Tutorials & Goodies
Release 10 comes with a second DVD or it does now. Those of us who had Release 10 from the launch date in October 2006 had to wait quite a while for the second DVD with the goodies and the tutorials on to arrive. Mine came around Christmas. Yet another reason why I feel Release 10 was a bit rushed being launched. But anyway I've got the second DVD and the tutorials on it are superb and by far and away the best tutorials that MAXON has ever produced. No skimping here. You get around 9 hours of clear and well presented tutorials that take you through a complete project of modelling, rigging and animating. While the final animation is not the greatest, the journey on getting there by following the videos is excellent. We'll summarize the videos briefly. There's just too much in them to cover here. We'll also have a look at what else is on the DVD.
Tutorials
As mentioned in the introduction Release 10 comes with a second DVD and much of this is devoted to an entire animation project from start to finish. Some models are provided but others need to be modelled. We'll briefly summarize the subject of each video tutorial. The videos are in Quicktime format and have been setup to run from within a web browser with a menu on the left hand side. I strongly urge people following the videos to run from a browser as running the videos directly with the Quicktime player doesn't work nearly as well and scrubbing back and pausing can be problematic.
Video Tutorial Menu
Video 1 - Introduction 3min. Short introduction and changing layouts and using C4D's new help system
Video 2 - Modelling and texturing a park bench 19min
Video 3 - Modelling and texturing a street lamp 15min
Video 4 - Modelling a trash can 16min
Video 5 - Butterfly head polygonal modelling 1 hour 9min
Video 6 - Butterfly body polygonal modelling 38min
Video 7 - Butterfly UV mapping 16min
Video 8 - Butterfly texturing in BodyPaint 24min
Video 9 - Butterfly rigging and morphs 1 hour 9 min
Video 10 - Flabio character rigging 1 hour 43min
Video 11 - Merging the elements 13min
Video 12 - Creating the environment 17min
Video 13 - Camera animation 9min
Video 14 - Butterfly animation 30min
Video 15 - Flabio animation 1 hour 10min. Walk cycles.
Video 16 - Animating Flabiana 30min
Video 17 - Special effects adding dust 17min. Thinking particles module.
Video 18 - Special effects adding grass 5min. HAIR module
Video 19 - Rendering 6min
Video 20 - Final animation 20sec
Here's a still from the final animation
An addendum video that address several issues when rigging the Flabio character is available free at Cineversity. In the Character Animation / Mocca 3 section of the review I also mention a problem with the feet twisting and explain how to resolve it.
Video 21 - Addition animation sample using some of the Mocca preset characters - 1min 11sec. This is an outstanding animation. Both characters come with Release 10, pre rigged and ready to animate. You can view this animation at MAXON's site here. Below is a screen grab from the animation.
Screen grab from bonus video.
Here's an animation I made using the Ghost character from the animation. I gather this model is by Cafe member Kiteman. You can find this and other pre rigged characters ready to go in the Content Browser under the Mocca presets.
MAXON hasn't skimped on things with the Release 10 video tutorials. You get just under 9 hours of excellent video tutorials. These tutorials take you through modelling, texturing, basic UV mapping and painting in BodyPaint, lighting, rigging, using morphs, walk cycles and rendering. The videos are very well presented and move at a pace that beginners should find very easy to follow. More experienced people may them repetitive as instructions to do the same task are described fully every time and this can get a little tedious to listen to but I think it's appropriate for beginners following along. Even for experienced users there's some great information and it's a quick way to get up to speed with many of Release 10's new features. The video on creating dust using Thinking Particles for example was excellent and I hadn't done anything like this myself before. Here, you're shown how to make particle emitters only emit particles as the 2 characters feet hit the ground.
Goodies
The DVD has the following goodies:
3 x 3DAttack magazines
3rd party materials including the excellent Noctua materials from pervious versions of C4D
3 free plugins - CenterAxis, Shuffle and Swap Normals
3rd party scenes from Andreas Keller and Tim Clapham
3rd party textures from 3DTotal, 3DFluff, Sachform, Seamless Reality and Simon Wicker
Irfanview freeware image browser
Export examples in various formats
MAXON textures - "basic001.jpg" to "basic057.jpg" were missing from the installation DVD. Put these in the "tex" folder in the main CINEMA 4D folder. You'll get render errors otherwise when rendering the basics materials
MoGraph resources - these are the textures, videos etc that originally came on the disc if you bought MoGraph when you were running 9.6.
So all up and an outstanding Tutorial and Goodies DVD. By far and away the best set of tutorials ever provided by MAXON.