When I started working on an animated logo for my company Hotwax Media, Inc., I decided to take advantage of some of the great features found in Cinema 4D. In this post I will highlight some of the features of the animation (which can be viewed HERE) such as modeling a drop, modeling the stamp (using paths from Illustrator), use of the certain deformers.
Modeling the Drop
This being the first time I really worked with C4D, modeling the drop seemed complicated in the beginning. My first attempt was to take a cone primitive and a sphere, then join them together. The problem I ran into was getting the two objects “molded” together without any seams. I found an example of modeling a tear drop in Anne Powers’ book Cinema 4D An Artist’s Project Sourcebook.
Instead of trying to combine these two objects, the better way is to cap the cone. Then increase the cap’s radius to around 95 (experiment and decide what looks best for your project). Once the radius is set, adjust the height of the cap to match the style of drop you are modeling. For me, setting the height to 100m and radius to 95m looked great. To finish off the drop, increase the fillet segments to round off the bottom of the drop, around 20-30 will look good, and increase the overall height of the cone. Increasing the height will create more space between the top and bottom of the drop, giving it a more realistic feel. Throw on a Banji texture for a clear drop (like a water or tear drop) or a Danel texture for a shiny paint drop. I used a modified Nukei texture for the wax. Position a slight bend deformer on the top of the cone to curl the tail just a little.
Modeling the Stamp
The stamp was modeled from a photo of an actual wax seal. The image was loaded into Adobe Illustrator and traced using the pen tool. The outline was then saved as an Illustrator 8 file and loaded into C4D. The imported spline was then placed inside a Lathe NURBS and then textured.
The exact same procedure was used to make a 3D model for the logo used at the end of the animation.
Finishing Touches
Once the objects were modeled and textured, the scene was lit and the animation fun began. The wax slowly enters the scene by starting at a very small size and slowly growing to the proper scale. The position of the drop was keyframed to drip at the specific speed. Fast enough to almost appear real, but slow enough for anyone to see exactly what is going on. The timing decisions were critical, a completely realistic drop would have been too fast. The drop was tied to a Melt deform and the strength of the Melt was keyframed to begin right as the wax touches the ground until it was the perfect radius.
Once the drop was animated to my liking, I then started working on the camera position. Knowing where I wanted to start and where I wanted to end, I set two keyframes and let the interpolation handle the middle. Certain points were either too choppy or too fast; so keyframes were added to certain key positions to make sure everything flowed smoothly.
Finally, the stamp was animated to enter in and out of the scene once the wax was at the proper melted strength. When the stamp covers the wax completely the wax was removed from the visible area and the logo was put in its place. As the stamp pulls away from the floor the logo begins to appear.
There were 5 channels of sound effects combined together and mixed using Soundtrack Pro. The exported animation was added as a video track so that timing of specific sounds would match the actions. The final render was exported as a lo-res Quicktime movie for display here.
//jaz
April 8th, 2009 at 8:46 pm