Excerpt from Chapter Fifteen

chapter fi fteen: 3D 1 excerpt from chapter fi fteen 3D multi-pass rendering After Effects is used for many different purposes but the area in which it is probably most widely used is in the post- production of footage. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, this is when the produced footage, image and animation are put together and any effects; color treatments or graphics are added. Quite often the compositor will have to mix 2D and 3D footage together at this stage, their job is to make sure that the Here is a frame from a fi nished QuickTime movie that I will teach you ‘joins’ between these two worlds are how to create using a Cinema 4D multi-pass render, Zaxwerks Invigora- seamless. tor and a smattering of effects! You’ll often fi nd, when talking to artists One of the things that in the past put me off some 3D animation and designers that they tend to have a was the fact that it was too unrealistically ‘real’, too perfect, preference towards working in either a shiny and polished. I prefer work that has more of an edge to 2D or 3D environment. I’ve often over- it, you know, with a slightly grungy quality. heard individuals complaining that they feel ‘uncomfortable’ outside their chosen In recent years I’ve seen some really impressive 3D work, which environment. displays these qualities. After researching the techniques used to produce these works I discovered that the all too important Being from a fairly traditional 2D back- fi nishing touches were often added in post-production with ground myself, I have only begun getting applications such as After Effects. All the things that make a scene into 3D animation quite recently, in fact more realistic can be added after the 3D render is complete. my interest only really started grow- ing when working with some of the 3D To make these 3D renders easier to edit and to make them concepts introduced in After Effects 5. more fl exible you can render the image or movie out as a multi-pass render. Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html 2 chapter fi fteen: 3D chapter fi fteen: 3D 3 What is a Multi-pass Render? I have recently become interested in learn- ing more about 3D, in fact I’m currently trying to fi nd time to spend with my two 3D applications of choice: Alias Wavefront Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D XL (C4D). It may seem quite odd to you that I have two favorites but, up until fairly recently, Maya’s price was out of the reach of most small production houses, it also has a complicated installation procedure. This makes it diffi cult to transport the software from one machine to the next, A multi-pass renders each element of the scene as a separate pass, for this is something that has to be done at example: below are some of the individual passes that can be rendered times when freelancing. Whenever I work from Cinema 4D: depth, refl ection, and diffuse values respectively. away from my studio I take my copy of C4D to install on the machine where I work (I also remove it from the same machine when I fi nish the job!!) Cinema 4D is an excellent, low cost alternative which can pretty much match Maya feature for feature, its interface is very similar to that of Maya. Plus it has some unique features, which we will take a look at in the following tutorials. Tim Clapham, a very talented designer at These passes are then composited together in a compositing programme HYPA solutions in Brighton, England and such as After Effects where they can be adjusted using transformations, myself, designed these tutorials. Tim con- blending modes and effects. centrated more on the Cinema 4D aspects whilst I concentrated on the After Effects side of things. In a way, this echoes the way that many real world studios work: one designer passing the 3D materials onto the post artist for effects and fi nishing touches. There are two main sections to this tutorial. This is the fi rst part of the tutorial; it shows you how to set up a scene in Cinema 4D. The second main section We’re going to take a look at a couple of techniques for re-composing shows you how to adjust elements of these Cinema 4D multi-pass renders within After Effects. this 3D scene in After Effects. Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html 2 chapter fi fteen: 3D chapter fi fteen: 3D 3 creating 1the fl oor texture If you want to skip straight to the After Effects sections, please open the PDF fi le named AE_Multipass.pdf. Figure 1: Cinema 4D’s Material Manager For the fi rst part of this tutorial we shall be creating a tile texture to place onto the fl oor. This will involve only proce- dural channel shaders. This means that the texture will be created using math- ematical calculations rather than bitmap images. The advantage to this is that no matter how close you get to the material it will never pixelate. Also it means the texture is saved directly within the scene fi le without any need for external image fi les. We will create the texture using all built in channel shaders that ship with C4D 7+. These include the excellent bhodiNUT smells like almonds shaders. Figure 2: Cinema 4D’s Material Editor 1 Open ClubFront_Start.C4D from the multipass folder. 2 Firstly go to the Material Manger and create a new material by selecting File > New Material. (see Fig.1) 3 Double-click the new material swatch to open up the Material Editor. Rename it ‘Floor’ by typing in the fi eld at the top left of the Material Editor. (see Fig.2) 4 In the Texture section of the color channel (next to the blank text box) click on the little wing menu and select bhodiNUT Channel > bhodiNUT fusion. Then click on the edit button below to bring up the bhodiNUT Fusion dialog box. (see Fig.3) Figure 3: bhodiNUT’s Fusion ‘Smells Like Almonds’ dialog box. Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html 4 chapter fi fteen: 3D chapter fi fteen: 3D 5 By using Fusion we are able to combine several textures together using masks and various composite modes. You can even use Fusion within Fusion to create texture trees. We’ll use it to create our tile pattern and then roughen up the texture with some noise. 5 In the Fusion dialog box go to the base channel section at the bottom right and click on the little arrow and select bhodiNUT channel > bhodiNUT tiles. Click the edit button to bring up the dialogue box for bhodiNUT Tiles. (See Fig.4) 6 The tile shader is for creating various regular patterns including tiles. 7 Click on grout color and pick a neutral gray. We will make the tile colors slightly different to add variety to the texture. 8 Click on tile color 1 and select a light beige color. Click on tile color 2 and select a similar but different color to the color you selected for the fi rst tile. 9 In the pop up list select squares as the shape of our tiles, have a look at the other patterns available while you are Figure 4: The bhodiNUT Tiles here, then go back to squares. 10 Set the grout width to 0.1% and the bevel width to 0.5%. 11 Lastly we need to scale up the tile shader so the tiles are not too small for our scene. In the global scale fi eld enter 500%. 12 Click OK to return to the Fusion dialog box. We will now create a noise texture to blend with the tile pattern. This will create a more interesting texture but more impor- tantly it will help to break up the uniformity of the tiles. 13 In the Blend Channel at the top, click on the wing menu and select bhodiNUT 3D Noise. Click Edit to open the 3D noise shader which can been seen pictured in Fig. 5. 3D noise is one of the most valuable shaders in the bhodinut collection. It generates 3D noise that is totally seamless so therefore will tile infi nitely. There are various types of noise you can generate and they can also be animated. 14 Set the global scale to 400%. Set the noise type as FBM and increase the contrast to 81%. Click OK to return to the Fusion Figure 5: The bhodiNUT 3D noise dialog box. Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html Creative After Effects 5.5 © 2002 Angie Taylor. All Rights Reserved http://www.angie.abel.co.uk/book.html 4 chapter fi fteen: 3D chapter fi fteen: 3D 5 On the left hand side of the Fusion dialog box is the section that determines how the two channels are blended together using composite modes (add, difference, mul- tiply etc).

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