In this tutorial we’ll recreate this Scandinavian inspired design in Cinema 4D or Cinema 4D Lite!  It’s a design made up of a piece of text with layers peeling away revealing transparency on the backside of peeled back portions.  We’ll break down how you model all the pieces and set up your text so you can smoothly bend the geometry of your text spline or any other spline you’d like to use.  Next, we’ll texture our object, creating the plastic, glass, and wood materials as well as light the scene.  Finally, we will cover how you can easily iterate by changing the text in the Text Spline Object by using Instances.

By the way, this tutorial can be followed along using Cinema 4D Lite that comes for FREE with Adobe Creative Cloud!

And as always, if you have any questions, be sure to post it in the comments section and if you create anything cool using this technique, be sure to share it with me! Thanks for watching!

This was recorded live on the C4DLive Twitch stream.  To get alerted for future live design casts & get sneak peeks at new tutorials before anyone else, sign up for the Eyedesyn Newsletter.

Tutorial:

Visit eyedesyn.com for more from EJ

Lil’ Coffee Breakdown: All Motion Blur and Depth of Field was added in After Effects.

I realize that the title here is a bit bold, but in my case (and possibly) yours, this is very true. I ran into a fellow artist who at an event who pleaded with me to cover this issue. This artist did not have a giant render farm, nor did he have a multi-GPU setup using Octane. He simply wanted to know the correct workflow for doing Depth of Field and Motion Blur in After Effects. A method that didn’t result in artifacts or other anomalies. So, as I promised, here it is.

“A WHOLE tutorial about the Depth Pass?”

Yes and no. This tutorial is about saving a TON of render time by NOT having to render your Depth of Field and Motion Blur in C4D’s Physical Renderer. With a couple of After Effect plugins and the correct workflow, you can save yourself potentially hours of rendering.

What you will learn:

• How to add Motion Blur and Depth of Field to your C4D render in After Effects
• What is needed out of a Depth Pass to achieve proper results with Frischluft Lenscare
• What a “Position” pass or WPP is and how it can be used to generate a correct Depth pass
• How to set up a multi-layer EXR output for After Effects
• How to properly set up your After Effects comp with Frischluft Depth of Field and RSMB plugins (see links below)

Tools you’ll need:

• Cinema 4D R15 or Higher
• After Effects CC
• Frischluft Lenscare 
• Real Smart Motion Blur or RSMB by Re:Vision

Let’s Get to the Tutorial*

* So Ihab in the comments found a mistake, so thanks Ihab! Looks like I grabbed the regular RSMB plugin and not the Pro Vector version which reads your vector pass. Sorry about that folks. Grabbing this Pro Vector version and choosing your vector pass will give you more accurate motion blur results.

In this tutorial I’m going to break down how you can easily create a topographical map inside of Cinema 4D!  First, I’ll cover how to setup a Landscape Object and then how to then easily slice it into layers. Then I’ll demonstrate how to use the sliced layers to generate splines that will then be used to extrude to make each of the topographic levels.  Finally, I’ll light our scene and go over how to apply a colorful texture to the topographic map based on height (and even show some useful XPresso along the way!)

QUICK TIP:  For R17 users out there, be sure to use the new Spline Smooth tool to be able to smooth out those dense points to create rounder edges on your topographic layers.

If you have any questions, be sure to post it in the comments section and if you create anything cool using this topographic technique, be sure to share it with me! Thanks for watching!

This was recorded live on the C4DLive Twitch stream.  To get alerted for future live design casts & get sneak peeks at new tutorials before anyone else, sign up for the Eyedesyn Newsletter.

Tutorial:

Visit eyedesyn.com for more from EJ

Prime Focus Limited (PFL) reported 93.7 per cent growth in operating profit (EBIDTA) for the twelve month period between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2016 (12M-16) as compared to the corresponding period of the previous year. The company reported EBIDTA for 12M-16 at Rs 329.7 crore (17.3 per cent EBIDTA margin of net sales or Total Income from Operations or TIO) as compared to Rs 170.2 crore (13 per cent EBIDTA margin of TIO) for 12M-15.

TIO for 12M-16 increased 45.7 per cent to Rs 1,901 crore from Rs 1,304.4 crore in the corresponding 12 month period of the previous year. The company reported a higher loss of Rs 318.5 crore as compared to a loss of Rs 87.2 crore in the previous year.

Notes: (1) The unit of currency in this report is the Indian rupee – Rs (also conventionally represented by INR). The Indian numbering system or the Vedic numbering system has been used to denote money values. The basic conversion to the international norm would be:

(a) 100,00,000 = 100 lakh = 10,000,000 = 10 million = 1 crore.

(b) 10,000 lakh = 100 crore = 1 arab = 1 billion.

(2) The company had filed results for a fifteen month period ended June 30, 2014, hence y-o-y comparison is being done between Q3-16 and Q3-15 and q-o-q comparison is between Q3-16 and  Q2-16 (quarter ended 31 December 2015).

Total Expenditure in 12M-16 increased 38.5 per cent to Rs 1,571.3 crore (82.7 per cent of TIO) from Rs 1,134.2 crore (87 per cent of TIO) in 12M-15. Personnel cost that included employee benefits expense and technicians fees in 12M-16 increased 36.1 per cent to Rs 415.3 crore (21.8 per cent of TIO) from Rs 305.2 crore (23.4 per cent of TIO) in the previous corresponding twelve month period.

Finance cost in 12M-16 increased 65.7 per cent to Rs 107.4 crore (5.6 per cent of TIO) from Rs 64.8 crore (5 per cent of TIO) in 12M-15.

Let us look at the numbers for Q3-16

For the quarter ended 31 March 2016 (Q3-16, current quarter), PFL reported 10.7 per cent year-over-year (y-o-y) growth in TIO at Rs 465.7 crore as compared to Rs 420.54 crore, but revenue declined by 0.8 per cent quarter-over-quarter (q-o-q) from Rs 468.52 crore. EBIDTA in the current quarter at Rs 160.20 crore (34.4 per cent EBIDTA margin of TIO) was 52.4 per cent higher y-o-y as compared to Rs 105.15 crore (25 per cent EBIDTA margin of TIO) and more than doubled (2.24 times) as compared to Rs 71.56 crore (15.3 per cent EBIDTA margin of TIO).

The company’s loss in Q3-16 was higher both y-o-y and q-o-q. For Q3-16, PFL reported loss of Rs 80.10 crore, for Q3-15 loss was Rs 20.29 crore and for the immediate trailing quarter it was Rs 11.40 crore.

For other numbers for Q3-16 and previous quarters, please refer to Figures A and B below.

The post Prime Focus operating profit up 94 per cent appeared first on AnimationXpress.

One of the most anticipated movie of 2016 that’s based on Blizzard Entertainment’s game, Warcraft that’s set to hit the big screens on 10 June, tells the story much before World of Warcraft takes place. Since the game showcases the worlds of orc and human clash, the question arises how did director Duncan Jones and his collaborators craft a race of orcs, taller and more muscle-bound than humans, and feature them not just in ferocious mega-battles, but also reveal their more subtle and nuanced emotional lives?

The answer is quite simple. Visual effects and use of computer generated images helped the director and the production house to bring this game story arc to life. And this couldn’t have been possible without the use of motion capture and virtual production tech. Animatric was roped in to supply camera tracking, motion capture suit and simulcam technology that enabled complicated and realistic on-set performances from the orc performers. This data in turn aided visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer and VFX studio ILM easily transfer those performances into the digital realm, creating the photoreal orc ‘digi-likenesses’ witnessed in the final film.

Animatric, president and CTO Brett Ineson

“Warcraft was the largest virtual production Animatrik has ever been involved with,” says Animatric, president and CTO Brett Ineson. ”The production had eight different stages over five months of shooting. Some were 300 feet in length, and there were even outdoor stages where the team had to film in the rain!”

Compositing orcs in real-time

Animatrik delivered several motion capture services throughout production. Ineson explained that Animatric supplied tracking cameras, tracking weapons and props, all were integrated with live action sets and live action actors, which were later integrated with the CG sets and actors.

“The idea was that as we were filming you could see everything happening through the eyepiece of the movie camera – all the backgrounds, orcs and creatures composited in real-time with our tracking tech.”

Animatrik deployed two kinds of motion capture camera technologies – NaturalPoint and Vicon cameras and a SolidTrack system.

The first tech setup was coined ‘outside in’, and relied on capturing the motion of performers in motion capture suits along with the main film camera. This provided a real-time simulcam composite of the characters and their backgrounds.

Integrating simulcam

There have been situations when no motion capture equipment were there on the set or where the cameras could not see the actors. So to solve that issue, Animatrik used an ‘inside out’ approach.

“We’d mount a small vision survey camera to the movie camera,” explains Ineson. “This camera would integrate with a system called SolidTrack, which would lock onto every pixel it sees and calculate its 3D position to the world around it. We could then work out the offset between that camera and the movie camera for the simulcam view.

“Having that simulcam view was so valuable for everyone on set,” adds Ineson. “It really helped with things like framing, since the orcs, for example, might be up to 12 feet tall. Knowing that on set meant the camera operator could re-position for the best angle.

The production house was able to shoot Warcraft as if it were a normal movie, thus drastically reducing the changes which were necessary on the back end.

The great outdoors

Outdoor shooting is part of the filming stage of most of the movies and can’t be avoided. But what’s challenging in a film like Warcraft that requires motion camera is the fact that the there’s no control over the environment.

However, Animatric overcame it by using active marker suits fitted with LED lights developed with Standard Deviation to achieve highly accurate motion capture. “Because of the outdoor sets, light pollution and rain, we needed to create LED suits for the actors to wear because we knew we would have trouble bouncing light from the camera to do a traditional motion capture,” says Ineson. “The LEDs are synchronised to pulse in time with the motion capture camera and therefore not impact on the main photography.

This not only allowed for much more precise outdoor performance capture but also added a more realistic performance from the actors themselves, who could more realistically place themselves into the scene.

The subtlety of facial performance

If we see the trailer, we can observe that orc’s facial expressions resemble that of the actors to some extent. To achieve those emotive performances, the on-set actors wore a helmet camera system developed by Technoprops, consisting of a pair of stereo cameras that delivered two streams of video. These cameras caught every nuance and subtle shade of emotion that passed across the actors’ faces as they performed.

“Animatrik’s role in the facial animation was in the post process tracking of the data that came off those cameras,” describes Ineson. “The stereo cameras meant we could track the data in 3D as opposed to 2D. We would track the facial marker set into 3D and then deliver that data over to the VFX vendor, in this case ILM who then worked with it in their their proprietary facial animation solver.”

Seeing the final result of the credible work pulled off by Animatrik, a happy Ineson expounds, “It was just so complicated. It’s one thing to capture performances but when you have nine orcs fighting nine humans with moving cameras and all that action happening, the fact that the cameraman could see this all in his camera in real-time, was so great.”

Not only was Warcraft an evolution of Animatrik’s craft, but it also helped the team make a major leap in the services the company now offers. For a movie like Warcraft a lot of R&D had to be involved as a lot of things had to be custom built and team Animatrik gave their 100 per cent and delivered their best.

Written by Charles Leavitt and Jones and produced by Legendary Pictures, Blizzard Entertainment and Atlas Entertainment, the movie is slated to hit theatres on 10 June.

The post Animatrik delivers motion capture service to bring ‘orcs of Warcraft’ to life appeared first on AnimationXpress.