Creating a Basic Cinema 4d Animation for an Avatar. Welcome to the tutorial, I will be guiding you through this tutorial step by step so you do not get confused, there are a lot of images, I doubt you will get lost. First start by opening Cinema 4d. This is my interface, I customized the colors and tabs to my liking, but your will look the same, I'm using Release 8.
Firstly, start off with the object you want to animate, I'm going to use a Primitive Pyramid, you can use whatever you want… except a sphere, because… well, you can figure it out.
Then go to Objects - Scene - Floor to add a floor.
Now that we have that, we need to add some materials, so go (on the material editor) File - New Material.
Check the following boxes in the Attributes Editor. Color Luminance Transparency Reflection Specular
Change the color and brightness to whatever you want, mine will be orange, with a brightness of 30%.
Set your Luminance to 30%.
Transparency Settings: Brightness - 75% Fresnel - 4
Reflection Brightness to 60%
And Specular to… Mode - Colored Width - 55% Height - 80% Falloff - 8% Inner Width - 0%
Now that we got that done, lets apply it to our object.
Quick Render Preview, does not look like much, but will look better in the end, trust me.
Now to add a Material to our floor, I Changed the color to a dark grey, 20% to RGB, with a Brightness of 100%.
And also add a reflection to the material with a Brightness of 75%
Now add it to our floor.
Now for our lighting, create an Omni Light and position it above our triangle with a Brightness of 50% and a soft shadow.
(* is a representation of Degree's Herein) Then create a Spot Light and position it look at the triangle (personal preference), with the following settings under the tab Details… Inner Angle - 41* Outer Angle - 56* Brightness - 83% Contrast - 45%
Your setup should now look similar to this.
Getting Close to finishing up, lets move onto the exciting part!
Now that our scene is done completely, now onto animating. Go Window - Layout - Animation.
Start off by changing the orientation of the object, because the way it is, is just plain dull. So I Changed the Pitch to 30* and the Bank to 15* (On the bottom right.) Though such an extreme might result in odd angles with the final product.
Now Key that by hitting the red "Record" button on the animation editor.
Then click the button next to it (Auto keyframing) and drag it to frame 39 (because our animation starts at frame 0.)
And Change the "H" Value on the bottom right to 360*
I did a quick render so you can see how it looks so far, then click Render - Render Settings.
Click the tab Output, and change the Resolution to your liking, most forums take a maximum of 100x100 so keep that in mind. Also Change the Frame Range to 0 - 39.
Then Go to the Save Tab, and select Path and create a new folder where you want your animation to be stored. I gave mine a Prefix of pyramid_, but is not necessary.
Change the format to JPEG
Then Click the Effects Tab, and on the right corner click the arrow to the right of Post Effect, and select Glow. Leave at default settings.
Finally Click Render - Render to Picture Viewer. Depending on your computer, the render should take less than 30 seconds.
