We Can All Just Get Along

Posted June 30th, 2010 / By Timmy Allen in Resources, Tutorials

Hello to one and all!

I am here today to take a brief minute or two to explain a beautiful and wonderful relationship. Honestly its like something out of a Shakespearian novel. If you call yourself a “motionographer” at any level you already know about this romance of “Bennifer” proportions, or at least know of it’s reputation. A lot of applications work great together and share data from platform to platform. However, in my experiences, none can compare to the love between Maxon’s Cinema4D and Adobe’s After Effects. The main beauty of it all is how well Cinema4D translates and packages up all of its data into a nice comfortable package for After Effects to unwrap and rebuild. For the sake of keeping it short and sweet (because believe me there is a lot you can do with integrating these two applications) I will cover 2 simple points and give a few examples as to why I think these two apps are made for each other. I’ve actually just finished a project where I used the C4D/AFX integration and will use a few examples from that piece.

The first ingredient to this wonderful little love affair comes with a simple click of a checkbox in a field called, “compositing project file”. On checking the Save box C4D will create a file in your file structure with the extension aec. Inside of this file, that opens with After Effects, holds a number of very important things. First it holds all of the 3D camera data that existed exactly how it was inside of C4D. Second it holds all of the file target information for all of your rendered passes out of C4D. Third it opens all that data up in a neat and easy to understand way. When opened it creates a folder tree inside of your project window that packs all of your data into specifically named sub-folders so it is easier to find later. It places all of your separate passes and object buffers into a folder called “Special Passes”. It then creates a folder called “Solids” which is where it will place all of your nulls, lights, anything else you put an External Compositing Tag on. But I’m getting a head of myself with that one. Lastly, in the root folder that the aec created is where you will find your main comp that encompasses all of your camera data, nulls, and footage to start to piece your project back together and begin adding all of your After Effects assets. If all this did was give you simply the camera data, it would be invaluable! Being able to take the true 3D camera moves you made inside of Cinema4D and now add assets in After Effects directly into the scene is crazy. I can’t imagine trying to do that while creating a brand new camera in AFX that matches the camera from C4d.

Second on my list is the External Compositing Tag. This is and does exactly what the name implies. Any null you put into the 3D environment and attach the tag to will then be saved as an XYZ position null for After Effects to use when you open the aec. Right off hand it might not sound like much, but believe me it is so much more powerful than it sounds. In the Easton trailer I placed a number of these nulls in the scene to be used later as light sources for the lens flares. Of course once I was in After Effects I could have guessed and eyeballed the correct position for any one of the nulls, but this comes much simpler and takes the time of positioning the null out of the time equation. Of course it can be used for placing things like pictures or videos in an exact position as well like I did with the pictures and the video of the band. Again, to make it look like it fits perfectly in the scene it simply makes more sense for me to know out of C4D the precise point at where this is supposed to live so all the movement and parallax looks correct. The last example I have for the beauty of the external compositing tag is if you plan on adding a moving asset in later. Something like that can be done in AFX alone, but again, to match the correct depth and position would simply take too long to justify not using the tag. When creating 3D strokes or particle streaks in AFX you could animate the null spinning around an object from C4D then in AFX attach a light to the null and point the particle emitter to that light. Simple.

There are a lot of other things you can do to help these two applications get along better. For example, rendering out the lights as separate passes so that you can adjust the brightness or color temperature later if you feel the need. You can render out object buffers in case you need objects in Cinema to move behind or in front of objects using track mattes. You can even render out the different shadow layers and all the layers that light up your textures. There is nothing better than realizing after an eight hour render that you made that light “too blue” and now you can simply adjust to a point inside of AFX and hopefully save yourself another eight hours. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all thought about kicking a cute animal across the room in a fit of frustration. Well, it looks like Cinema4D and After Effects are looking out for you and the cute animal you may or may not being thinking about punting across your living room.

If you guys have any questions, or want me to go into a little more detail about it feel free to ask me. You can of course leave a comment here and I’ll make sure to help out in any way that I can.

Hello. My name is Timmy Allen. I’m a motion designer based in South Florida. Not much bio to give at this point, but I look forward to hanging out and talking with each and every one of you then maybe someday I’ll have something impressive to say about the time I’ve spent on this planet. But so far, I started a show called “Keyframe” and I’m a part of Triune Films‘ internet show “Film Riot“. I am blessed to say that I get to do what I love every single day for a living. I love and talking to cool people. With all that, to be continued….