3.4 Animating the Model

Hello, this is Christopher Kimedy, and welcome to the Visual Effects Compositing course. And we have our bars in place, which then become this grid grill as it falls away. And I think it's time to texture this now. We don't need to do too much texturing, but it's just gonna give us a better idea of how this is going to look in the finished product. And although we could say this takes up some render time and we'd rather leave it till later, I think now is a good time. You can apply textures to groups. So I'm gonna group everything together here. I'm gonna shift-click to select my cubes up here and then drag them into the Null. And this means that when we texture the Null, everything will be textured. It also means that when we animate this later on, the whole thing will move as one piece, which is what we want. Now I could go into the content browser and look for a particular material that I might want to use because there are a lot of metals in here that would be ideal. But seeing as we've been using these imported photo textures, I'm gonna stick with them for now. And I'm gonna use the right wall texture, drag that onto the null up here, and just render that and see how that looks. I really like the way that's created a slightly unusual, graded metal look. I'm please with that, so I'll save, check it in After Effects. And of course that's not lit properly, but I think that looks like what I want to achieve here, so I'm going to leave that for now. You can experiment with whatever textures you like, but the important thing is, whatever texture you use, you also need to apply it to this ceiling layer. So I'm going to select that and then go to Edit Original. And in here, we need to drag the texture, the right wall texture, up to the null and look at it in After Effects. Now we can move on to the animation itself. I'm gonna switch off some of the layers to speed things up. So I'll turn off the tunnel back there. Then move over to where the animation starts here. Save that and go back to CINEMA 4D. Now, before I start animating, there are a couple of things I want to check. First of all I need to make sure I'm at the 50 frame mark. That's where we need to begin, down here. And I also need to check my model as absolutely right. When I rotated this before I noticed that the bars are sticking out over the top there, which isn't ideal. I want to shrink those a little. So I'm gonna shift-click the cylinders in there, and then under the coordinates here, I'm just gonna shrink those down a little in the z axis. And then with just those cylinders selected, I'm going to move them down a little render that. Select the Null, rotate it towards us and check that that's doing what I want it to do now. That does look just about right. So once my model's ready, I can keyframe into position here at the 50 frame mark. I do that by selecting the null here, coming down to coordinates, and I could right click on any of these coordinates and go to Animation > Add Key Frame. That's keyframed the position, but it's not done the scale and the rotation. The easier way is to click this key button, which records position, scale, and rotation. You can see they've all gone red over here. So now I'll move forward a few frames. Let's go to 75. Get the move tool and just move this, not quite out of frame yet. We'll just move it down to there for now and then I'll select the rotation tool, I'll rotate it once that way and once that way. Now I need to keyframe this before I move. If you look here, this little light blue keyframe, whereas one hasn't appeared here yet. So I actually need to keyframe this position. So I click the button here and now the keyframe has appeared. So when I play through you can see that fall as it goes. Now looking at that, I probably have too many rotations. It's not really, I don't want it rotating around that blue axis. Because it's too much. So I just undo that. So I'll move it down to here. And I think I want it to move towards camera like that and maybe to fall forwards like that. Maybe no more than that. Then I'll just drag it down out of shot, and then hit the keyframe button. Now I'll see how that looks. Now that's much more like what I want. If I hit the play button here you can see not too much is happening. If you find that's moving too fast, or too slow, you can just grab hold of this keyframe and move it somewhere else. I'll move if further on there, just play through. You can see that's probably a bit too slow. I may even take it back to 70, and see how that looks a little faster. That's probably better. So, now with that done, I'll save and go back to after effects. Of course, there's no blurring applied to this yet. And the lighting isn't finished because we'll work on all that as we go. But this will just give us an impression of how this is going to look in terms of speed. So I think that works well. And the fantastic thing is that if it doesn't, even when we've added all the other layers in, we can just come back to CINEMA 4D. And shift this keyframe, or go to the keyframe, and just change the rotation. And, then, all we do is just save and that change will update in After Effects. So, now we have a textured model, in position, and then, the sparks and the flash of explosion will occur. And, then, that model will fall away, through the scene. Just looking back here you can see that the masking isn't perfect, so make sure that you perfect the masking before moving on to the next lesson.