PROJECT 4: Simulation

This is my simulation project, trying to learn something new in C4D.

The concept behind this piece was for these abstract shapes to come in and form an object. I settled on a 'shark' and 'bubbles' because my best friend loves sharks.

I used clones, deformers, and a little bit of character building as well as modeling the shark.

The only problem I faced was that shark was hard to animate. It's fins weren't attached to the body and I didn't want them to fall off as I moved the body so I tried to cheat it by turning the whole object and just animating the back fin. I think its alright for my first try at c4d character animating but it could be a lot better.

The overall feel.. I am pretty happy with. I achieved what I wanted as just a simulation project.

PROJECT 3: Show Promo video

I finally got at least something to present during class, it isn't anywhere near perfect and I do plan to go back and fix it up (IE: colors, funny cuts, end logo, longer product shot).

We just got done going over ideas for our simulation project which I will update with a different post on the process.

PROJECT 3: Show Promo

Project Information

Students were to create a show promo, featuring a made up show or an existing one. It is to be 10 to 15 seconds long.

Ideation

I wanted to do a show I really enjoyed watching and something I could do a bit of a fantasy feel to. I listed several tv shows I had watched recently and decided to go with Pushing Daisies. Their usual show promos, when the show aired, had a lot of symbolism that was hidden in the episodes: bees, daisies, pies, etc so it would have been easy.

I didn't have decent storyboards for this project, but I tried to throw together a simple animatic.

Basically wanted to have someone feel as if they were a bee flying through a field of daisies.

Problems

I ran into a lot of problems that I tried to resolve on my own. I thought it would be simple to model a field with hair/fur dynamics and random clone daisies into it. But for some reason Cinema ended up glitching or crashing every time I tried to render preview. Then once I finally got over these glitches from discovering my problem was due to a malfunctioning material on the daisies, I couldn't get the field to set out the way I wanted to. Then when I got to something somewhat decent, none of the deformers like wind or anything worked (or if they did, I couldn't tell when I tried to render out a few frames to see).

These weren't issues that I really needed help on, it was just the program not liking my concept.

So I gave up. I completely scrapped my idea and decided to try something else. 

I had another concept I storyboarded back when I was thinking up ideas. I had seen several videos of this particle effect I wanted to try out too. I follow a show called Glee and this will be their last year with most of the cast members before the graduate, so I figured I'd do a little special promo for a graduation episode with balloons flying into the air, creating the word Glee before cutting into a quick animation of Fox's logo.

Unfortunately, the render farms decided to quit working, and rendering it out through Cinema 4D was taking 2 hours per frame due to trying to do a full resolution...

I don't know. I know other students have Cinema on their personal computers, I guess I should look into getting my own copy. Maybe that will help me not lose sleep at night.

I'm really disappointed in this whole process.