Oh Man I’ve been wanting to know how to do this.

Thanks Nick!

Syn on November 30th, 2009 said...

Hey Nick I got a question for you, I’m a designer out of Toronto Ontario, and I’m really interested in getting into 3d modeling. Ive notice you used cinema 4d alot rather than software like 3d max and other application. My question to you…… Is there a reason you prefer to use cinema 4d rather then the other leading apps. And second what apps would you recommend a designer with strong design background looking to get into the world of 3d model and motion graphics.

PS love this site, on it daily keep it up

Nice tutorial Nick! you just need to enable Animate Preview in the Editor tab of the Material to see the movie animate in the viewport.

The Gorilla on November 19th, 2009 said...

Briliant!!!! Thanks.

Nick Jones on November 19th, 2009 said...

Ah Man! I finally had a tip to share that Nick didn’t know and you beat me to it… Well played sir.

Maor Bar on November 25th, 2009 said...

What a great sub-tip!
Thanks Rick.
And thank you GSG

Dave Koss on January 8th, 2010 said...

Was just trying to figure that out yesterday. Thanks!

Awesome tutorial, it’s nice to see the integration with After Effects and C4D

Nice tutorial Nick!
I think this kind of speedy tut’s works best, because you can show more info and more trial and error.

Ha! I’m from the UK. I see that intro everyday for the BBC News, and i’m glad to see that you’re doing a tutorial for the effect.

One of my favorites so far. Love seeing how to pull off the same kind of stuff in both AE and C4D, and seeing which components integrate when necessary. Thanks NIck!

I was messing around a few weeks ago with an idea like this and instead of using an alpha channel, I made a couple squares, animated them, and put those along with the sphere in a boole object. Same effect. Good stuff.

Nice one Nick.

Got one workflow tip for your ’cause i’ve seen you flip the slider in the gradient bar in c4d. You can actually do a right click into the little bar to get the flip option and two more options. All those little things build into c4d – making a workday easier.

P..:

Another fantastic tutorial! Learned some cool new tricks from this one, thanks nick!

Great Screencast Nick, like everyone on here I appreciate a good breakdown of professional methods. Also it didn’t strike me as particularly speedy to be honest, I think if you needed to, to get something covered you could easily crank it up a notch with the spice-weasle and it’d be perfectly ‘followable’, like a cordial that people can dilute (or download) to taste – especially if you’ve alot to get through. Anywho’s this has answered alot of questions for me but also revived an old one that I’ve been thinking of for a while… Is it possible to animate, or use a movie for your HDRI, so you’re reflections move to match live footage? I’d be very interested to hear what yourself or anyone has to say on this.

Warmest

Lawrence

Christopher S. Knell on November 19th, 2009 said...

I’m thinking we all need to learn SynthEyes. Looks really cool for matching to live footage. Been playing around with the demo today. There’s a Tut on the COW for it.

Matt Frodsham on November 20th, 2009 said...

You can put a QT in any texture.. so you can put it in a sky and have it reflect off materials. BUT.. because it isn’t a High Dynamic Range Image (a technically impossible thing as of now pretty much I think) it won’t be true HDRI lighting… but you can use it for reflections, see my crap test using that here: http://vimeo.com/6201475

Lawrence on November 20th, 2009 said...

Thanks Matt, I’m just giving that a try now.

Massive tutorial there!
No problem with speed at all, right to the point!
It’s cool to see the process of it, I had a few tweaks in mind throughout the watching and you actually made them along.
Pretty cool to have to think of pushing it a bit further.

Just two questions:
-In After Effects, when you try to get the second “sphere” feel inside the first one, why not pickwhip (not sure how you spell that) the scale parameter to link them both. You’ll get the perfect match (hehe, sorry for Alexia)

-On this question, I’ll be a lot shy.
How could you delay the beginning of the movie’s alpha channel in C4D. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I very new to C4D, and you amongst others got me into it.

BTW, keep going dude, it’s awesome.

Max on November 19th, 2009 said...

In C4D maybe try animating the Movie Start Frame under the Animation Tab inside the movie texture?

Rich on November 20th, 2009 said...

Great Tutorial and great feedback all up!!

AE:
A quickie from me, instead of linking the scale in ea. layer, re-size the inner sphere without keyframes and then pick-whip the inner (yellow) CC Sphere’s radius to either of the outer CC sphere’s radius and apply simple math to keep the downscaling uniform:

thisComp.layer(“Stripes Comp 1 F”).effect(“CC Sphere”)(“Radius”)/1.5

Nice!

Hi Nick excellent tut..again.
i was just wondering after watching this if the effects (around about the 1 min mark) in this awesome FMK/Mathematic video were working on a similar, all be it more complex principle?

http://www.vimeo.com/6996147

The Gorilla on November 24th, 2009 said...

That looks like it’s made with a TON of deformers and boole objects.

Hi Nick, great one, i found another way of doing this, using an emitter, i’ll try to explain.
I made a disc, made it into a polygon object, used the ring selection to cut out all but the ring at the edge of the disc. so a flat ring was left.
Then I took the emitter and and made the ring a child of the emitter. the size of the emitter set to 1×1, birthrate to 2, end scale up to 3 or so.
So now the emitter is spitting out discs, then I put the emitter into a null object.
Then I made spherify deformer a child of the null object.
Now the emitter spits discs that hit the spherify deformer.
The effect is made a little more interesting by adding a sound effector on the X-scale of the sphere, so that it rocks around a bit….
I hope you understand the steps, if not, i’ll mail you my project file or some screenshots.
Give it a try.
Kind Regards,
Remco, Holland

The Gorilla on November 24th, 2009 said...

That is a great technique. I would LOVE to see the project file if you could share it.

Cheers!!!!

remco on November 24th, 2009 said...

all yours at remco.erwindeleeuw.com/greyscalegorilla
file is called ‘the other way.c4d’
cheers!
remco

The Gorilla on November 27th, 2009 said...

Thanks for the file. That works well. It’s a slightly different look though. Thanks!!!

Bitch’n tutorial…..I bet you’ll see this on some peoples show reels.

Thanks Nick! I love your c4d tutorials. They are clear, great stuff.

Thanks for the tutorial, one issue im having is with netrender and the animated texture. It seems to do anything but natch up, ie 2 comps rendering 0-75 76-150 respectively, 25fps, ae file 6 secs long, but the comp starting at 76 sometimes seems to render the animated texture as if frame 1, sometimes not at all.
Anything i should be doing other than not using net render ?

BBC News intro is my all-time favourite and this tutorial is just a brilliant idea. Cheers mate

As I watched the cinema portion, I pulled up 3ds Max, and you can do the same thing! I just don’t know how to do color correction. Thanks Nick!

Great tut, but i have a problem when i render…
it makes a lighter sphere where it should be transparent …

an example:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2601/4128675466_8e2f4fee80_b.jpg

i just started to use cinema 4d by a couple of week so i’m a complete noob :p

The Gorilla on November 24th, 2009 said...

hmmm… Not sure about that one. Anybody else?

Jake on November 24th, 2009 said...

Try making a new material with the only attribute being 100% transparency, and put that in front of your material with the alpha in it. Ran into a similar problem on a project a while back and that fixed it.

The Gorilla on November 25th, 2009 said...

Thanks, Jake!!

Matteo on November 25th, 2009 said...

Thanks the tweak worked greatly
when i can i will post the final result.

Matteo on November 25th, 2009 said...

Argh the tweak works only in the render view when i try to render to picture viewer the globe comes back :p
BTW thanks a lot i think i will start again the project maybe i’ve done something wrong in AE..

Man you were flying… I could keep up in AE, but in Cinema I had to go back several times, but its all good!!!

Hey Nick and viewers,

If you like to preview a movie on the object in the viewport just go to the “material editor”, go to “editor” and select “animated preview”.

See ya,

Lysander

You know ur let’s know lot more idea! i haven’t seen this tutors and many tut thing getting me going and going to learn more in c4d, wow ur rock guy, also I’m was playing around in c4d that i love.

Hmmm.. I guess I got lost on the way. After I bring over my rendered lines to C4d, make a material, then I try to add my alpha in and my stripes come up damn near transparent…where did I go wrong? in ae?

The Gorilla on November 27th, 2009 said...

Hmmm, hard to know without seeing. Did you try rendering the scene. It may just be hidden in the viewer.

hei..i realy like your work and i like to know how to create 3d text explode like syfy logo animation.thx

Nick, real nice tuto.
Screen real estate is free.
Why is the gorilla cage so small?

Hi Nick,
First of all Happy new year and best of luck with greyscalegorilla and any other projects you are and will be involved this year!
Now something, regarding your tutorial: it’s excellent; got inspired and started applying it to my own short project, but after I have rendered out my .mov and uploaded to cinema I cannot render it out from cinema as I keep getting Texture Error. Meaning if I want to render preview I need to go to material and calculate animation and only then I am available to view current frame.
Anyone has got any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thank you!

smile on January 5th, 2010 said...

hey andrius!
same error here!
i tried different renders but it still doesn’t work :’(

smile on January 5th, 2010 said...

heey i found it!
dubbelclick on your material and open in its ‘editor’ the texture preview size…i set it to 64×64
also check the ‘animate preview’ option.

The Gorilla
I found something this plugin
Try using (http://www.conoa.com/)
(Conoa 3d Plugin)can used with AE camera it its almost like 3d (Conoa sphere wrap)
camera can in and out