This was a very challenging week in my Cinema 4D journey. This week we dived into the basics animation in Cinema 4D and we started where everyone starts with keyframing objects in 3D space. We used this mouse trap setup as the assignment to animate. We had to animate the ball coming down the tubes, hitting the shoe swing, which would hit the hammer, which would land on the see-saw, our QBert character would go flying in the air, bouncing on the spring, landing on the button, which would trigger the lights and finally release the cage.
I approached this assignment like I would approach any complex problem and broke it down into smaller pieces and worked through each element of the assignment. First I keyframed the ball rolling through tubes, which was a simple series of keyframes on the positional elements of the object. Then we looked the keyframing the rotation of the shoe swing and hammer, aligning those timings to when the ball interacts with the shoe. In order to make QBert launch into the air, we duplicated the character and grouped it with the see-saw and made it visible til the apex of the see-saw motion. At this point, we cut to our “Flying QBert” where we keyframed all of the positional and rotational keyframes for him to do his jumps and flips in the air. We ended with simple keyframes on the spring, button, lights, and cage to finish the scene.
The final assignment for the week involved a new method of animating which involved creating Splines as motion paths and rail paths. We used the “Attach to Spline” tag to pin an object to Spline that we created for the path of our airplane. We also looked animation tags and deformers that can automate and generate specific types of motion. In this project we used the vibrate tag to create the floating islands, the wind deformer to make the flags wave in the air, a displacer deformer on the clouds, and an emitter to create the smoke puffs.
One of the things that I experimented with was attaching cameras to the motion path to create a tracking shot of the plane. In this assignment, one of the camera angles we used was attached to the motion path ahead of the plane and would lead the plane through the course achieving a kind of Top Gun “dog fight” shot. We also added a target tag to one of the cameras so that it could follow the plane through the course, which allowed us to get some interesting camera motion without any keyframes.
One of the things that I found incredibly interesting was thinking about how much dynamic motion I can create without creating any keyframes and just allowing certain tags and deformers do the majority of the work and then I can simply keyframe the big pieces for cleaner, smoother motion.
