Cinema 4D
During creative exchange week, I attended a workshop based around Title sequences using Cinema 4D, This was my first experience using this program so I learnt several different skills throughout this session and the basics of the program. The class looked at an example as in introduction, the end credits in 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' which can be viewed via this link.
To start, we learnt the basic of a simple credit scroller. We added text which was edited to remove depth, increased size and aligned to the middle. We used the cameras viewpoint to ensure we were happy with how the text looked or where it was located. To animate, we used key frames, so we set our first key frame at the start of the credit text, and a later key frame for the end of the credit text. One thing we noticed is that the animation of the scroller played at different speeds, to fix this we used the 'Dope Sheet' which offers a convenient way to shift the timing of key frames in the timeline. We set the keys to a linear interpolation which means it uses a straight line to find a point between two frames, therefore making the animation between the first key frame and the last one smoother and playing at the same time.
To start, we learnt the basic of a simple credit scroller. We added text which was edited to remove depth, increased size and aligned to the middle. We used the cameras viewpoint to ensure we were happy with how the text looked or where it was located. To animate, we used key frames, so we set our first key frame at the start of the credit text, and a later key frame for the end of the credit text. One thing we noticed is that the animation of the scroller played at different speeds, to fix this we used the 'Dope Sheet' which offers a convenient way to shift the timing of key frames in the timeline. We set the keys to a linear interpolation which means it uses a straight line to find a point between two frames, therefore making the animation between the first key frame and the last one smoother and playing at the same time.
Next we worked on the title scene, below will be a step by step process of using a variety of techniques to animate the text similar to what you might see in movies.
We started off with text that started really small and zoomed into the camera while keeping it's depth to create the sense of 3D.
Next we wanted to shatter the word 'Invader' using the 'Voronoi Fracture' tool. Using the simulation tags, we applied a rigid body to the object, which calculates how the object moves and collides with other objects according to some parameters such as gravity, initial velocity and mass centers.
After applying the rigid body, looking at the simulation tags again, we added collider body to the object. This is so the objects fall and collide realistically into other objects. To stop the text shattering and falling off screen, we added a plane to catch the shattered objects.
In these screenshots, you can see how the shattered text hasn't collided through the plane. To add an effect to this text, we then looked at particles under the simulate tab. For this we added wind to this scene, which acts as a giant fan behind the text. As you can see, the fan has change the scene significantly, the objects have been blown towards the camera. We changed around the dynamics, looking specifically at gravity for the text to keep most of its shape while flying towards the camera.
We decided to add colour to the text using the material editor. For the style, we gave the font a sketch and toon (Cel) appearance using the 3 colours to act as a gradient, red, grey and black for the word 'Invader'. For the text 'The' we change the red into white instead. In the above screenshot, we did a render preview to make sure we were happy with the appearance.
To finish this title scene, we added a 3D UFO to fly above the text. We added a key frame at the beginning, where the UFO starts on the left, then one at the end when its on the right. We further animated it to make the UFO rotate 360 degrees while flying from left to right.
This is how the finished title scene looks.
For the second part of the session, we began to animate text for the credit screen in a bit more detail through the use of effectors. We added a random effector to the text and changed around the parameter and falloff. In this type of animation, the letters in the word start invisible and spreaded out, at a certain point the letters become visible and start moving closer to together to form words.
Once we were happy with how the text animation looked, we then merged this scene into a city scape scene. For the next part, we duplicated the text animation, changed the job role and name different to the first one and then moved it out of the scene of camera 1. Another camera was then added in order to view the second text. Using the camera morph, we morphed two cameras together, using different frames, camera 1 moves slowly to camera 2 while the text is still animated.
This is how the finished credit scene looks.