- [Chad Ashley] My name is Chad Ashley, and I am or/was a Creative Director
at Digital Kitchen. But as of about a week ago, I switched jobs and I now am
a Creative Director at Greyscalegorilla, which you may be familiar with.
But this presentation is not really about that. It's about my time at DK.
At Digital Kitchen, we were a 3ds Max house, and we decided probably about
six months ago-- I've only been using Cinema 4D for about nine months--
that we were going to make the switch from Max to Cinema 4D.
So my presentation, I'm going to talk to you about how we made that switch,
why we made that switch, and what we learned along the way.
First of all, I want to show you a little bit about what we did at DK.
So I'm going to show you our reel, real quick.
♪ [music] ♪
All right. So that's a little bit of the work that we did at Digital Kitchen, where
we were a motion graphics house. We did a lot of movie titles, a lot of commercial
work. So the big question is why did we switch? Why did we switch from 3ds Max to
Cinema 4D? We realized that we just didn't have a big user base in Chicago, which is
where we're located, in Max. And we knew that there was this giant user base of
Cinema 4D freelancers and whatnot. We needed an ability to scale. If we got a
big job, what would we do? Who would we hire? There weren't any Max freelancers in
Chicago that we could bring in, yet there were all these Cinema artists out there.
So switching to Cinema gave us this ability to scale. We also saw a big
roadmap alignment in which we saw where we wanted to go as a studio, and we saw where
MAXON was going with their products and their product line. And we had an
alignment. We both value the artist, we both value the process, and we both wanted
to create art. Also, Cinema has some amazing renderer choices, tons of choices.
Octane, Arnold, Physical, Corona. There's so many. It's great.
We needed a way to test out Cinema 4D and figure out if it was going to work for us.
So what we did is we created a commercial. That's what we did at DK.
We decided, "Let's create a commercial, a photo reel, Cadillac car commercial,
using Cinema and we're going to use it to test the software.
We're going to use it to learn, and we're going to try everything.
We're going to throw everything at it. We're going to see how does
the job workflow happen in this program? Can it handle what we want to do?
Does Xref-ing work? How does that work? Rigging, is it going to do what we need to
do in terms of rigging the car, animation, cameras, Xpresso, rendering?"
We need to cover all this stuff, so that's why we developed this fake commercial
to essentially learn the program. So let's take a look at the
Cadillac ELR spot that we did.
♪ [music] ♪
- [Male voice] Dare to be beautiful and sustainable.
Dare to increase range and performance at the same time.
Dare to challenge what an electric car can be.
Introducing the 2016 Cadillac ELR, because only those who dare,
drive the world forward.
- That Cadillac ELR spot was done completely in Cinema and rendered in
Octane. And it was all done in our spare time to try to learn the software. Every
moment that we found ourselves kind of like, "Okay. Well, can it handle this?
Can it handle that?" We found that Cinema exceeded our expectations on every level.
So let's talk a little bit about... I'm just going to pause it here. You can see
we have all these light fixtures in every single shot. So we used Xrefs. How many
people here have used Xrefs before? Not very many. What an Xref is, is it's an
external file reference. So imagine a movie. Let's say, I don't know,
"Star Wars" or something where you've got BB-8 in like, I don't know,
probably 1,200 shots. Imagine if BB-8 wasn't a separate asset
and you had to, let's say, change the orange to blue
and go into 1,500 shots and go in there and tweak that shader.
You'd want to kill yourself. That's why people develop assets, Xref-ing.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that.
In fact, I'm going to dive in here. We're just going to show you
how Xrefs work really quickly here in Cinema because they're so useful.
You can use them for just about anything that you're going to have a
repeatable asset for. We're going to open up this light fixture and Light Fixture
Master. So let me delete this, and let me just hide this, real quick. Let's say this
is our light fixture asset. And our artist is modeling this light fixture and he
knows that it's going to go into all those different shots that we saw. He finishes
it up, and he publishes it as a Cinema 4D scene. So it's just a master, just a
regular old Cinema 4D scene. Then, we have another artist on the other side of the
room, and he's working on this shot, here. This artist is just animating. So he's
animating the shot, and he's trying to get everything done. I'm just going to come in
here and reload this, real quick. All right, perfect. So he's animating a shot.
This guy is also working on this asset, and the client comes in and says, "Hey,
listen. The client says that they don't want these bulbs exposed. They want them
to be covered up." So all right. Well, that's no problem. We can do that. But we
were already halfway through the production and this asset has been
published to all the different animation scenes. So how do we do that? Well, this
is an Xref, so we're going to change one scene and it's going to propagate across
all our shots. I'm going to turn on my light cover, which it's messed up right
now. So let's go ahead and fix it, put it back into place here. And we're just going
to grab these points. Actually, I'm going to just delete that, and we're going to
make a new one. In fact, they don't want a cover, I've just decided. They want to
actually change the bulbs. So I'm going to come in here and I'm going to grab Marquee
Selection, and they say for whatever reason they want these bulbs to stick out
over here. Don't ask me why. They're crazy clients. They don't know what the hell
they're doing. So they decide, "This is our new light fixture. This is how it's
going to look now. This is what we want." So this artist here that's working on this
light fixture just hits Save. I'm just going to hit Control+S and save the scene
out. Now, the artist working on the other side of the building opens up their scene,
and all they have to do is dive into the Xref file right here and hit Reload, and
boom. Every single light fixture just changed and updated to the most recent
master scene file. In fact, if there's an artist that went home that day before that
change was made, and they come in, in the morning, and they open up their shot,
which is going to be Shot 02 here. They're going to come in that morning and they're
going to notice, "Hey, look. All of these lights changed. I guess there was a tweak
to my asset and the client made a change, and now I don't have to do anything. It's
all there. It's all ready for me. It's perfect." So you can see how by creating a
master asset, a master Cinema 4D file, and bringing it in as an Xref into many, many
scenes, many, many camera shots, you don't have to worry about going into each scene
file and changing the model, or merging it in, or doing any of that sort of thing. So
you can see how Xrefs can really change the way you work. You can use them for
cameras, you can use them for rigs, anything that's going to be repeating.
Or if you just want to work in tandem with other artists, you can actually have
somebody animating a camera while you're animating a character. Then you can Xref
in their camera. And every time they hit Save, it's going to update when you hit
Reload. It's going to update in your scene, so you're always getting the latest
thing. So that's a little bit about Xrefs. The next thing I'm going to talk to you
about is the car rig. You saw in the very beginning, the car doesn't drive much. But
we wanted to make sure that whatever the car did, we wanted that ability to roll in
and steer, and all that. So we said, "All right. Well, let's rig it the right way.
Let's do this car up the right way." So we used, and not very many people use this,
but it's called the "character template." How many people here have used the
character template? Very few, even fewer than Xrefs I think. What the character
template is, it's an easy way to rig things. I'm not going to pretend to be an
expert at it, because I am not a rigger. This was actually rigged by an amazing
artist, Andrez Aguayo. We call him "Dre" around the office, "Dr. Dre."
He made this awesome car rig for us. So I'm going to show you how simple it is to
create this car rig based on what Andrez has built. The first thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to create a character template, and that pops it into the scene.
The next thing I'm going to do is turn off Auto Size, and change it to
475 centimeters, which I just happen to know because he told me. That's the number
that's going to keep it inside of our car here. Now, I'm going to go into Object and
I'm going to stamp down a root. Oops. I actually did it wrong. He would kill me if
he knew that I screwed that up. I forgot to choose Animation Car, which we've
included here. Once you've built a character template, it'll pop up in here
if you do everything right. So I'm going to do Animation Car, Create a Root. Then,
I'm going to create the body, and then I'm going to hold down Control and Shift. I'm
going to do Wheels Back, Wheels Front, and there's our rig. Our rig is set, but you
can see not all of it is perfectly aligned to my wheels and to the body of my car
here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to Adjust, and everything now
is ready to be live and adjusted. I could come in here and actually manipulate every
single helper and center it to the car, and center it to the wheels, and all that
sort of thing. But I'm a lazy guy. I don't like clicking around. So I made sure that
I said, "Dre, can you make this rig so that I don't have to do any of that stuff,
because I'm really lazy." He's like, "Yeah, no problem, as long as you name
your car in this very specific way, which is Body, Left Tire, Right Tire, all
that sort of thing. I'll make a Python script, because Python scripting in Cinema
is awesome, and you can just run that script." So I'm going to go over to
Scripts, and I'm going to find the script that he wrote for me. It's called "Car Rig
Aligner." I'm going to click it, and boom. It just snapped all of the axes to the
center of the wheels, everything else. So I didn't have to adjust anything. Now, I'm
going to come in here. I'm ready to animate now, so I'm going to click Animate
and that brings the rig back to life. Now, I'm ready to animate my car rig. So the
first thing I'm going to do is create a path. Now, this is not a dynamic rig. He
wanted to make sure that I told you guys that. Because it is not a rig that you're
going to drive with an Xbox controller. It's actually an animation rig. So it's a
little bit more user-friendly, I think, and art directable. I'm just going to draw
a path here. I'm just going to make a path, very kind of simple, little path for
our car to drive on. I'm just going to drive around this corner, and that's
pretty good. All right. So there's our path. I'm going to dive into the body and
go into my control section. Now, we've rigged this car with all sorts of fun
controls. We have Auto Roll, Ground Detection, Spline Object loading here,
Auto Banking, so I'm going to go through some of that stuff. The first thing I'm
going to do is load the spline into my Spline Object. You can see now, it's
popped my car onto my road and I can actually just simply drag my spline
position, and my car is going to drive along that road. But I do want to make
sure that my spline is set to Uniform to give it a lot of segments so there's not
any weird bumping on my car. I'm going to dive back into my body here, and let's set
some keyframes. So at the very beginning, we're going to set our spline position to
zero and he's going to make this run around this little track here pretty
quickly. So go up to 100, and there. I'm going to play this down, and our car is
driving along a path. You're like, "Oh, wait. That's simple. It's just animating
on a path. That's really not much going on." But no. The wheels are actually
turning. You just can't see them. I said to Dre, "I want to be able to
see my car better, dude. I don't want to have to rotate my camera and find my car."
He's like, "All right. Cool, man. I will give you some cameras to attach." So I can
actually come in here and switch between three different cameras to be able to
follow my car as it's driving around the track. So all the wheels are turning
automatically, everything is dynamic, and the fact that I don't have to worry about
the rotation of the wheels. It gets a little bit wonky at the end, but that's
not a big deal. I can fix that with a spline later. All right. That's pretty
cool, but let's turn on some Auto Banking, because that's kind of fun. So we're going
to turn on Auto Banking and set it to a pretty low number. We don't want it to
have really crazy, bad suspension. So I'm going to go ahead and play that down. You
can instantly see that this is one dynamic part of the rig, is the Auto Banking. So
the car actually has the ability to kind of wobble and change with the velocity of
the car there. In fact, you can actually come in here and add even more secondary
rotation. If you really want to make it look like the car is maybe driving and
it's got some crazy road. I can actually turn this way up and now my car is shaking
like crazy. It's really kind of nice if you want to just create that subtle shake.
This is not very subtle. But I just want to let you know that you can do this sort
thing. This comes in handy when the car is driving like on a crazy road, for
instance. While I'm talking about the rig, let me show you some of the controls. So
these are some of the other controls that we built into the car rig. This is Dre.
He's working through the rig here. And I'm just going to tap down a little further
into the video because I know I want to show a lot of stuff today. You can see how
crazy he went. He even put deformations on the tires. He's got like full suspension
going on here. It's pretty nuts. So as an animator, you can go in there and really
tweak this stuff out. In fact, we didn't actually use a lot of this in our spot,
because we just wanted a really simple thing. But he kind of went crazy with it,
and we applaud him for it. It turned out really awesome. I think I even have a
shot... Oh, yeah. He kind of went crazy here, a little monster truck action.
But here, I'll open up a scene file that actually has some Ground Detection on it,
just so you can see it. All right. So here we have our ELR driving. He's even got a
little drift. Oh, I forgot to show you the drift. Let me go back into my file and
show you that. So if I'm animating, let's say here, and we're doing a crazy turn
here. But right there, let's say, right when he makes that turn, I'm going to go
ahead and turn off my Dynamic Banking. Which it's not going to like it when I
scrub. So right there, I'm going to set a keyframe on my drift, because you've got
to have drift, man. You've got to have some Tokyo drift going on here. So he's
going to drift out right there, and we have this full control to swing that car
out, right there. Hit a keyframe. And then maybe he comes back to normal like right
there. I'll just play that down. It's going to look really weird. I'm not a car
animator. Whoa. He hit a patch of ice, maybe. I don't know. But this rig was a
lot of fun to create. I've got to say, the process of creating this rig and animating
this rig in Cinema was really, really amazing. It's very easy to set these
things up. If you already know anything about rigging, I highly recommend
checking out the character template stuff. It's really powerful. So I'm going to move
on to a little bit about the rendering of the ELR. We jumped around on renderers on
this, because we tested everything. We tested Physical, we tested Arnold,
we tested Octane. And we actually ended up using Octane. So I'm going to show you a
little Octane with the car. Here we have a typical kind of shot that might have been
found in the car spot. And I'm going to light it up really quick using Octane. The
first thing I'm going to do is initialize the Live Viewer of Octane, and I'm going
to dock it. I'm just going to pull it over here, which I absolutely love the floating
viewports and the ability to dock things. It's great. So I'm going to initialize
Octane, and you're going to see that it's extremely dark, once it finally loads all
this geometry. I'll take a sip of water while it does that. All right. So this is
extremely dark. It's not really lit by any of these overhead fixtures. That's because
car lighting isn't about... If you just told a car lighter that you were going to
use fluorescents to light their car, they're going to be like, "Oh my God.
You're out of your mind." So of course, I wouldn't because cars are all about slick,
pretty-looking stuff. I'm going to create an Octane area light, and I'm going to
dive into a perspective view so I can actually kind of see what I'm doing here.
I'm going to wait for that to update. I'm going to pull this area light way out
here. It's going to update a little slow, because we've got a lot going on here.
But bear with me. It will update. So that light is way too bright, first of all.
But I know what I'm doing, so I'm just going to crank this light out. This is not
something that you would do in reality, but I bet every car photographer would, if
they could, have a 300-foot light put out in front of their car. The other thing I'm
going to do is turn off Normalize, because that is just not the way light works in
real life. I'm going to bring that intensity down to like 20%. And what I'm
going to do is I'm going to show off the natural curves of the car. That's what
every good car photographer does. I'm walking this light up, and in Octane, I'm
seeing that in real-time. So now I'm able to make creative decisions on the fly on
what I want this thing to look like. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit more,
and I'm going to extend this light out even further. This machine is performing
fairly well. And that looks pretty good to me. It's pretty close to what I want. But
But if you notice at the top, this light is affecting my light fixtures and it's
blowing out the metal on there. I don't want that. That's ugly to me. So in any
other renderer you'd be like, "Cool. Just exclude those light fixtures. Done."
Well, that's not Octane. Octane, you can't actually, in this version, exclude objects
from your lights. So you have to think about it like a photographer. You have to
say, "Okay. If I was a photographer, what would I do?" I would use a flag, and the
flag in my world is a plane. I'm just going to put this plane in between... It's
basically a photographer technique. I'm just going to walk this plane up, and I'm
going to rotate it if my hotkeys work, which now they sort of will. It's going to
slow down a little bit. I'm just going to pull this plane out, and all this plane is
going to do is block light for me. You can see, I've already blocked all the light in
it right now. So I'm just going to rotate my camera over here, and I'm just going to
start to walk this flag up to the angle over here. Watch this. I'm just going to
quickly start to bring that flag down. I'm watching in Octane. I'm watching these
lights to see where that flag is going to come in. And right about there. So Octane
is great. You just need to start thinking about things in a little bit more
photographic way. You have to think a little bit more like a filmmaker. When I
lit all the shots for that ELR spot, I had to go in there and flag little highlights,
just like you would on a real set. I'm hoping someday a toy will work in some
light exclusions so I don't have to do this. But it was kind of a fun process, I
have to admit. So we've talked about that. We've talked about material testing.
I'm going to talk a little bit about a brand new tool that we are very close to
launching at Greyscalegorilla called Link. How many people here are familiar with the
Greyscalegorilla HDRI Studio tool? Anybody? So quite a few people. One of the
things that a lot of people were requesting from us was the ability to use
the HDRIs that you find in that tool, in other renderers like Arnold and Octane.
So that's why we created, dah, dah, dah, dah, first time it's probably ever been
seen... I'm going to find it and you're going to love it. When I started working
on this job, I needed a way to test out my materials and to do that quickly. So I
started creating 360 renders using HDRIs to test out all my car paints and the
chromes, and all that stuff. I needed a way to quickly switch from one HDR to
another and not have to keep navigating around and around to all these different
folders and what not. So in comes Link. I'm going to go ahead and just initialize
Octane here. We're going to use Octane, but it works in Arnold as well. Someday...
Okay, there it is. All that we're seeing right now are the headlights, because
there's no lights in here. So what we're going to do, and you're going to love how
easy this is. I'm going to go to Objects, I'm going to say "HDR Environment," and
that just does what Octane does. It puts a nice little sky blue environment in there.
I'm going to walk over to my Octane sky, and I'm going to tag it with HDRI Link.
Boom. Done. Okay. So what do I do next? Simple. Open up the HDR browser. Now, what
do I do? Well, now I just have fun navigating tons of awesome HDRs, and be
able to just click them down. Oh, I don't like that one. I'm going to try this one.
No, I don't like that one. Let me try this one. It is just an awesome way to navigate
and just audition different HDRs for your lighting. In fact, I'll try some studio
stuff. Let's go to Pro Studios, and I'll navigate to my favorite one, which is 19
and look at that. I'm just going to orbit the camera around and find my killer
product shot, because that's what Octane does so well. It's just a killer-looking
renderer. Here, we've got our nice product shot. It's looking pretty good. In fact,
I'm just going to kind of kill my browser over here, and find a shot that I like.
That looks good. I'm going to drop a camera down right there. I'm going to look
through that camera. And now let's add some depth of field. So how are we going
to do that? We're going to add an Octane Camera tag. I'm going to dive into my
lens, and I need a wider aperture. This is crazy. This is not going to work. Let's
try two centimeters. That looks pretty good. It's a bit big, that depth of field.
But here's the fun part. I'm going to turn over to my regular camera, and now I'm
going to pick my focal point. So I'm going to dive in. Oops. I've got to turn Auto
Focus off. I forgot to do that. So Auto Focus, I don't know why there would be an
Auto Focus. I don't know who the heck would use that. I'm going to tap down on
my car. Where do we want the focal point to be? I don't know. Let's try here.
It didn't work. Come on, baby. Don't do me like that. There we go. So now I can
audition different depth of field, and it's all live in Octane. You're starting
to see the power of this tool. Now, you're like, "Okay. That looks cool. This shot is
looking good." Let me actually pull the focus over to this light. And now I want
to jump back into Link and I'm going to try a different HDR this time. I'm going
try... I don't know. Let's try this one, Outdoor. How awesome is that? It's so
fast. We're going to be coming out with tons more HDRs, so keep your eyes peeled
for Link. It's going to be a new tool, Greyscalegorilla. We hope you love it.
We love it. I use it all the time, actually. So I'm going to talk about
a Lego spot that I did for the Museum of Science and Industry.
I teamed up with a few friends of mine, and we used Cinema 4D Octane
together to create this great spot for the Museum of Science and Industry's
new Lego exhibit. I'm just going to play the spot, and then I'll talk about it.
Because I think without context, it's going to be a little hard to understand.
- [Female voice] MSI is using Lego bricks to reconstruct fantastic feats of
engineering, like the Golden Gate Bridge, 60 feet long, 65,000 Lego bricks,
800 build hours. It's one of 12 incredible Lego structures in the Museum of Science
and Industry's new exhibit, "Brick by Brick." Come see them all, and discover
that nothing is impossible when you have the courage to build the unbuildable.
- So that was a ton of fun to make, and what made that unique, it wasn't done at
DK. It was done, like I said, on the side with some friends of mine. And we had a
very tight timeline, a very small crew, and we all worked remotely. I was
responsible for all of the CG. We had another artist doing all the compositing
and an editor, and then another artist doing the end tag. So we had four people,
all working remotely on Dropbox. And we just used Slack and... Well, kind of just
Dropbox and Slack, really, to kind of work through the entire project. We used
MoGraph, obviously, for all of the revealing, which I'm going to go over
that. We used the Camera Morpher, which is amazing. We used a lot of Xpresso. We used
Octane. We used the new Link tool, which I just showed. And we used Signal. I'm
pretty new to Cinema 4D, so when this job came in and he asked me if I could help
him out on it, I was like, "Yeah. This will be a great chance for me to kind of
learn even more about Cinema 4D." So I'm going to show you how I did that Lego
reveal. I bet in your heads, if you've been using Cinema for a while, you're
probably thinking to yourself, "I can already think of a way that I would reveal
those bricks." I probably did it a little bit differently than maybe you guys did.
But that's okay. There's no right or wrong. It's all just fun times. I'm going
to dive in. Actually, not into that one. We'll do this to start. So here we have
our tower. And I'm just going to go ahead and hide these cameras, because we don't
need to see those. We have our Lego tower here, and we need to reveal them from the
top, up. So the first thing I'm going to do is create a box, and I'm going to move
that box over my tower. I'm going to make it really tall to encompass my tower, and
there it is. Now, I'm going to throw a display tag on it, just so I don't have to
look at it as a box, getting in my way all the time. So I'm going to turn it to
Wireframe and Box. So now we've got our box here. And what we're going to do is we
need to turn all of these Lego pieces, which were hand-placed by the way, by
Amador Valenzuela, who actually did all the print campaign work for this. He did
an amazing job hand-placing each one of these to the expert Lego model builder's
specifications. So this wasn't created with some Voxel plug-in or something.
So I'm just going to select all these bricks, and I'm going to drop them into
a fracture. So I'm going to create a fracture. It would've helped if I created
the fracture first, I guess. I'm going to select all these bricks, and we're going
to dump them into the fracture so they're MoGraph compatible. So these are our
bricks. They're a part of that fracture now. The next thing I want to do is figure
out a way to reveal them. So I was thinking, "Well, let's do like a Volume
thing." If I grab a Volume... Make sure that actually applied. Yep, it did. So the
Volume Effector is perfect for this. What I need to do is actually tell it to use
this cube that I created as my Volume object. The parameter that I'm going to
do, I bet you're thinking like, "Oh, he's going to do like a -1 scale." No, dude,
easier. Set Visibility. So now I can just take this cube and just literally drag him
down, and he just reveals brick by brick, right up the tower there. You like the
sound effects there? You like that? You still awake out there? Give me some signs
of life. Anyway, so this was cool. But I was like, "All right. That leading edge is
way too perfect. I need it to feel more organic." So how was I going to do that?
Well, I don't know. I was just messing around. So I just said, "Okay. Well, what
if I gave this thing a little bit more segments?" Now, I'm going to jump into a
mode where you can actually see the segments. I'm going to give this cube more
segments, and then I'm going to displace it. So I'm going to throw a displacer on
here, and we'll dump that into there. We'll grab a displacer, and we'll throw
some noise on it. There's a little noise. Maybe scale up the noise a little bit,
maybe like 600, something like that. We'll increase the height to like 30. So what
did that do for me? Okay. Well, let me just show you what that did. What that did
for me is it gives me a more natural, organic shape at the leading edge for my
bricks to be revealed. So now it doesn't look so boring. If I turn that off, you
can kind of see it's just like boing, boing, boing, layer by layer. But if I
turn that on, it's now displacing the edge of that box, therefore giving me a little
bit more randomness on that edge. In fact, now I can art direct it. I could throw a
bend on it and have the left side go on before the right side, and really art
direct the way that the bricks were being animated on. Because I was still kind of
interested in Xpresso and what that did, I went ahead and thought, "Well, I've got
this workflow going. I wonder if I could make it into a rig?" Because I always try
to like rig things, so that I don't have to repeat my actions. Because again, I'm
super-lazy. So I made a rig for this and it was really simple just using Xpresso.
Let's go into the tower rig scene, and that is going to be here. I made a rig,
which was just all done via Xpresso. I'm going to go into my user data. And you can
see I created a Lego reveal percentage, so I can literally just drag this up. So it's
100% revealed or not revealed at all. Then, I also have this ability to do a
randomness amount. So I can turn that up here. Let's find a nice little spot.
All this randomness amount is doing is changing the intensity of the
displacement. So if I bring it down to zero, I've gotten back to my flat, boring
reveal. If I bring it up to 100%, I've got really, really random... In fact, so
random that it kind of is breaking the laws of gravity there. So you don't want
to go too far with that. Probably like somewhere in here. Then, the scale, which
is also just Xpresso linked to the scale of that noise. So again, being able to
quickly use Xpresso to build rigs to make your life easier, I can't tell you enough
to do those things, on top of Xref-ing, on top of figuring out interesting ways to
use rigging to do what you need. This tool is really robust. Camera Morpher, how many
people here love the Camera Morpher? Again, the same people. If you haven't
checked out the Camera Morpher, it is really, really cool. The first shot of the
Lego piece, I was like, I wanted the camera to travel up the tower as it's
growing. So what I did is I created three different camera angles and three
different cameras' viewports here. I'm going to actually reveal a little bit more
of my Legos here. We'll go ahead and dive into this camera right here. So this is
Camera 1. This is the part of the spot when our Lego is all the way down here.
I'm just going to quickly show you when my... I'm going to animate this, actually.
Screw it. I'll just animate it. So we go to Frame 0, and we'll make a keyframe
here, and then we'll go, I don't know, make it like 152 frames. That's fine. Make
it 100% there, and add another keyframe. There we go. All right. So now if I play
this back, it's going to fully encompass our camera. It looks terrible, because now
we're inside the Lego. We don't want that to happen. I set up that camera as the
beginning shot. Like I knew, "Okay. That's a cool angle for the beginning. I need an
angle for the middle." So I kind of rotated a different camera over here, and
I placed this camera. I'm like "All right. This will look cool for this part."
And then I made a third camera which then was going to capture my nice ending here.
It pops in and it looks all pretty, and there it is. So I made three different
cameras, but now I want one camera because these are just three still cameras.
Actually, this one has a little bit of a noise wiggle on it. So I used the Camera
Morpher, and I added them all to the camera morph. You can see here, those
cameras, 1, 2, 3, sitting right there. And now I can animate the blend between all
three of them just by changing this little slider, right here. Let's go ahead and
look through that camera, so you can actually see what's going on. What is the
Camera Morpher doing? Let's go into this view, so you can actually see it. I'm
going to dive into Perspective, and we'll just do this. So the Camera Morpher, all
it's doing is saying, "Okay. Well, you already told me where Camera 1, Camera 2,
and Camera 3 are, so that's cool. I'm going to go to all three of them in that
order that you told me, and I'm going to make it as smooth as possible." In fact,
there's a couple different ways that you can change that. But what that allowed me
to do was it allowed me to dive into my camera and say, "All right. Well..."
I think I just screwed it up, actually. I think I actually rotated the wrong camera.
Thank God for Undo View. I'm going to see how many times I can click this. That
looks pretty good. Let's look through our Camera Morpher again. And it's still kind
of wackjob'd out, but you get the idea. I basically can then go back into this
video here, and I'll show you. This is the pre-disc. So I went from one
camera, and you can see that's one camera doing three different camera positions and
morphing between the positions. It really allows you to get really dynamic shots
without having to sit there and interpolate, "Okay. Well, at this point,
I need to Dutch angle it right here, and then this and that." It's just so much
easier to go in and place a camera where it looks good, place another camera where
it looks good, and then place another camera where it looks good, and then have
one camera go through all those moves. Done. The client comes in and says, "This
camera move is great, but when you're on the top of the Legos I wish we were a
little bit down." Now, changing the end of that move if it were one move, I wouldn't
have to worry about whether or not me changing that one angle is going to
somehow affect or screw up the move 30 or 40 frames earlier. Because it's just
adjusting one camera that our Morpher is just going to find. So again, those are
all some of the things that I've grown to love about Cinema.