- Hey, everybody, thanks for coming down and watching this. My name is Dan Pierse.
I am a art director, designer, animator. My history is in theatrical and
entertainment marketing. Right now, I work at Fox in the promotions department
helping out with graphics for their on-air promotions, for their shows and for the
network. I'm just going to cycle through some of the things I've done previously.
My background was originally just only After Effects, Photoshop, that kind of
thing. And then I really wanted to get 3D into my toolset, and just from working at
different places I got exposed to Cinema 4D. And the learning curve on that was so
great that I could really just jump right in and start making some 3D type, because
the good thing about doing this kind of stuff is you get new projects all the
time. But one pretty much constant thing throughout the whole thing is type. And
you got to make it pretty impressive especially if you just have a 10-second
spot and your type is up for 18 frames.
You got to make it pretty memorable. So these are just
some of the things that I've done in the past, and I'm going to go through today
and just go through some things, some tips and some processes that may elevate
some of your work or at the very least, just make it a lot simpler to do. So I was
lucky enough to work on the Fox rebrand last year and I'm just going to do a
little break down of one of the elements that we did. This is the end page that
comes on at the end of all the network promotions and I have a little breakdown
here for you. So let me just play it and then I'll run through
how everything was done in this.
♪ [music] ♪
So there we go. Thank you. So the creative on that was it needed to have this
lightbox look, and because of the needs of the rebrand, of so many different elements
and everything to it we needed to be able to create a base and in After Effects or
whatever compositing program, we use After Effects, that we can change these
out. We can change these animations after the fact so we don't have to go back into
3D and re-render all different versions of everything. So one other thing that the
management really wanted was that we use an actual practical fox. So they built an
enormous one. Here, I got some pictures of it here. So this was a pretty big
undertaking. This was 6 feet tall, 14 feet wide. It was a monster, and so with this,
we were lucky enough to have a camera with motion tracking so we could just repeat
that move over and over and we got a little bit of camera data from that, but
we just ended up actually 3D tracking it within Cinema. And just a note, if you're
ever on the set doing this kind of thing, and this is a super technical thing as you
can see by my drawing, take as many dimensions as possible. Even if you don't
end up using them, just the fact that you have that it comes in handy, and the most
important thing out of this was I talked to the DP. I knew what the lens was and
I knew what the camera was so I could go back and look at the sensor size, and that
will be important once I do the 3D track. And all these details was so I could
rebuild this in Cinema to the exact proportions of what that practical build
was. So let me just jump into Cinema right now and just run through some of the
process. So we'll do the motion tracking first. Cinema, 24 frames and I love the
Cinema motion tracking. It's super easy to use. I don't really have a mindset for
these kind of things and the fact that I could just jump into it and start using it
and figuring out, it was really great. So let me just load the sequence. So we got
the sequence here. This is a resampling of how detailed you want it to be, to track.
I'm going to crank it all the way up to the top because I size these down. They're
just PNG's so this is going to crank through it pretty quickly. So once I got
that in, I can do autotrack and let that go for a minute. So as you can see too,
here's the track that the camera was on. There was a long arm that came out so we
could go...We actually started within the pill of the O and came all the way back
out and then we made a minute long loop of that. So another one came through and
it just kept on going and this was just...We reset the tracks and everything.
There was a lot of different moves that we did with this. All right, so we got all
our tracks here, which is awesome. So let's go back into reconstruction and
here, this focal length, unfortunately a lot of times it's unknown, but since I
did write down what it was, I can actually fill this in and it's going to save a lot
of time. So let me put that in and I'm going to run the solver. So when that's
going, I'm just going to hop into how we built this fox. So we built it from
scratch and I will go in later in the presentation I'll explain how all
that's done, but the important thing
was that using the dimensions this is all built out to the proper
proportions, and when we did build it, we did selection tags for all these different
phases because we didn't know what we were going to do, but in the process of
building it, you might as well just select everything. We have vertex maps as
well, which will come in handy later, and I'll explain that a little bit further as
well and then I have the UV here. So if I just jump into the UV edit and then click
on this and then do show UV mesh. We took a lot of pains to put this together
so it would be usable, and remember this because there's going to be a template in
After Effects of what we're going to animate to and I can just show you
something really quick of how it started. Let me get rid of this and get rid of this
guy. So if you haven't used this, this has a wonderful like little wizard thing.
So this little button here. Click on that. This is the one I want to do. Click
next and then this, maximum size. That's how big the image you want. Let's just say
3,000 for that. And then it's smart enough to figure it out, so it takes apart all
the faces and everything and it gives you this. So as you can see the difference
between these two. So I took all these pieces and let's see. I can just show you
how this would work really quickly. So you just select them. There's no real easy
way to do this. So just sit down for an afternoon and start moving things around
until they all come next to each other and these ones over here those are the sides
because I knew I'd probably want to have something going around clockwise on it. So
that will be our guide for later and then just a quick note on this, say this is the
layout that we wanted. If we wanted to do something with that, so in here under
layers, you could click new layer and what I like to do with the polygons, I'll
just select them all and then you can go up to, du-du-du, fill outline polygons. So
I will do that and then it will trace all of those polygons there. So we know where
the things are because if you click off of that, all those are going to disappear. So
now, we're going to have a proper reference of that. So let me actually just
show a quick example of one step further with this. You can save this
texture. Here I'll just go loose into here. And then if I hop over to Photoshop,
open that guy up. And there we have it on here. Now so if I make a new layer let me
just for instruction purposes make it really obvious. Here's some red. I can
start drawing on this. Let's bring up the opacity. I just loosely draw on this,
Okay. And then I'm going to turn this off because I don't really...whoops.
Leave this guy on. I don't really need
that reference anymore. Resave that. Hop back into Cinema. Go to
my texture and then go find it. Go back up, sorry, and then reload. Yes, I want to
make sure to reload that and now where I painted in Photoshop it's on here. So if
you want to go in and do corners and textures and stuff, that's a way to do it.
You probably want to reorganize how that's laid out so corners are touching each
other. So if one goes around the side, that textural finish, but if you get some
good dirt brushes in Photoshop, you can chunk up that side and make it look really
good. And then one other thing real quick if this is actually going to work. I
can make a new layer and then with 3D paint I can paint straight in Cinema and
it will be updated over here now. So you can bounce back and forth between
3D painting in here and Photoshop
and just go back and forth. So you can have a lot of control about
this. So let's just pop back over to the track. All right, here's our track. Let me
just go back to standard, and as you can see, if you look at this from the
different views, it's lined up where it is. It's a little bit off so the good
thing about the motion tracker if I go back into here...Let's go back into
here. I have all these tracks and what you need to do under constraints is just
tell it which way is which, which way the axes are. So I know for instance,
this is going to be Z. So you just need to click two and see you got a little line
there. Over here axis Z. And then I know this one here obviously across the front
of the fox, let's just go back to vector. Just go across here. And then now
we know that's the X. So the more you do the more accurate this track is going to
be. There's a couple other ones. There's planer constraints. So you select more and
it makes a little triangle so you can be...you're either on the XY or the XZ and
it will know that. So after noodling with that for a while this is how it turned
out. So now, I know where the floor is. I know where the fox is. The fox is the
right size per the practical fox and we can layer it right on top. I did have to
scale things down a little bit but once I knew where my zero, zero, zero was, I
could figure everything out. So once we did that, I knew we wanted extra layers
that we can composite over it in After Effects. And plus we really wanted
the UV multipass. And one of the good things, we didn't have it at the time, but
putting this together with the takes manager, for those who haven't used that
before, start using it because I like to do as many multipasses as possible and
previously I'd have to say that different projects with certain things turned on,
certain things turned off, and this now I can just set it all up, all within Cinema,
just press "Render," and it will do it all for me. So make sure to look that up if
you want to use it. So here's my different takes. I'll make this a little bigger so
maybe you can see. So I have the lightbox. This was the important look. We did
this with the backlit texture and I don't know if you guys...I was exposed to this
for the first time. Apparently, it's been there forever. I have splines within this
fox, within this geometry, and I have area lights being generated by the shapes of
the splines. I don't know if you've done that before but if you just do an aerial
light, and you can tell it to be an object a spline or whatever, and it will emit
light from whatever that shape is. So we just trace out these loose splines inside
of here and then with the backlit texture, it looks like a lightbox. It emanates the
aerial light through the backlit texture. So that was super cool. And then with the
UV, super basic. I didn't need any textures from it because I just need the
UV pass from this, and then knowing that I'm going to animate that we flipped it
knowing where the ground was because we need a UV pass for the reflection as well.
So that way, on the top, it's going to do its animation, then you'll have the
proper reflection. We just did an additional floor pass. We didn't do the
fox. I just wanted a little bit of a reflection down there. With this one, it
was just some dirt on the edges that I'll composite in and then specular edges just
to get a little bit of highlight. So this fairly a little overkill. We didn't really
use all of them but the most important things were the UV reflection. So I used
takes, pressed "Render," left, came back and all of them were done. So let's just
hop into After Effects really quick. So here's our scene and here's the different
takes that I did. There's the edges. There's the floor. You can see that in
there. There's a lightbox plus there's the crazy UV pass. Crazy UV pass. Okay. So
I'll just show you really quickly how that all worked. So here's our main shot right
here, and let's just put a pass on it. Hey, it lines up. Awesome. Okay. So one of
the things that was good about this having it lined up is that we could actually use
that as a alpha channel. We could set the matte for the actual shot one, and just
simplify our rotoscoping and stuff. There needed to be a little bit of
cleanup but it just punched it straight out so that made our lives a lot easier.
So now, we have a clean plate. Now we got the fox right on top and I'll just take
this super simple. We'll put this UV asset here. So I know it looks crazy but all
those combination of colors is telling which way is pointing out, and in which
direction it is, and how to paste it on. We did need to get a separate plugin for
this. We used REvision Effects' UV map and what that does is it will tell...know it
looks crazy like that. Don't worry. It will tell which face to paste it onto and
if you remember this guy from before, this is what we animated to. So there's our
reference and I'll just...ran this really quick. So we just animated shapes right on
the top and we made that the polygon stuff just a guide layer so when we
rendered it, we didn't see anything. I'm going to...hung up. Oh, there we go. Let
me just stop it there. All right, so that is a precomp, which is in our master comp
here, and I know this looks crazy so all you have to do is just tell it
where to look at for the animation. It's all right. It still looks
a little wigged out. You just have to tell it what size your precomp is,
and the worldview for however this works with this plugin in Cinema, you need to
flip the Y. So you're flipping around and there you go. It's all pasted on there. So
this is our animation right over the top. Let me just do some quick compositing
here. I won't take it all the way through. I keyed out the floor so that way it left
all the texture in there. Just put a little ramp on there. Let's make it a
little darker, curves. Let's find a reflection or a floor reflection. Let's
put in there, add it. You can see it looks duplicated a little bit and then what
we ended up doing since this was pure white we just used that as a matte for the
lightbox as what we wanted. So let me just use that as an alpha matte on that. So
now, we have this lightbox texture that hopefully if it ran previous properly
is going to be revealed by the animation that's in the precomp, and once this is
all built, you can do sweeping moves. We just have a lateral move with this or a
dolly push but you can do sweeping moves. All your textures are going to stick
perfectly to it and you could switch this stuff out with footage, images, anything.
We just wanted just a nice simple animation for this. So there was a lot of
compositing in that so I won't go over all that with you, but you just tint it a
little bit and then you got a glowing lightbox. And you can change out all the
different colors. You can change that animation. And you don't have to go
back into 3D and spend your time re-rendering everything. So that's what we
did for that and I'm going to pop over to something else right now. Like I said
before, my background is just in After Effects and Photoshop, and when I did
type, I always did the extrude nurbs, bring in the spline, or whatever, or
Motext. There's some really great tools in it and with entertainment marketing and
theatrical you got to pump out a lot of cards. You got to change them, change
them and the flexibility that Cinema has for having live type in there and just
being able to change that and re-render is really great. But if you have the time,
there's a way to build this type from scratch, and when you have that, then you
have a lot of flexibility of how you can treat it, how you can texture it, and how
you can distress it. So one day at work I was just doing my regular type stuff and
my officemate, Jason Smart, he started building something with a
Polygon Pen and I'm like, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "I'm just building
type," and in 10 minutes, he told me how to do that and when we have enough time
to do it, that's all we do. That's just the base that we're going to do now. So
let me just bring up a file here. So for demonstration purposes, let's just say
there's a new blockbuster coming out this summer and it's called Colossus, and we
want this really big title reveal at the end of it, and a lot of times in reality,
we'll get vector art from many different places. From print, from the production.
Sometimes we get to design it ourselves but generally this is where it starts. So
let me just get rid of the takes here so I can see what's going on. So I will
just start making this and the magic to this whole thing is the Polygon Pen. So
let me just center this guys so I can see it a little bit better and this works
best in frontal view so everything's all flat, and this Polygon Pen, if you haven't
used it, this is awesome, and think too as you're watching this, it's not only for
type. You can use it to build so many different kind of things and all these
methods you can apply to any kind of modeling or anything that you want to
build. So under create tools and there's a couple cool things about it. If
you're in face mode here, you can literally just start drawing, and that was
the base of where I started, but then I was explained too that you can actually
build it on, and I know this looks like a weird spiderweb, but once you put in a
subdivision surface, starts bending it around, and the more geometry you put into
it you can start really curving it to that shape. So let me just do something
really quick. If you're in point mode with a Polygon Pen, you can just start
drawing it out a little bit more exact, and I've learned since I've been here that
there is a spline snap. So you can actually just hover over here, start
drawing, make sure to close that loop, but after that, you just start drawing around,
going around. Whoops. I might have made an extra point there. You got to be careful
of that. So go around. I'll just make big old chunks here. So you don't have to
agonize about being exact on this. Another cool thing about the Polygon Pen you just
hover over this line and for the Mac it's a command, you can just drag, and if you
hold down shift, you can actually start turning it too. So if I'm going just
straight up the side here so I don't have to do all those clicks. I'll just click
and drag so you can see how powerful and how fast this is. Oop. And there we go.
All right. Sorry, guys. We're almost there. Little less exact but that's all
right because I got another one all loaded up. Okay, I'll try this drag...whoops. Try
this drag thing again. Hold down "Shift." Perfect, and we're down. Okay, so now it's
a basic shape. I'm a little wonky up there.
So let's put that in a subdivision surface. So now, you can see that
you're getting close to the shape that you want. Let me just turn off this. Whoops.
Let me turn this off. This [inaudible]. Okay. So if you go back into point mode,
you just click on it. You can start moving these over into the...go a little closer
so you can see, into the proper position. Okay. So we got a basic shape here. If you
render...it's getting close. Looks a little wonky. So all you need to do is
just be a little bit more exact and push them into place. Here's one that I did
earlier. So you can see it's all lined up. So once you have this base, you have a lot
of options of what you can do with it. So let me just start showing you some of
these things. All right. If you just want a simple extrude out of this all you need
to do...Let's just go back into here. I'll take off camera so I can go a little
closer. Let's go to face mode. Select all. Whoops. Select all. Yes. Oop, sorry.
I need to be in live so I can select all. And then I know the shortcut is M,T for
extrude. It's also up in these menus up here if you need to go find it and
there's two ways to do this. You can either just start clicking and dragging
or there's a numerical entry down here and just a note on this. See this little
checkbox here? This is really important because if I do this, if I uncheck that,
and do apply, if you look at the back of it, it has enclosed it up. And sometimes
you can actually want that because if you want to make this something special, maybe
tilt it a little bit, you can actually flop it, and stitch and sew it back
together. So sometimes, you actually do want that. In this case, I do not so I'm
going to put on create caps and then I'm just going to drag this one. So right now,
you can see we're getting some nice type in the subdivision surface. It's doing a
good job of rounding it over but I don't want my type to be that soft. I want it to
be nice and chiseled. So let's go to the top view and look in here and the other
trick to this is the knife tool. So M, K for the knife and the thought behind this
is how close you get to the edge is how tight that corner's going to be. So let
me just do an example here. I'll do it this far away and you can see it
brought it a little bit closer. So I want it super tight on that corner. You can go
in and you can go in even further and further. So let me just go straight to
that right now. Let me add a little bit more geometry here and since I'm on loop,
that's going all around this object. So now, if you look at it, it's got harder
corners. So if that's the kind of look that you're going for that is great, and
one of the other benefits of doing it this way, if you look at the geometry, it's all
super clean. All these edges are...the polygons are all pretty much the same
size and the benefit of doing that, if you go into sculpting and you want to bang
this thing out you have all this great geometry in here. Let me just subdivide it
a couple times, if you can look again. So now, it's pretty tight. Actually, I
probably don't even have to do that much. Just go in. I like wax. Okay. Let's
go into wax and then the good thing about this is you just start drawing. Say we
don't want that...a little bit more pressure. Oh, I might need to subdivide it
more, I'm sorry. Whoops, increase, increase. You can see I'm bending this out
now. So now, this is really becoming custom type. It's not just an extrude
nurb, not just an even thing perfectly around because I've noticed as doing
things, even though we're doing it in 3D and it can be absolutely perfect, giving
it realism is, you want things
dented up a little bit and some little imperfections to it. So that's one
of the side benefits of building it straight out. So let me just jump back
into standard view here and I'll show you another example. So let's start again and
if you just want a bevel around the edge so that's just as simple. Let's go back
into face mode. I'm going to M,T, extrude, pull that out, do some cuts on the top. M,
K, and oop, go to point mode, sorry. M, K, boom, boom. So that literally took me
eight seconds to build that type, which is amazing, but we want a little bevel
around the sides. So let's go back to the face mode and we want inner extrude, which
is an awesome tool. So what that does I think it's M, W. Yup, M, W. So if you
watch these edges here, I'm just going to click and drag and it's going to make this
little outline around the edges and that's what we want. We want to create some more
geometry around the edges. So now I got that. That's our new face and I'm going
to just pull this out a little bit. So this again, the subdivision editor, is
doing a really good job of trying to curve all this stuff. So again, all you need
to do is just start making some more cuts on this. So let me go into here, go back
to point mode, M, K. K for knife so I can remember. Let me go really tight in here,
really tight in here. Now if I render this guy, we got double around the edge and
again that's...if you do that with an extrude nurb, you're not going to have any
geometry around that, and if we look at it here, we got plenty of geometry. And if we
want to cut even more, just go right in there, loop tool or whatever part of the
knife tool you want to do. You can go this way too. So now, we got clean geometry all
the way around and just to show you an example of this I will show you some
premade ones. Actually, let me show you this from before. This is the non-beveled
one just with the smooth corners. I found that this works really well with
subsurface scattering because of the geometry on the side, is so clean. That
light is going to penetrate through really well and in an even way, not all patchy.
So that's good with the subsurface scattering and
make sure it always...just blast that with light. Just to make sure it goes through.
Another one that it works really well with is if you have something glossy, let me
just render, because of those edges are so clean, you're going to get really good
reflections too so I just have a basic...actually, I just have a circle
that's white above this and you can see on the corners here, since your edges are
so clean, it's really doing that reflection really nice. So the glossy look
in that style works really well and now it's bounced back into the bevel around
the edge. I really liked how the Deadpool logo looked so let's just bring it up so
we all know what we're talking about here. I really liked how these edges were banged
up and I really wanted to figure out how to do it and what I showed you before,
with the UV going into Photoshop, you can do it that way but there's actually a way
that you can do it right within Cinema and because it deals with geometry and
displacement maps it actually gives it a better feel like it's been dented in. So
based on that I made this type, the similar. Let me just render this out so
you can see. This takes a bit of time to render. So while that's going, let me just
highlight something about these textures and this discovery I made because like I
said before I wasn't really a 3D guy and just stumbling through these things.
Cinema has so many different ways to do the same thing, and for not having a
fundamental understanding of how texturing works it was great that I could just
stumble through and figure out how this works. So now, I always saw this thing
normal maps. Okay, what's a normal map? I really didn't know, but I know on all the
nice 3D sites you can always download those things. You put it on, it looks
great. I didn't know how to make one. So I discovered within Cinema. Make sure to
explore all these pull down menus and stuff because this is where bedecked light
was. I didn't know that was there. That came in super useful and then there's
this normalizer. So if you choose this you can choose just a regular image and
we'll make a normal map out of it, and then it does all the work because I
couldn't find any generators for, I work on a Mac, so I couldn't find any
generatiors for that and so I'd never knew how to do it and there it was. The answer
for it was right in there so see if this render is going. I probably went overboard
with this too because I have a bump, a normal, and a displacement, but since my
geometry is so clean you can use this displacement. So poly displacement and
it's all going to be right. You're not going to get all weird spikes going out
because the Polygons don't know where to go. All right. So there's our type and I
just did a very basic. The extrude is one. The edge bevel is another and then the
face is one other. So just going back to the Deadpool. How do we get this on the
side? So I saw this tutorial by Ben Watt, I think, and he puts up some really
good stuff so make sure to check him out, and it was about how to distress edges of
things, and I was like, that's perfect for type so let's do that. So that was all
based around making a vertex map. So I did a lot of this before because I just didn't
want to have to make you guys watch me paint in stuff but, oop, my orbit's all
weird. That's fine. I will just create a new camera. Let's hop in
this guy. Okay. So I'm pen tool. All right. So if I click on this, you can see
where I've painted before and it was not difficult to do this at all. Actually, let
me just go into face here so we can see it a little bit better. All right, so there's
our edges. So all you have to do, just go to character, and apparently this paint
tool is made for weighting characters, but you can use it on here and again, since
your geometry is so clean I think I need to go to point mode. Oh, I can't do it in
this front bib. Since this takes a little bit of time to render.
Essentially what you is you just start drawing on this guy. Oh, I might have a
selection. That's probably it. You just start drawing on this guy and this has
some really good options here. Oh, that's why I was on smooth. There's nothing to
smooth. All right, so super easy. Just start drawing on and all these options
here, if I don't like it, oop, take it off. If I want a smoother blend to it, you
can just go in and start blending that out. So let me just go super harsh on
this so it's pretty obvious what's going on. All right, so that creates this little
tag here and once you have that tag, you are going to assign it to a texture, and
this texture here I know is super chrome-y and so I know it will look like, when it's
scratched off, it will be super shiny. It will pick up the light really nicely, and
so under the alpha channel I will just go in here really quick. This vertex map was
made by just going to shader. Again, in the secondary pull down menus there's
vertex map. So you just choose that, click that on it, and just drag it straight in.
And that's all it is. It's super easy and then another good thing to do is this
noise is going to tell the edges not to be this smooth, just like gradient over into
the other texture fade out. This is going to warp the edges so it looks a little
bit more chumped out. So apparently and I know I'm going to mispronounce this, this
lever, I'm just going to call it lever. This is what you need to do above of the
vertex map and so we got all this now. So let's put this on and let's hope for the
best. All right. Here's the Colossus. I'm going to put this on here and you know
what? I'm going to make this one cubic and actually, I might go in a little
closer so we can see and see what's going on with my orbits a little bit weird. All
right, render the picture viewer. Let's hope for the best here. I took it off the
subdivision surface so it's a little bit chunky but just in...for reasons for
render time. So now, you can actually see this is where I painted on before. I went
a little bit overboard on this obviously but now it's not only a texture. It's
affecting the geometry that''s on the corners so you can use this style to
really chunk out things, make things look
really distressed. Once I discovered this technique, I try and
work it in everywhere but like what I said before it's like everything has little
imperfections to it and if you can just, even like this little chunk here, maybe
this a little chunk here, that will I think really up the level of how things
look so that's how you do that. And then just one other thing I wanted to show
you, the illusive chisel type, where the face is coming out at a point. We call it
center bevel. Other people call it chisel type and that was always such a
a pain to make but now with the Polygon tool, it's
super easy. So hey, that came out really great. All right,
that render is done. Let's put that away. Let's put this guy away and let's bring
up center bevel. So again, let's go back to the base. Put him up. And let's go back
to face mode, select all, seen this before, extrude. I'm going to
do this really quick. Go back into the top. M, K, let's knife this guy. And then
the trick with this is that you're going to have to draw right down the middle of
it and because your geometry is clean and the knife tool is awesome, look at that. I
just dragged right down the middle of it and it makes my geometry for me. It does a
perfect cut straight down the middle. Now I'm going to change this to line because
when I pull this center one out, it's going to need a little TP thing to be able
to pull out from the edges, so I'm just going to make a little cut here, a little
cut here, a little cut here, a little cut here. And then with the path selection,
another tool that makes your life really easy, and just go path select and make
sure I'm in path. Just start drawing and just trace that guy out. All right. So
there we go and then while I have that selected I might as well make a selection
for that because this will come in handy later. Let's just call that edge. Let's
just call that edge Okay. So now,
we got that and we're going to want to pull this out. Okay. We're going to want
to pull this out and you can see again it's trying to curve that. There's a
couple ways that you can deal with this. You can bring down the phong
if you don't worry about the other edges but again, all you need to do
is just make some more cuts. All right, so let's just M, K back on here. Oop, I got
to go back to loop. Loop, cut this edge and there we go. Now we got some nice
center bevel type, and then the other cool thing that we can do is, since we have
this edge selection, we can actually use one of these deformers, bevel deformer.
We'll just pop this in right in here, tell it which selection that we want to do and
then now we can actually control the size of that bevel and this is nondestructive.
We can turn it on and off and do whatever we want. I like a really tight one there,
so let's just do a subdivision, let's actually bring this down, something really
small. All right, so there you go. Just a couple minutes, you can make chisel type
and let me just give you a couple examples how those look and just render this out
for you really quick. So this kind of stuff works really good with stone. That
looks really nice. This is like a galvanized metal but if you do marble or
stone like that you can get a really nice look out of that. Actually let me just
revert this real quick since I have all these saved. Turn this on and then
everybody loves chrome type, and that's good because you have all those
angles. Oops, take off my dented, sorry. All those angles is going
to pick up a CRI really nicely, and since all the geometry is so clean,
everything, all the reflections are going to be really nice. So what I did, remember
the Colossus big blockbuster? So I used this centered bevel technique to do out
all those letters and that didn't take too long. Let me just open up this project
really quick. I think I'm running out of time and so all I did was a simple
camera move right down the middle. I mean, you got to think of a big trailer reveal,
big camera move type gimbal and all I did with that was just a shader
effector. I have all those pieces within a fracture object, which is great because
you can use all the MoGraph Effectors without it having to be in a cloner. So
that's really useful for other stuff not just text. So I used this shader, as you
can see right here, and all you do is animate it through. I have a little bit of
fall off on it so I'll just pull it back. It'll pull all the type right in
it. And one of the good benefits of the type rotating, it's going to pick up the
reflections differently and it will look really big. Another element I want into
this was a asteroid belt around it and again, with how awesome Cinema is, this
was so easy to do. I just had my asteroids in a cloner and they were just sort of
rock shaped things. I only use four of them and then I had this tortise and I
just flattened it down and that was my generator and I just rotated the
tortise a little bit of random rotation and position on the
cloner and we got some asteroids going by. And another thing that I've discovered is
that see I have my Colossus type here. I have some volumetric light in here because
I wanted some spill off from the side, like it's being lived by, bounced off the
planet or from a star or something. I have this Colossus actually cut out. I have it
matted, and that was as easy as just putting a compositing tag on it, and this
little check box down here and this was one of the best discoveries because all
you do is check it. It will make an alpha channel so you have one object and
another object in front of it. It will punch out through that so in your
compositing, it makes it a lot easier to put it together. So let me just hop in to
After Effects really quick. I'll show you how this composite worked and then we can
see the final product. Okay. Almost there and I'm a huge fan of multipass. Just
render as many passes as you possibly can. I usually do PNGs so they're not that big.
One way to do it too is to render a single frame, render all the passes that
you would think you'd want, make a composite just for that single frame,
figure out which ones you need and then when you render the whole thing just turn
off the ones that you don't need. So here's just my base pass, my beauty pass.
I did another pass at chrome to make it a little bit more fancy and here's my
asteroids in there and then there's my light I tweaked. I just used this as a
luma matte on some effects. Here let me just open it all the way up so we can see
how this look. Low lens flare,
and put all that into a 235 matte because everything looks better
with a 235 matte, and I did the poor man's chromatic aberration. If you don't have
any filters, do not do that. You just set your channels. Duplicate it, duplicate it
so you have three. Make one all red. Make one all green. Make one all blue, and then
make them all add, and when you put them back together, you get the color you look,
and you just warp them out, each layer just a little bit. So on the sides, the
color starts coming apart a little bit and that's a good trick for doing screen
replacements too. If I just nudge this over a little bit, and over a little bit
you can see this effect as it's having now. So that's just a nice really trick.
So I actually have a render of how this all turned out. I think if I got five
minutes I can show one more thing. I did a Maxon as well and just one quick tip for
this. I used the spline that was the source of this as it aligns the spline for
some nulls and I put external compositing tag on those. So when I export it out, the
camera and all the 3D data in my composite, let me just switch back real
quick, get to Maxon. I just nulled some...you can see then these are my
nulls. I just nulled the position of my lens flares to those as those aligned to
spline nulls, so it goes around the edges perfectly and everything's in 3D space.
You can do 3D optical flares on that and that's really good trick to know. So
without further ado, let's go to the final render. Hope I got some sound on this. My
friend Mike, who owns Audio Brewery, he's a trailer editor, but he's
also a composer. He was nice enough to compose some sound design for this so
hopefully this is nice and loud and you enjoy his work. So in just an afternoon,
not counting render time, I made all this in an afternoon.
♪ [music] ♪
And that's it. Thank you very much.