller03. So, if we look in the side view, we can get those, we want to keep them on the same z-depth and just kind of position them like so. And we're going to make one more null, conveyor leg assembly, and we're going to put our conveyor legs and rollers in here. Now, we're going to convert this into an xref. We've made the super low-res version, which is great for now, but if we save this out as an xref, we can continue to use the low-res version and then add detail to it later just like we did with the light bank. So, go ahead and select your conveyor_leg_assembly, create xref, convert object selection to xref, and we are going to call this guy, conveyor_leg_assembly_low_res. So, we'll open it up, and there you have it, right here with our null as the master, so save that and close it. Now, we're going to take this conveyor leg and we're just going to use a cloner to span the entire trench. So, we'll select the conveyor_leg_assembly_low_res, go to Mograph cloner, turn off the y transform, and push it out in z to about 130. So, look at the side view, you can see our rollers are about equidistant and if yours aren't, just adjust the rollers. You'll actually have to do that in the xref, so if you need to move your cylinders, open that for edit, tic rollers 1, 2, or 2 and 3, move them a little, and then when you save it, you come back in and hit reload, and they'll update. So, that gives you a little example of what the xref will do. So, I'm going to go back into mine, undo that, save it, come back in and reload it, and there you go. So, let's rename this conveyor_leg_assembly_cloner and push it back in z 1130, and that will get us to the beginning of the trench. And then let's crank our account up to, 18 looks like a good number. Because these deformers are end-cloners, you can't just turn them off with that filter. So, to get rid of those, to make your scene look a little cleaner, just come down into the driveshaft master, into any of them that aren't render instances, grab your deformers, and just turn off visible in editor. So, here's one more. There you go. So, now we have a nice, clean scene.
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