Quick Cinema 4D Experiment: Marble Pop

Just playing around with some physics again. I used Cinema 4D with my HDRI Light Kit Pro for the window area lighting. I then used Frischluft Lens Care for the Depth of Field and Magic Bullet Looks for the color correction.

3D Render Time: 40 minutes
Total Project Time: 2 hours

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74 people have commented on this post. You should too!

  1. Julien says:

    Really nice render

  2. Wilson Filho says:

    Thumbs up for your commitment to us!

  3. Ameen Ali says:

    Looks pretty cool
    I might do a remake :P

  4. Freed says:

    how did you get the balls to pop up like that in the centre?

  5. Pingback: Tweets that mention Quick Cinema 4D Experiment: Marble Pop | greyscalegorilla/blog -- Topsy.com

  6. Jovan says:

    Popcorns:)

  7. randmcnally says:

    I’d love to see Nick do some simple modelling tuts…lord knows the man can work a sphere though!

    keep em coming!

  8. Marijan says:

    Can i found a tutorial to export/import 3D movie to AE and make the DOP ? thanks and nice job :)

  9. richard dobell says:

    Loving the moody black and white vibe!

  10. Ali Karim says:

    wow nice im gonna try and do this effect with popcorn. thanks nick get well soon.

  11. oh wow, very cool. Thanks for posting this! The five second project should be POPCORN! word.

  12. newroyal says:

    Reminds me of the MTV-ident! :) Sweet!

  13. phil says:

    Did something similar a while back- sorry encoding is not so great…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibdsV0Pji3E

  14. Jason Harmon says:

    Sweet balls dude.

    A fracture object as a particle… that’s a really smart little experiment.

  15. Karim says:

    excuse me?..

  16. I like the black and white. Do you render out a depth matte to use the Frischluft Lens Care plugin in AE? or is this something you do in Cinema. Thanks!

  17. Benjamin says:

    Can I ask a dumb question?

    Regarding the depth of field…can you do a tutorial sometime on using the depth in Cinema 4D to render out a depth map for Frischluft or AE’s lens blur?

    It seems to me like it should be pretty straightforward, but I always seem to have problems with getting my depth map to render out clean and convincing depth of field.

  18. Looks nice :)
    I think a litle pan to the left & zoom would make it even more “exiting”.

  19. MarcyVF says:

    Smooth. That’s a bunch of plugins.

  20. eyepic9 says:

    Hi, can i ask another dumb question?
    regarding the render time. since i didnt saw flickering and other bugs can you tell us how many polygon do you have in the scene? are your settings of GI high, medium or else? and if you have time how can we optimize any scenes for better results in less render time in order to answer production deadline more easily. i really would like to have tips in that particular area, thx

    • The Gorilla says:

      Sure thing. The spheres are set to 10 segments but the “render perfect” checkbox is left on. This creates very few polygons, but still renders really smooth. As for lighting, I used the Softbox from my GSG Light Kit set to “Window”. I used Area Shadows with a very low accuracy since I knew that I would be adding so much DOF to cover it up. Hope that helps.

  21. Steve says:

    Nick, you could achieve the same result with only the cloner and have the count go up with the frame number via XPresso

  22. Edward says:

    Does anyone have any good tutorials on how to get a depth map out of cinema 4d for use like this?

  23. Jón says:

    Very nice! Reminds me of the MTV breaker that’s running right now here in Europe. :)

  24. flo says:

    hey Nick! another question:
    The DOF looks so nice! I do it just the same way but somehow, sometimes I get these “hard” edges, even on objects, that should be blurred. The object looks blurred on the inside, but not its “outline”, you know what I mean? Maybe you did a little compositing trick on the depth pass to make it look just perfectly right. If so, please let me know! :)

    • The Gorilla says:

      I use a gradient for DOF when I can. It ends up being a bit smoother than depth passes. It’s what I did for this piece. Just a ramp from top to bottom.

      • Stuart says:

        I was having the same problem today with a slightly different application of this and google led me to your GSG comments… I found the answer was to invert the DOF in the Frischluft settings :) This allows the blur to ‘spill’ out.

  25. G Man says:

    you splash a little red on those balls and you got yourself a lot of Poke Balls! haha The good ol’ days…

  26. Juart Little says:

    Nice !
    Render time for my own test : 2h30mn !! :(

    Could you tell me how many particules do you have please ?

  27. fotinos says:

    nice! I may do a tutorial for that :_P

  28. Fabrice says:

    Hi ! Very nice render… How long was the render, Nick ?

  29. I got shown how to do some cool stuff with thinking particles with modynamic cloners referencing particle groups this week. Can get some really cool transforming popcorn stuff going on. If I had a mic and didn’t have a super boring voice I’d consider doing a tut for the first time but no time. Pretty cool how you can integrate Mograph with other modules seamlessly though!

  30. DAN-O-SAUR says:

    Hi Nick!!!!!
    How´s it goin ?

    This reminds of the last GSG live casts where people asked for a render tutorial. It would be cool if you could do a render and also Depth of Field tutorial! That would be dope stuff sir!
    See you wednesday! I am EXCITED buddy!
    Cheers,

    Dan

  31. polypixel says:

    Didn’t you enable the highlights option in the lesncare menu? It makes a HUGE difference. And Crap, for some reason I still don’t like the C4D render output quality.

  32. Hey check out some animation titles made with C4D and manly after effects with a lot of footage. It’s a promo for a movie coming to cinema’s here in My Country.

    http://vimeo.com/13270485

  33. Ataman says:

    I am new to this – A simple Question

    See when I set up:

    Emitter
    Fracture Object (Rigid BOdy MoGraph Tag)
    Sphere

    Hit Run my spehere just go crazy and explode all over the place because they are born overlapping…

    IF I disable dynamics it is just not cool looking what am I doing wrong…

    Thanks…

    Great render by the way.

  34. Joel Machemer says:

    Hey Nick, I have a question that’s been bugging me for a while now.

    Every time I try to save the compositing file for AE, it always saves as an .aec (i think that’s what it’s called) which is an adobe bridge file that doesn’t even work for AE

    I was wondering if you have ever come across that and if you knew how to get it saving as a true AE file???

  35. Joel Machemer says:

    Hey, I have one more question. Someone please help if they can!

    My particle source for the emitter is a cloner object when i try this, and the render is just not matching up with the preview. there are a lot of “marbles” in the preview, and i’m happy with it, but there are not NEARLY as many showing up in the render?? I tried baking the particles, but it still didn’t help!

    Do you know what’s happening?

  36. Dave N says:

    This is just popcorn falling into a bowl. Once you use actual popcorn, it presents its own problems because of the irregular shapes.

    http://www.vimeo.com/12412793

  37. Jacob says:

    I’m pretty new to cinema 4d, and a noob, but I would love a full length tutorial. This is one of my favorite animations that you have did

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