3.3 The Second Model

Hello, this is Christopher Kemithy, and welcome to the visual effects compositing course. And we have our grill, or grid in place here, in the trap door, but now we need it to animate and fall away at just the right moment. So this is gonna be around the two second mark. So what I'll do here, is split the clip. Go to edit. Split layer. And then I'm going to delete it from this point. Just gonna re color our ceiling 4D to something different. I need to make another copy and adjust it. So the way to do this, is go, edit original then go to file, save as. We'll call this Animation, Save. Then in After Effects, we import that, drag it to the timeline. And again, at exactly the same point we split this layer, delete the first half. Now recolor this and so at this point, the original shot is going to end, and be taken over by the second one. Now this is a good point to get all the masking right before you go any further. So, I'm just going to switch the resolution down, select our first ceiling clip, and just play through a few frames. Adjust this mask. And this way we can check that the bars are working all the way through this clip. You don't have to be too exacting at this point if you don't want. You have the option to just come back and do this later. But I think that given we're doing animation, and checking how the bars look all the way through the shot, it's really quite important to see what's going on here. Now bear in mind the viewer doesn’t really know what they’re looking at, they don’t know this is about something that’s going to fall down in front of them. They just think they’re looking up at some metal bars in a ceiling space. I mention this cuz it means you don’t have to be completely perfect with your masking. It could be that once we've added all the smokes, sparks and everything else, raindrops coming through that perfect masking would have been a waste of time. However to see whether you're getting the result you want, it is worth spending a little bit of time just getting this reasonably accurate. And then we move over to the second clip. I'll just change this to standard draft. Now the difference here is that the second part of the clip is going to be animated, and this is going to have a frame around it. So I'm certainly not going to mask this at this point. We'll work on it in CINEMA 4D, and then mask it. so in CINEMA 4D I can now work with this layer at the two second point. So make sure you get hold of this and pull through to the 50 frame mark. And this is where the animation will begin. Now one way to animate this would to be individually get the bars and have them tumble down through the scene as though they've been exploded. That is acceptable. But there is something about over-animating CGI objects that gives the game away. If we have all these spectacularly blasting through the scene the audience knows that it's CG. If we just have it fall away, like a frame, it looks so much like a real special effect that was done on set, that, that's what people will feel. And that's what you want. So you don't want to over do this. You don't want these things flying past the camera and bouncing off each other. So we'll simplify this to make it look better. And we need to create a frame around it for it to fall away. So we'll create a cube, then just going to click on the dot at the right, the orange dot, expand that to make a bar. And then I'll use these Move tools and position it so that it starts intersecting with our bars up there. I'll take it back towards that back edge and just rotate it so that it looks more as though it's in line with them. And that's almost the right size. I'll just adjust these dots again, and you can see there if I render that's pretty much filling the frame behind it. So now I'll duplicate this cube by going Copy, Paste. And with the same cube selected, I just drag this along this way and the temptation is to arrange it here. At the end. But in actual fact, we're going to want it to be more down here. Because as it fall away, that's the size of the frame that we're going to see. So now, I'll select the Null. So now I want to shrink these along one axis. So I'll select the null. And in the coordinates here, I go down to the y-axis and just shrink that by dragging down. Then I'll reposition. Make sure they're intersecting and they need to be expanded a little. Just by moving backwards and forwards like this I can get a frame that's working for me. And now we want to create the two ends of the frame. So once again create a new cube. This time, select the orange dot nearest to you. Drag that way. And again, this is just a case of positioning this in 3D space until it intersects, so in the four views here, drag this into position. And it's easy to see what you're doing up here, get things to line up. And always keep checking up here of course, and you can see that it's not remotely in the right place because we've not put it on the right plane here so I'll just drag it up. And it's starting to sit in the right position, and if we go back to this view and render it, that's looking very good. It's sticking out a little bit here, so I'll just shrink that down a little. So even if you're an After Effects user, you're gonna learn enough 3D modeling to able to get away with it. You'll be able to create something that looks real enough as it falls away. That's looking good now, but a reminder, this is only going to be visible for a very few frames. So although I'm gonna get this as accurate as I can, and make sure I'm happy with it. It's really not going to be on the screen for long, so it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to give an impression of a grill. So now, duplicate second cube, and move that along to the right-hand side there. I'm just going to save this and have a quick look in after effects. So, with the correct background in place we can now see how that's going to look. So the bars will be there and then this grate will fall through after the sparks and explosion. In the next lesson we'll look at texturing and animating this.