Creating a Morning News Opener in CINEMA 4D and After Effects
In this series of tutorials, we will go through the process for rigging, animating, texturing, rendering, and compositing a morning news opener-style motion graphics piece. Software required: CINEMA 4D R14, After Effects CC 12.0.0.404, Trapcode Particular v2.2.0, Knoll Light Factory v3.0.0.
What you'll learn
In this series of tutorials, we will go through the process for rigging, animating, texturing, rendering, and compositing a morning news opener-style motion graphics piece. We start out by creating a camera path that we can arrange our models around for a quick setup and flow of the piece. We learn how to create sweeps that move around our models for added emphasis, and we learn fast ways to get our camera pointing in the right direction along this complex path. After finishing our animations, we move onto briefly discussing our texture workflow. We then begin working in After Effects, where we take the piece from looking good to great by adding a series of effects and color tweaks. This course is for you if you want to create a motion graphics piece that takes the guess work out of your camera animation. By the end of this course, you will have your very own finalized motion graphic as well as a new knowledge on the workflow between CINEMA 4D and After Effects. Software required: CINEMA 4D R14, After Effects CC 12.0.0.404, Trapcode Particular v2.2.0, Knoll Light Factory v3.0.0.
Table of contents
- Creating a Spline and Rig for the Camera 10m
- Animating the Camera Rig 13m
- Editing the F-curves to Correct Overshoot 3m
- Adding a Camera and Beginning to Position the Models 13m
- Using a PSR Constraint with the Camera Target 11m
- Fixing Flipping with Nulls, the PSR Constraint and a Rail Path 14m
- Adding Time for the Final Camera Move 9m
- Editing the Models' Rotation 3m
- Creating the Main Spline 14m
- Using SweepNurbs and Splines Together 15m
- Creating Secondary Splines and Animating Them 6m
- Texturing with Tags 13m
- Creating a Tight Specularity for Texture 4m
- Using Bump and Reflection Together 9m
- Lighting the Scene 9m
- Rendering the Scene 6m
- Importing the Rendered Frames to After Effects 7m
- Creating Lights in CINEMA 4D to Use as Emitters and Lens Flares in After Effects 10m
- Saving the .AEC File and Bringing It into After Effects 5m
- Placing 2.5D Images Between the Two Render Layers 9m
- Keying the Light Positions to Reveal the Flares 9m
- Using the Lights as Particle Emitters with Trapcode Particular 15m
- Adding Lens Flares with Knoll Light Factory 13m
- Adding Lens Effects for Added Realism 9m
About the author
Laura is a passionate visual effects and motion graphics author at Pluralsight. Ever since her first exposure to After Effects in college, Laura has had an eternal drive to learn more about motion graphics, and teach others what she has discovered. Laura began working at Digital-Tutors (now a Pluralsight company) as a motion graphics artist, creating visually-appealing advertisements and informative art for the site. Throughout her time at Digital-Tutors, Laura contributed greatly to both the ... more