3.1 Creating the First Metal Bar

Hello, this is Christopher Kenworth, and welcome to the visual effects compositing course. We're now ready to put in the grill, or grate, the metal bars that go over this trap door here. So we'll model that in Cinema 4D. But to begin, make sure that your track solid here is made visible. So we can see it up here. Then we need to position this over the trap door, so I'm just going to pull on the green arrow there, press Shift to move it a little faster. And hit W to rotate over the z axis. And then, I'm just gonna turn the resolution right down. Turn off the tunnel layer. And just play through to see how that's looking. That does look as though it's fairly close to where we want it to be. We will put a background reference in Cinema 4D as well, but it's just good to have this in place as a starting point. So expand it slightly, move it over, expand it a little more. Rotate one more time, and that's fairly close. And that means now that when we go over to Cinema 4D, that will be sitting in just about the right place for us to see where these metal bars should go. You can see there as we get towards the end of the clip, it looks like the height's not completely accurate, whereas it looks reasonably correct at the beginning. I think it would be wise at this point to leave it where it is because the grate will actually fall down halfway through the clip. So it doesn't matter about the accuracy towards the end. If you are modeling something into place with the whole clip you might want to be more accurate than this, but that will do for now. And now I need to export a new Maxon Cinema 4D File. So I go to File > Export >MAXON CINEMA 4D Exporter. And I'll call this, Ceiling 4D. Save that. As before, we import it directly back into After Effects and drop it into our timeline. Looks a little unusual because there are those little textures in place. So we'll just go to Edit Original and in there I'm gonna make a lot of these things invisible. We'll make the door texture invisible here, and the right wall. The track solid is in place, just where we want it. But, now, we need to add a background. So, to do that, we go up here and choose Background. So, we create a new material, double click on this, with color selected, go to texture, choose the corridor dark movie, open, say no and then drag that over to our background. And now you can see that, that looks to be in just about the right place to set this going. So I'll save and then I'm gonna go here and instead of adding a cube, I'm going to choose a cylinder. Now this appears very small over here. You can't really see it, so I'm gonna click on the scale tool and then drag on these green handle until that's a little larger. That's larger than we're going to want, probably. Go back to the move tool and just get hold of the orange dot at the end so we extend that and make a bar. Then click the rotate tool, and rotate on the red until it looks just as though it's in roughly the right place. If I render that, you can see that's floating somewhere in space that's just about right. Well, now go to our four views. And, as always, frame selected objects. Right click on each window and choose frame selected object. And then just pull out a little. And we can see where it needs to go. Our track solid is there. Our cylinder is here, so you can see they're close to each other, but they need to move. So I'll select the move tool and just use the green arrow to move that into place there. Looking at the front view, I can see the perhaps it needs to go that way a little, and while I'm doing this I can look over here and see what's happening. And as I move that, you can see it's intersecting with the track solid which is what we want. Now on this window, I'll just pull out a little. And here we can see that it needs more rotation because it's not on a flat plane with this. So I'll select the rotate tool, rotate around the red, and that's looking much better. Now if I look up here again, I'm just gonna zoom in, and you can see that it's not parallel with the grid lines on the track solid. So I'm gonna make it parallel with the rotate tool, and now that's getting very close. Go back to one view and if I render that you can see that we have one large bar, much too large but it's in roughly the right place. If I make the track solid invisible again, save, and then go back to After Effects, we should be able to see that bar in place, so I'll change the software renderer to Standard Draft, push my resolution up a little. Now, the track solid's showing because it's here in After Effects separately, so I'll just switch it off down here. Then as we play through, you can see that that is appearing to be in the right place. So this is a good starting point. It doesn't look realistic. But we've placed an object in roughly the right place, and now we can do the fine tuning to make it look as thought it's real.