Simple C4D Animation for Avatars

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.

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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.

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Then go to Objects - Scene - Floor to add a floor.

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Now that we have that, we need to add some materials, so go (on the material editor) File - New Material.

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Check the following boxes in the Attributes Editor. Color Luminance Transparency Reflection Specular

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Change the color and brightness to whatever you want, mine will be orange, with a brightness of 30%.

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Set your Luminance to 30%.

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Transparency Settings: Brightness - 75% Fresnel - 4

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Reflection Brightness to 60%

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And Specular to… Mode - Colored Width - 55% Height - 80% Falloff - 8% Inner Width - 0%

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Now that we got that done, lets apply it to our object.

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Quick Render Preview, does not look like much, but will look better in the end, trust me.

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Now to add a Material to our floor, I Changed the color to a dark grey, 20% to RGB, with a Brightness of 100%.

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And also add a reflection to the material with a Brightness of 75%

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Now add it to our floor.

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Now for our lighting, create an Omni Light and position it above our triangle with a Brightness of 50% and a soft shadow.

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(* 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%

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Your setup should now look similar to this.

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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.

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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.

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Now Key that by hitting the red "Record" button on the animation editor.

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Then click the button next to it (Auto keyframing) and drag it to frame 39 (because our animation starts at frame 0.)

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And Change the "H" Value on the bottom right to 360*

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I did a quick render so you can see how it looks so far, then click Render - Render Settings.

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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.

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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.

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Change the format to JPEG

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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.

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Finally Click Render - Render to Picture Viewer. Depending on your computer, the render should take less than 30 seconds.

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