Danny TCF

Hi! About a year ago I decided to take the step from 2D(+- 7 years experience) to 3D. This is one of my current spare-time projects next to my daily job as a 2D-Animator. The project: Modelling, texturing and animating a 3D Lego Car, came to this idea during building a lego car I bought a couple months ago: Lego Speed Champions_ Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 :https://www.lego.com/nl-nl/product/chevrolet-camaro-zl1-race-car-75891 During building of the car I was impressed with the amount of detail added to the car, even on parts where it’s not directly visible in the end result. First thing I did was modelling all parts seperately based on the original parts measurements by calculating, measuring and integrating information I found on the internet. I read about some software where you can build your lego creations, download it and merge it into Cinema4D, but I rather model all parts myself, because the learning-path is more important for me than the result, I want to make mistakes to learn about and ofcourse gain some model eperience. After that I started naming all parts to it’s original name based on the part number, so when I started building I could easily switch between projects, find and import the files to the building project file. During the building I followed every step to ensure I made no mistakes during the modelling, after completing the car based on the manual, I did a strict check, highlighted the parts that were not accurate or occurs large gaps... Up here some first results with the gaps/ faults/ bumps higlighted. ...and started the next Phase: 02_ Finetuning, so here I double checked every part on its measurements and changed it if necessary and recoordinated the bricks to line up perfectly with the other bricks. So that is where I am now, lined up every part and it seems nearly perfect. Parts I still need to fix: - Main window measurements are not accurate (used a Bulge deformer( within box) to deform the glass into a rounded shape, unfortunately the bottom of the window on the front side is intersecting with other parts which is not as accurate as I wish for, and may occur problems in the window refraction. - The wheel measurement and shape are not accurate, rim is missing holes and detail - Roll-cage is not added tot the model yet. So after these are fixed I will start fase 03: Optimize Where I will try to optimize every part: - Make sure the bevel is correct - Turn down the amount of polygons Video to the current state: The next phase (03) will be adding materials: Since 2 months I got a Octane Render subscription, really impressed by the results, but untill now I was not able to really dive into it... having a hard time learning the other terms and way of working in contrast to the original Cinema 4D material manager where I was just getting used to. The decals on the car will be made in Adobe Illustrator, there is a lack of online reference material so, it will be a lot of re-measuring and replacing during this phase. I may want to add some dirt/ fingerprints to the model to make it look more allive but that is something i never did before so let’s not get ahead of myself. To make the model ready for animation/ renders I would like to make 2 versions: 1. Full accurate model with parts on places you can't see in the end result, so I can use this as a speed build animation or for a dynamics simulation. 2. Hollow model where every unnecesary part (not visible) is left out of the model for better performance and controll. So that’s it for now, I hope you like the result so far, next step will be recreating the front window and the wheels and start texturing the model. Time spend: 34 hours During the corona-virus period I’m only able to work at my working station at home wich is not really bad, but also not as good as my office working station so my final renders will be done there to get faster more optimized render results: Home station: i7 6700k 16gb ram Nvidia gtx 980 Office computer: Alienware Aurora r9 i9 9900 32 gb 2x nvidia 2080 super Working on both work-stations with a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium, cinema 4D R21 (subscription) and Octane (Subscription) Looking for some tips and feedback on: Workflow Results Tips, tricks, tutorials for octane texturing Time spend on result(34) (normal or too many hours) Side question: Will the instance generator optimize the viewport/renders?

@jed Wow this helps me out a lot! Thanks A lot!, I will try this on my project, thanks!

Hi Everyone, so trying out a lot Cinema 4D these days, now I am working on a personal project with creating an construction area where I want to moddel and animate an aerial platform with a Scissor construction, now I am in the try out fase for animating the scissor movement, and pushing up the next part etc. etc. and pushing the platform up at the right position based on the scissor movement. I've got 3 solutions, but don't know what will be the best/ controllable and accurate way. Option 01: Xpresso, Link the Rotation of the outer arm to the inner arm and link to the position of the second arm and add some Math: to the node editor to get the right numbers. + Making a UserData Controller on a seperate null object to controll these easily. (tried, kinda worked. But far from perfect) Option 02: Riggin like a character ( but quite unknown with rigging, but will be a good excercise, but probably the best solution) ¿Can I rig it with the Cloner or is it better to rig it with duplicates? Option 03: Maybe with a MoGraph Effectors? Tried out some effectors but did not get the right result, probably doing it wrong. Anyone any advice? Tips etc. Attached: Option 01 tested, Can found the controller in the User Data Null layer in the object menu, it's also animated. (it's just a fast moddel, not made for the end product, just trying out the scissor movement.) Aerial Platform_Xpresso test.c4d

Wow thanks! This will help me out a lot! I will explore more with post-production and will update the topic when I find the solution for it! Thanks again

@Lonchaney Thanks for your response, well, I don't have any yet, so maybe for later... I think the problem is with recognizing where the world axis is after I set the camera to Parallel, now when I set a layer to a 3D environment in AE it will look like this (see attachement).... Sorry still a newbie, had to post this in 'new users & beginners'

@Lonchaney Yes I did, but it was still out of screen and orientation

Update: Tried to save te file and import to AE, hoping to extract the camera and use it in AE, but it didn't worked out that well, after extracting the camera and placing a new layer in AE in a 3d envorinment, it just was out of world axis and unmatchable with the scene. I tried 2 versions of the camera from Cinema 4D: - Preset Isometric Camera - Parallel Camera with isometric camera settings: P: 136 H:-37 Maybe the world Axis are not good? Have not found the solution yet... If someone had any ideas or tricks... don't hesitate. Kind regards, Danny

Thanks CBR, Yeah, I think that's the right workflow aswell, I will put a few tests on it! Thanks

Can anyone please tell me how to implement these 2D graphics in this 3D isometric animation? They look like they are animated in After Effects, but they are implemented very well and precise measured... Is this a post- production feature or is it clever done in Cinema 4D. Once I was working on a project with 2D characters in a 3D environment which I projected on a transparent plane, but that isn't ideal because there were some limitations, though these vfx doesn't need any shadows/ environment lightning etc. Thanks!