Tutorial: Cineware for After Effects | Make a 3D Room

Learn how to make a 3D room using Cineware in After Effects.

Ready to learn a bit of Cinema 4D? In this lesson you'll be using Cineware, Maxon's solution to easily pull 3D data from Cinema 4D into After Effects. It can be a bit buggy at times, but if you need to get something out of Cinema 4D quickly this is one solution to do just that. In this tutorial Joey is going to show you how to create a 3D room that looks like an illustration in Cinema 4D using the Lite version that comes bundled with After Effects.

We want to give a quick shout out to Matt Nabosheck, the very talented Designer / Illustrator and good buddy of Joey's that created the Boston Terrier named Steadman that Joey uses in this tutorial. Check out his work in the Resources tab.  

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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Joey Korenman (00:17):

Well, hi Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 10 of 30 days of after effects. In a previous tutorial, we talked about how to make a 3d environment from a photo. What we're going to talk about in this first part of a two-part tutorial is how to set up a scene. So it feels like a 3d environment. When you're basing the scene on an illustration, we're going to do kind of the same thing we did when we made that 3d environment from a photo, but we're going to do it in a very different way. We're going to go into cinema 48 just for a little bit, and we're going to use CINAware the link between cinema 4d and after effects to create the environment. I want to give a big thank you to my buddy, Matt Navis shack for letting me use the illustration of the Boston terrier in this lesson.

Joey Korenman (00:58):

And don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on this site. Now let's go do the thing. So first I want you guys to just, uh, notice a couple of things here. Um, cause again, this is a two-part tutorial and in this first part, we're going to talk about the environment and the second part, we'll talk about the dog, but, um, as far as the environment goes, I want you to look at the floor specifically, all right, this, uh, this environment, it feels like a 3d environment. The floor is kind of lying flat, um, and the camera's not moving too extreme, but, um, you, you know, if you look closer, you can see that the walls have perspective on them. And this feels like a 3d room.

Joey Korenman (01:44):

Um, and you know, in another tutorial in this 30 days of after effects series, uh, I showed you guys how to take an existing image and sort of warp it and after effects to make a 3d scene. Well, today I'm going to show you a different way. Um, and this is a way this is actually the first time I've tried it and it worked out pretty great. And I figured it would be a neat thing to show you guys. And it uses a, one of the newest features of after effects, which is called CINAware. All right. So ignore the dog and what he's doing, we will talk about him in the next tutorial, but for this tutorial, um, I want to talk about the room. Let's hop into Photoshop for a minute and let's look at the Photoshop file. First of all, again, I want to give a shout out to Matt Navis, Shaq, who is an incredible illustrator and a dear dear, if not kind of warped friend of mine.

Joey Korenman (02:33):

Um, and he's an illustrator in this dog. Uh, he's probably been drawing this dog since he was five. Um, and I love the way it looked and I thought it would be great. So I asked him to borrow it and he let me do it, but the room and everything else in, in this scene, um, I just created in Photoshop. Okay. And it's really simple shapes. There's some textures on it. And all I tried to do was create this kind of warped looking room, right? And I used a few composition tricks. If you notice the lines, all kinds of point to the dog, and then I'm kind of focusing on the dog, right. But ignoring all that this room is very simple, right? And if you know, some basic Photoshop, you can make something like this. And I knew this would be a great environment for the dog, but I wanted to be able to make this room feel three dimensional.

Joey Korenman (03:19):

And you know, I kind of intentionally made the lines a little askew and you know, there's these there's no right angles and PR perspective wise. This really makes no sense. It's just a stylized illustration. So if you want to turn something like this into a 3d layer or sorry, a 3d scene, it's tricky because after effects works really well, when you have 3d layers that can kind of be aligned in a certain way in, and sort of make a room. But when things are all over the place, it's kind of tricky. And so there's a really sweet trick. I'm going to show you guys. Okay. And all it requires is that, you know, a little bit of cinema 4d and then I'll show you how to make this work in after effects. So again, I know this is 30 days of after effects, but we're going to go to cinema 40 just for a minute.

Joey Korenman (04:07):

Okay. So, so don't, don't fret. All right. So here's what we're going to do. We are going to hop into cinema 4d. Now, if you have after effects, creative cloud, you have cinema 4d. Okay. Now you may not have the full version. I have a I'm on cinema 4d, AR 15. Um, but if you don't own that, you do own cinema 4d light. Okay. So that's what you'll open, open cinema for delight. All right. Here's what we're going to do. First thing we need to do is we need to load in what I want to load in is this layer right here. Okay. Uh, you know, if you want, um, I'll post this Photoshop. I, you guys can take a look at it, but, um, this room is just made up of a bunch of shapes, right. And if you go through, I've got my kind of background color, and then I've got kind of like a shadow color with a little texture and then the floor, um, with kind of like a little, you know, kind of highlight color to it and some more texture.

Joey Korenman (05:07):

And then I put some stripes on the wall. Okay. That's all, it is just a bunch of junk and Photoshop. And what I did, um, was I then just copied. And if you guys don't know this trick, this is really cool. You just, you hit command a to select all you hit shift command C. Right. So instead of command C it's shift command, see what that actually does, is it copy, does a copy merged command, which copies literally whatever is on this canvas. Right? And then when you hit paste, it paste Solera, that looks exactly like whatever your comp looks like. So that's what I did. And I did that. So I can have one layer in my Photoshop file called room copy that had that contained my entire background back in cinema 4d. What we're going to do is we're going to add a background object.

Joey Korenman (05:52):

Okay. And again, if you've never used cinema 4d, I apologize for you into this mess. Just follow along. I'm going to try and explain it. Um, as though, you know, you're someone that's never even opened this program before. Okay. So up here, this top bar, this is kind of the basic tools that you use. And what you're looking for is this button right here, right. It kind of looks like a perspective floor. And if you click and hold the mouse, it shows you a bunch of objects that you can add that are sort of environmental things. And we want the background object. Okay. And all that background object does is it lets us load in an image that we can then use as reference. Um, I also want to make sure I set up our cinema 40 projects. So that is it's going to match our after effects projects.

Joey Korenman (06:35):

So this button here, it looks like a little clapboard and a gear. You click that first set. You're a resolution, right? Pretty straightforward width. 1920 height, 10 80 down here where it says frame rate, let's set this to 24. All right. And then we have to do one more thing. Okay. Because this is one of those dumb things in a 40, you set the frame rate here and that's not all you have to do. You have to actually set it into places. I'm the second place I close this and I hold command and hit D that brings up the project settings. All right. Those also live in the edit menu project settings. And you need to go here where it says FPS and set that's 24. Okay. Now we are set up. So here's what I'm going to do. I want to load that background image onto this background object in order to do that, I need a material.

Joey Korenman (07:28):

So down here, this bottom kind of area here, this is where your materials live right now. We don't have any, so let's hit the create button, see new material, and now we've got the material. Okay. Uh, and we're just going to, we don't even need to rename this. Let's just come over here, whatever you click on in cinema 4d, the options for that thing show up right here. So let's click on that material. Come over here. This little tab here, this is showing you kind of what options on your material are enabled at the moment. If you click on the basic tab, you can disable and enable more options. And I want to disable everything except this one, luminance. Okay. And I won't get too far into it, but the reason it's luminance is luminance is not affected by lighting. Okay. It's going to remain like a flat shaded thing, no matter what's going on.

Joey Korenman (08:17):

And that's what we want for this particular example. So we've enabled luminance. We get a tab down. If we click on that, we can go to this texture area, click this giant bar here, and we can now load in our image. Okay. So there's, there's a few steps so far, but they're all very simple. And hopefully you can pause the video and follow along. All right. So now let's, uh, let's load in our Photoshop file. Okay. So I'm going to load it in. All right. Um, when this message pops up, I generally hit no. And maybe at some point, I'll explain what that means. I don't feel like getting into it right now, but I've loaded in my Photoshop file into the material. And now I can click and drag this material right onto my background. And if I don't miss there it is. Okay.

Joey Korenman (09:04):

Um, now I don't want to see the dog and the shadow and all that stuff. I only want to see that layer that had my, my room on it. Um, and cinema 40 is a great way to do that. If I click on that material again. Right. And I see my luminance tab highlighted with my file loaded in. If I click on that file name, I now have some options that I can mess with. And one of them is this layer set option. So I'm going to click that and I'm just going to, what's great. Cinema 4d can actually read Photoshop files. And it's pretty powerful actually, what you can do, you can even see like my, um, my layer groups here come through. Right. But all I care about is this room copy layer. So I'm gonna select that and hit, okay. And now that's the only layer I'm seeing.

Joey Korenman (09:48):

Beautiful. Okay. And this background object, it will just kind of show through so I can use it as reference. Okay. So real quick cinema 4d lesson, the a, if you look at the number key, like the top row of numbers on your keyboard, uh, put your left-hand ring finger over the one and then let your middle finger fall over the two and your index finger fall over the three. Um, one, if you click and hold, it moves you round two zooms in now, three rotates the scene. Okay. So what I want to do is create a cube. All right? And this law makes sense in a minute, right? Practice moving around the cube. And I'm gonna, you know, as soon as I click this little button that looks like a cube, it makes a cube cube shows up over here. And now if I select that cube, I've got some options right related to the cube.

Joey Korenman (10:35):

I can scale it up. I can move it around. And what I want to do is go to the basic tab and hit x-ray. And that's just going to let me see through this cube. All right. And those of you who have used cinema 4d, you may already know where this is going. Um, the next thing I want to do is select this cube and hit this button over here. Okay. Um, and if I hold the mouse over, it, it says make editable. And really all you need to know if you're unfamiliar with cinema 4d is that some objects are called parametric objects. And what that means is you can click on them and you get this nice little object tab, and it lets you really easily stretch them out and do neat things like round out the edges and stuff like that. We don't give a crap about any of that.

Joey Korenman (11:17):

Right now. What we want to do is be able to pick this corner here and move it around and then pick this corner, move it around to do that. You have to turn this into a polygon object. Here's the button right here. It does it. Or you can hit the, see here on your keyboard. It does the same thing. Now we have that. Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to now switch into polygon mode. Okay? So by default, anything you do is going to affect the entire cube. If you want to work on individual pieces of the cube, you've got these three buttons here, point edge polygon. I'm going to go into polygon mode. I'm going to make sure I, this tool selected right here. This one with the orange circle, that is my selection tool. Make sure the cube is selected here.

Joey Korenman (12:00):

And then I can, you know, you could see it. I can highlight individual faces of that cube. And I'm going to, I'm going to select this one, right? I'm gonna hold shift. And I'm also going to select this one in this one. Then I'm going to hit delete. Okay. Now, if you couldn't guess what I was doing before, you can probably guess what I'm doing now. Okay. I'm going to recreate this room using this 3d object. Okay. So what I need to do is I need to match this as closely as I possibly can. All right. So first thing I want to do is add a camera to the scene. Uh, there's a big button right here. It looks like a camera. That's probably the one you want to click. So let's click that. And what do you know? It looks like a camera. Okay.

Joey Korenman (12:44):

Um, if you want to look through that camera, you need to make sure this tiny little crosshairs chat. So right now it's not. So when we're moving around our scene like this, we're actually not moving the camera. And in fact, if I zoom out, you can see, and it's kind of faint because the, uh, the color of the camera is very light, but you can see the camera sitting right there. If I click this cross here, now we zoom in. Now, if I move around using those 1, 2, 3 keys, we are actually moving the camera and that's what we want to do. Okay. So what I want to do is I'm looking at this corner of the room right here, and I want to line it up with that corner of the image. Cool. And now what I want to do is I want to just try and match this room up as closely as I can.

Joey Korenman (13:26):

Okay. I'm not going to be able to get it anywhere near perfect, but that's okay. I just want to get it close. Um, and one thing that would really help is if I could kind of rotate the camera, kind of like, can't it a little bit to the left. Um, so an easier way to do that is to click on the camera and you get this giant menu here of all your camera options. But if you, if you click this coordinates button, every object with some exceptions has a coordinates tab that lets you sort of manually, you know, adjust the exact XYZ and rotation. And I'm just going to adjust this be value in cinema 4d. It's different than after effects. It doesn't use XYZ rotation. It uses HPB, which stands for heading, which kind of makes sense if you think of it like an airplane, right.

Joey Korenman (14:11):

You're heading this way or this way, the pitch right up and down. And then the bank and the bank is the one we're looking for. And we want to bank this thing just a little bit like that. Move the camera. I'm holding the one key in a bank. I'm just trying to get it close. We're not trying to get it exactly right here. Okay. That's the next step? Cool. So here we are. So, um, I'm gonna, I'm sorta gonna like spill the beans here. What we're going to do is we're actually going to take this texture and we're going to project it literally like it's coming out of a projector and stick it to this, you know, this inside of a cube that we've created. And uh, and so in order to do that, you actually need a camera in the right position. So this camera that we created is actually going to act like a projector.

Joey Korenman (14:58):

And so now I'm at the point where it's lined up close enough. Right. And now I w I'm actually going to start changing the shape of the cue, but, um, I want to make sure I don't accidentally nudge that camera around. Okay. Cause it's lined up pretty nicely. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right. Click or control, click on this camera. I'm going to, and that opens up this big, long list of things that you can do. Just look for cinema 40 tags protection. Okay. All that does is it makes us, you can't accidentally move your camera. Wonderful. If you do need to move your camera around, just to see something, click this little cross here, and now you can move your key. You basically, you have something called an editor camera, which is a camera that doesn't render. It just lets you move around your scene and see what's going on.

Joey Korenman (15:43):

Um, and uh, but this camera is actually a real camera it's sitting in your scene. And what you want to do is look through this camera, click on this cube. And you see you remember when we went into polygon mode, go into point mode now, right? Select this point. And now I want you to move that point way out here. Okay. And what I want to do is move that point. So it is actually lined up with this line here on the floor of my background image. All right. And so now I can't actually see that point anymore because I've kind of moved it off the screen. So what I'm going to do is click this button right here. Okay. If you click this, this brings up your four views, right. And if you've ever used a 3d program, this should make sense to you.

Joey Korenman (16:29):

You got your perspective view, you look through the camera top front and right. And so I have that point selected and I can't see it in this view, but I can see it in every other view. And what I want to do is scoot it kind of towards the camera so that it lines up with, um, you know, with this edge here. And so I'm going to come into my top view and I'm just gonna kind of scoot it forward like that. Okay. Then I'm going to grab this point and I'm going to scoot it over. So it's kind of, I can look in the top. BNCs kind of parallel to that, but I also want to scoot it up higher. So in my front view, I'm going to scoot it up higher. Okay. And I know I'm doing this really quickly and really the, the, the truth is it just takes awhile working in a 3d app to be able to kind of do this without having to think about it. I know that, you know, it's not, it's not really this easy to do when you start using 3d, but eventually you will get the hang of it. I promise you. All right. Um, so I moved that point. Now I'm going to now I'm one of them do is I'm gonna hold shift and I'm also gonna click up. See, I did it wrong. I'm going to click this bottom point here. Let's see.

Joey Korenman (17:38):

Let me figure this out. Yeah. So that's the point, right? Cool. All right. I want that point. I also want this point here and I want to grab the handles. Right? I want to push these things forward a little bit like this. Okay. Cool. All right. So now let me, um, and now here's a, here's a little gotcha. If you, if you've never used cinema 4d, if you don't have the cube selected, you won't be able to move the points to make sure you have it selected, and then you can manipulate the points. And what I'm doing is I'm moving a point, but I'm looking over here. Okay. And I want to align up with that edge of my, my reference image. Now I'm gonna click this point and I want to move it up in the air and I can just scoot it over like this.

Joey Korenman (18:22):

Okay. And now if I click this button again, in this view, I can really get a good view. And it's amazing. I mean, it didn't take long, but now you can see that we've pretty much lined up that cube with our reference image. So let's click on this Christ cross here on the camera, um, and just kind of take a look, right. And I know it's a little distracting having the background image. We kind of see that what we've created is this warped kind of funny shaped little room. Right. But because we were looking through this camera when we did that, we lined it up perfectly. So now here's the fun part. What I want to do is take this, see this little icon here. When I took, when I made the material and I dragged it onto the background, what it did was it made this little guy, this is called a texture tag and a texture tag and cinema 4d.

Joey Korenman (19:08):

It just assigns a material to an object and I'm going to move that. So it's now assigned to the cube. Okay. And you can, you can actually delete the background object. Now. You don't have to, but, um, you don't need it any more, as long as you've done everything. Right. Okay. And then the next thing you want to do. Right. So right now, if I don't look through my camera and I just kind of move around like this, you can see it doesn't look right. Okay. The reason for that is because we have to tell this texture tag, look, the way I want you to put this material on this cube is actually by projecting it through this camera right here. Okay. So what I'm going to do is select that tag. Remember whatever you select shows up here and change this projection to camera mapping, and you see the texture disappeared.

Joey Korenman (19:57):

That's because it needs to know what camera to use. So you click that camera and you drag it into that little camera slot and boom. Look at that. Okay. And now if I look around, you can see, I've actually got this texture mapped on there. Now it's not, it's not working perfectly. Right. So let's fix a beat with a way you can tell is you can see that here's the wall and here's the wall. We're kind of seeing some of the wall on the floor. So something isn't lined up quiet. Right. Okay. But that's okay. Um, now one thing that helps in this situation is if you had a little bit better detail in your texture while you're previewing it, um, so what you can do is click on your material here, go to this editor tab and where it says texture, preview size, change that from default to like this one, write 10 24 by 10 24.

Joey Korenman (20:45):

And now it's a lot sharper. Okay. So that, so let's look through this camera again. Let's try and figure out what's going on. If I click on this cube, um, and now, oh, I know what I did wrong. Oh, I almost led you guys down the wrong path. There's one step. I forgot when you, uh, when you put the material on the cube and you say camera mapping, and then you throw that camera on there. You gotta click this button calculate. If you don't click that button, bad things happen. So now I click the button and look what happened. Now we are pretty good to go. Right. So I just clicked on this cross hair. So we could look through our editor camera and lo and behold, we've got a pretty, pretty solid little 3d room there. Pretty neat. Right. Cool. All right. So, so far this has been a cinema 4d tutorial, which is not what you guys signed up for.

Joey Korenman (21:32):

So let me do one more thing. Okay. Um, in after facts, when we use this 3d scene, um, we are going to have a small problem. Okay. And I'll tell, and really what the problem is, is I'm going to want to put the dog right on the floor in order to put the dog on the floor. I need to know where the floor is. And the problem, if we look through a, our front view here, is that the floor, here's the floor to this bottom edge right here. It's actually a, it's actually below the zero line, this red line here. This is the zero line, which means the floor and after effects world might be, you know, it might be like 3 72 or something weird. Um, and we're not going to know where exactly the floor is. So what I want, what I couldn't do, um, what I probably should do is I'm going to actually move the camera and the cube at the same time.

Joey Korenman (22:22):

So I can move that floor up to the zero line. Um, now I had a, uh, if you guys remember, because I pause the video, now I'm screwing things up. I had this protection tag on the camera. Um, and if I try to grab both of these and move them, I'm going to have a problem. The problem is the camera is not allowed to move because I got that. I have that little tag on there. So what I'm gonna do is just grab the tag and I'm going to temporarily scooted onto this background. Okay, I'm going to go into my front view and I'm going to grab both the camera and the cube, and I'm just going to scoot them up. Right. And if you look over here, you can see that everything's stain lined up, everything looks great, and I'm going to zoom in and I'm just going to try and get this thing close.

Joey Korenman (23:05):

Okay. It's not super important that it's totally accurate. Now. There's way more accurate ways to do that, by the way, I just don't, I don't want to make this tutorial anymore. Cinema 4d esque than it has to be. All right. So, uh, another thing we can do, which is really smart is to add a Knoll object. So you guys all know there's no objects in after effects while they're in cinema 42. So if I click on this cube and I hold the mouse down, I get all of these nice objects I can add on one of them's a no, and I'm just going to call this dog ref, and I'm going to, uh, I'm going to go into my 3d views here, and I'm gonna click on dog graph. And I just want to make sure that it's on the floor and not only is it on the floor, but I want to make sure that it's kinda where I want that dog.

Joey Korenman (23:51):

Right. And I want them kind of in this corner here, just like that. Okay. Um, okay. So here's my camera. And I'm going to put the protection tag back on this camera, so I can't move it. And I'm going to rename this camera projection. Okay. Just so, just so it's clear, what's going on and now we're all set up. Okay. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to, I'm going to save this file and we're going to save this as room C4, deed demo. Excellent. Now we're going to after effects and you know, the great thing about CINAware is it's just, it's just stupid, how easy it is, right. Let's make a new comp, we're going to call this room demo. And I have a cinema 4d folder in all of my after-effects projects. So I can just import right into that folder, that room C 4d demo.

Joey Korenman (24:42):

And it just, the cinema 40 project just comes right in as a file. I'm going to click and drag it right into here. Okay. Um, now don't worry about this yet. Okay. I know it doesn't look right. Um, so the first thing you want to do is hit extract, right? Um, when you have a cinema 40, uh, object, like in, in your timeline, it automatically has this CINAware effect on it. There's a whole bunch of buttons and things you can do. This extract button is super important. What it does is when you click it, it grabs any, um, it grabs any cameras and any objects that are in your cinema 4d scene that you want to bring through to after effects. Now, all it's brought over as the camera. And that's because I forgot a very important step. We're going to head back into cinema 40, just for a second.

Joey Korenman (25:30):

This dog ref null is right where I want it, but after effects, can't see it. And the reason it can't see it is because I need to right. Click on it, go to cinema, 4d tags, and add an external compositing tag. Okay. I'd like to apologize briefly for how much cinema 4d I'm forcing into you guys on a 30 days of after effects, tutorial. Um, all right. So I saved the cinema 4d project. I jumped back into after effects. I can immediately now just hit extract and you see, now we get the camera called projection and dog ref. And that Knoll, if you look, the anchor point is exactly where we want to be now, why does this look wrong? Well, it basically looks wrong because by default, when you bring a cinema 4d project in, after effects, this render setting here, the render is set the software.

Joey Korenman (26:20):

Um, and it does that so that you can preview things a little bit quick, more quickly. It's not fast, right? CINAware does not render things very quickly, but it can be useful for simple things like this. When you're ready to render for real, you can switch the renderer to standard final or standard draft. We set it to either one, you can see now it matches our cinema 4d scene. Okay. Um, but if I take this projection camera and I move it, nothing happens, right. You can see the no move, right? The Knoll is in the right spot, but the scene doesn't change where this gets really, really cool is if you click on your cinema 4d layer and you go to the camera settings and you change it from cinema 4d camera to comp camera. And at first nothing changes because we already copied the camera out of cinema 4d into after effects, right?

Joey Korenman (27:11):

So this camera matches exactly the cinema 4d camera, the differences. Now, if I move this, it will, rerender our scene. And this is not zooming in, um, a 2d layer. This is actually rotating the 3d camera inside of cinema 4d and giving us a real time sort of 3d view of that scene. And because of the way we set this up, right? Remember this is actually a 3d room. Now we've taken our 2d Photoshop file, which doesn't have any kind of real perspective or anything like that. You couldn't physically build this room very easily and after effects and cinema 4d, it wasn't that hard because you can project that image onto a cube and move the points around. And now after effects, you have a live camera, right. And, and let me set this. So it's already set to third, a resolution, so it'll render little bit quicker than, than full.

Joey Korenman (28:11):

Um, and you can, you can key frame it and you can, you know, create a camera animation and get a real, you know, like not real time, but you guys know what I'm saying. You can get like almost instantaneous feedback, and this is actually literally a 3d room. Um, you know, you can go a lot deeper with CINAware too. I mean, obviously if you had 3d lights in the scene or 3d objects in the scene, those would render to the problem I have found is that CINAware is just, it's pretty slow. Right? You can see, even with third resolution here, trying to Ram preview this, it's not that fast, but man, does that look great because it's actually 3d and I mean, this is a fun thing to do. You've got this con this thing you just completely made up and now it's, you know, in like 15 minutes, it's like a 3d room you're in.

Joey Korenman (29:01):

All right. Um, and what's awesome is, uh, here, let me come in here. This is my Photoshop file and I have this dog, uh, as kind of a layer. Um, everything's not separated out yet, but I do have this dog. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set the anchor point to like his bottom foot. Okay. Um, I'm going to make it a 3d layer and I'm going to parent it to this dog ref and all that came through. Okay. Now that his parents did, what I'm going to do is I'm going to zero out the position. Someone hit peanut zero out the position, and actually I'm not going to zero it out. And I'll tell you why. When you bring a Nolan from cinema 4d, right. If I click on the smell, see where the anchor point is, the anchor point is not at 0, 0, 0 on the smell.

Joey Korenman (29:46):

I know this is confusing. Um, the, the zeros zero point on a Knoll is actually the top left corner. So the middle of the novel is actually 50 50. So I actually need to type in 50 50. There we go. So you can see now the dog's foot, which is where I put the anchor point is right on that null. And if I scale that dog down, okay. Um, and I'm going to hit our on the dog, make sure the rotation zeroed out. And now I know that dog is on the floor and I'm gonna just, I'm gonna scoot him over a little bit. Um, and I'm just going to do a quick, a quick Ram preview just to make sure everything's work. And let's make this two seconds long and let's do a quick shift Ram preview and see, see what we got. Um, and it looks like the dog is sticking to the floor pretty well.

Joey Korenman (30:35):

Okay. Um, and the more accurately you positioned the Knoll, the more accurately position, the anchor point of the dog, you know, and all that, the better off it's going to stick. But even with that quick little job, all right, that's not bad. And we've got a fully 3d room right now. You know, when you, when you do a camera projection like this, um, you obviously, you can't move the camera too far. Right. Um, because if I look this way, right, I start to lose, I start to lose the artwork. So this works, you know, this works best if you don't have too far of a camera move, but if you make your artwork, Hi-Rez enough, you can, I mean, you can do some pretty interesting camera moves with it. And what's great is you could just do it in after effects now. And you don't have to like render out the 3d part, bream end after effects, try and get it to work together.

Joey Korenman (31:23):

And then if you decide to change the camera, move, go back into cinema four D don't have to do that. It's awesome. Um, and using that little camera projection trick, you can make whatever we want, make the room, look exactly how you want. And if I went into Photoshop right now and I added a picture right here, it would show up instantly because cinema 4d, you would update after effects would update the whole thing's live. It's pretty slick. So I hope you guys liked this trick. Um, I know it was probably 90% cinema 4d and then 10% after Bex, but the 10% after effects is kind of what makes the thing awesome. Because, you know, I, I mean, man, you could even come in here to this camera and you could change the type of camera it is and make it like a wide angle lens.

Joey Korenman (32:06):

Right. Um, and, and really, you know, change the whole look of the scene and, and get like all kinds of crazy looks. Right. Um, you know, here, let me make this like a 15 millimeter lens. Right. And then you gotta zoom that camera way in, but you can see you're going to get all kinds of crazy perspective distortion now. Um, and you can just kind of quickly like preview what it looks like. Um, you know, and now this, I, you know, I got to say this isn't perfect. Um, and I'm sure that with future versions of after effects, it's going to be a lot more real time. And it's going to give you a lot quicker feedbacking you guys can see kind of how laggy it is, but look, there's a wide angle lens. And as long as I moved the mouse slowly, there you go.

Joey Korenman (32:51):

Um, this does go faster, by the way, if you click on the cinema 4d layer and set the render or back to software, right. That does help. Um, you can also click, keep textures and Ram that speeds things up and you can click on, um, I don't think it's going to work too on this case. If I click wireframe, you can still kind of see the edge of the cube, but it just doesn't give you as much feedback, but you can see how much faster the after-effects viewer updates. Um, let's try box. Yeah. It didn't really help too much either. Um, but there's some settings here that can make your previews faster, right? This is actually a little bit easier to work with. And then you just switched back to standard draft or final. Um, and there you go. Woo. I hope that was helpful.

Joey Korenman (33:33):

I hope you guys got some cool ideas out of this. Um, and those of you that can draw that it could illustrators, I have a feeling it's gonna be very useful for you. So thank you guys very much in the next tutorial for this scene. I'm going to show you how I animated the dog. I'm using follow through with some, with also some cool expression tips, because I just can't help myself. Thank you guys so much. Uh, I will catch you next time on 30 days of after effects. Thank you so much for watching. CINAware the link between cinema 4d and after effects is pretty darn powerful. And I hope that you learned a new technique that you didn't know about before cinema, where opens up opportunities to have full 3d things inside of after effects in a way that wasn't possible before. And it comes for free with after effects. If you have any questions or thoughts about this lesson, definitely let us know. And we'd love to hear from you if you use this on a project. So give us a shout on Twitter at school of motion. Show us what you've done. That's it. I will see you in part two of this lesson.

Music (34:34):

[Outro music].