SteveoStudios

I’m a sucker for story. Preferably a good one, but a story none the less.

We live in a messed up world, a world corrupted by sin after the fall. It’s incredible the atrocities man has come up with. But I came across an idea that is still rattling around. We spend billions upon billions on movies and books that will just tell us a great story. A story with action, intrigue, betrayal, death, the whole works. Could it be that God is in-fact not sadistic and cruel, but rather a master storyteller?

This is by no means saying that God is the responsible for the atrocities. But he created an exposition that allowed us to live inside this story. I have no theological backing, just thoughts.

(ideas taken from Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years)

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So, for this particular animation I was working on the other day, I wanted a stack of falling cubes that fell, stopped, and then reversed and got sucked back up into the stack. First, I realized that the word “suck” is blocked by our internet filter, which is frustrating but I can understand the concern. I know that you can render out an animation, using the MoGraph 2 module, and then drop it into AE and time-remap it, but I knew that there had to be a way in C4D to be able to reverse it. After two days of researching Thinking Particles, the Emitter object and even signing up for Cineversity, I still could not find ANYTHING online on how to do this. But randomly trying something, I stumbled upon a sad little variable that did the trick. Here you go:

Start by making a MoGraph 2 scene. This can be found in a ton of place. Then, place a Mograph Cache tag onto your cloner.

Then, Bake the dynamics:

Finally, Use the Offset parameter to adjust the time.

Now, I would think that adjusting this parameter negatively would go back in time. But, that’s not the way this works. If you go to frame 90, and then give this parameter a (positive) 90, the it’s as if this cloner is back at frame 0.

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Tuesday morning Romans study

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follow me @ twitter.com/steveostudios

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I have this subconscious fear of clicking a checkbox and my computer instantaneously blowing up and me losing my artwork and eyebrows, the latter of which I can grow back. So you can imagine that there are a lot of undiscovered things for me. Which lead me to my next tutorial.
I got a phone call from Jason (http://churchtechtalk.com) trying to make a “blue-print” from some 3d gears in C4d but he doesn’t have the Sketch and Toon Module. We came up with an easy fix using the Cel Renderer plugin that comes with C4D, which you can do some pretty useful things.

First, click Render -> Render Settings (cmd+b).

Then, in the Effects selector, click and select “Cel Renderer”. If you hit render right now, you will get this:

What Cel Render is doing is drawing cels from the outline of your objects (kindof like a silhouette, but not filled in). This may not seem that useful right now, but think of taking this shape into Photoshop or an animation into AE and you can do some pretty cool things with the data we just created. Let’s check out the other setting.

If you click the Edges checkbox you can see that it now not only draws the outlines, but all of the edges that make up the polygons of the piece.

Of course you can change the background color and the edge colors by selecting new colors in their respective color swatches.
By selecting the Color checkbox you can open up another pandora box of possibilities. Color will use the material color as the cel color.

Illumination is whether or not light will effect the shading of the objects. With illumination you get the Quantize checkbox. This allows you to select how many shades of color to use in your piece, giving you a posterized-kind-of effect.

There you go!

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I recently stumbled on the blog of John Dyer, Don’t Eat The Fruit via Collide Magazine and am really excited.
Dyer talks of Marshall McLuhan’s illustration of “hot” and “cool” mediums. Hot is where a medium is saturated with detail and information (i.e. a typical Hollywood movie), and cool is more fill in the blanks or participatory (like a book, or comic). Neither is bad. (I think a common mistake that churches/Christians instinctively go to is assigning everything to “good” or “bad”.) However, while both can entertain, one is significantly more effective at teaching/learning. When a person is involved in a “hot” movie, they are zoned into the story, letting it take them wherever; a zombie. However, with leaving out key information and letting the audience think a little more by posing questions can create a “cool” media, which is more useful for retaining information. Let’s change mediums to church services. If the service is all about the stage/screen throwing questions and answers and witty jokes at the audience, people are going to be entertained, uplifted and maybe come back. But, by asking questions (without immediate answers) I think that the attendee will grasp more. You start to engage them a little more, forcing them to draw their own conclusions.
Thought?

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Today at the office, Jonny Mac showed me this interview with J.J. Abrams (the creator of LOST) on TED.com. It is incredible!
The talk is called “Mystery Box”. Apparently, decades ago he bought a box of magic tricks at an old magic shop. It was crowned as $50 worth of magic for $15. Awesome, right? To this day, he still has not opened it. He hasn’t opened it because it represents the idea of hope, imagination, mystery, infinite possibility, etc. And he realizes that we, humans and our nature, are drawn to this!
In film school we learned that it’s not about what you show, but what you don’t show. Alfred Hitchcock was a genius at this. Take Hitchcock’s (in)famous shower scene from Psycho. If you watch it shot-for-shot, you never see the lady get stabbed! You see the knife coming into frame, you see her horrified face, you see chocolate-syrup-blood running down the drain, but you never see knife cutting flesh. Hitchcock would often get criticized for all the murdering he did on screen. But he would comment back that it was not he that committed the murder, but the audience member! He suggested and we committed the murder!
It is our modern nature to want to figure everything out, to tie a pretty bow on it and move to the next problem. But that’s just it; we want to move on to the next problem! We need the problem! We live for the problem. If there were no problems, we would have to fabricate our own. If you break it down, that what most of media today is: non-fiction and fiction books, TV shows, movies, it’s all about posing problems and the fixing them. The only reason why shows like LOST are so popular right now is because they stretch themselves out over a period longer than an hour. And we LOVE it, probably because we hate it so much!
The church, however, is more like a school. It attempts to answer all the questions as soon as they come up, before an real thought goes into what’s going on. During a sermon a person can find out they’re a sinner, discover the cure through Jesus’ saving grace, make their commitment, and be done with the whole thing in half-an-hour! My point is this: Maybe too often preachers, teachers, and theologians are trying answering to many questions. There is no mystery in God! We’ve got Him all figured out and we packaged Him into this nice little box and if you open it, all will be revealed to you and you will understand! But, maybe that is not the point, to understand everything. Or, maybe it is not the point to try and explain everything away.
What do you think?

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There are a ton of social network sites out there: Facebook, Myspace, Linked-In, Virb, Behance, etc. But there is one that I want to point out today that is designed specifically for Christian artists/graphic-artists/photographers/web-designers. It’s called CreativeMYK (a play on CYMK, or Cyan/Yellow/Magenta/Kroma, a four-color process. Creative, huh?!). This site is not your normal social networking tool. Sure, you can set up a profile (with a portfolio) and you can make friends and such, but you can do a lot more. For instance, if for nothing else, you can download from a huge selection of free copyright-free media from other church media designers. That’s literally hundreds of free images and vectors for worship backgrounds, series graphics, web and photoshop elements, logos, and t-shirt designs. Not only that, but there is a critique board where you can upload your own projects and see what other designers think, as well as a discussion board where you can talk about all kinds of theological, practical, or design related topics. It’s pretty cool. Be sure to start your our profile! when you do, look me up and lets be friends!

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I don’t care who you are or how amazing of a 3D modeler you are, but if your render settings suck, then your work will show it. It’s kind of like using cheap paints and construction paper to create fine art: You can probably do it, but the end result may not be as pleasing to the eye.
When in C4d, there are some “Magic Check-Boxes” that will automatically make everything you create look better (and, of course, raise your render times!). I’m no physicist, but I am going to try and also give my laymen’s terms as to what these boxes are doing. If I’m wrong with any of this stuff, please feel free to correct me (gently, please). Also, I think it is important to point out that most of these settings, if not all, are only available with the C4D Advanced Render Module.

First, Maxon was nice enough to place an invisible light in a blank scene, that way, if you’re modeling and you need to see what it looks like rendered, you can render it without fussing over adding lights. This feature is called Auto Light. Because we have already inserted our amazing light set-up into our scene, we don’t need this light.

Goto Render -> Render Settings (or CMD+B on a Mac).

Select Options from the side list of setting groups. In this panel, uncheck “Auto Light”.

Alright, now imagine a hypothetical room with 1 light shining on a red ball. You could say that since a light in shining on a red ball, the light will illuminate 1/2 of the red ball fully, and the other half will be dark. However, light attenuates, or diminishes, as it wraps around the ball. One algorithm that tries to solve this is called “Ambient Occlusion”. Another example of this is how a small flashlight will not only light up the area it is shining on, but very-slightly illuminate the entire room. We want that. So:

Click the “Effect…” button on the left of the sidebar, and choose “Ambient Occlusion”. (Because I don’t really know what I am doing, I leave all these settings on default)

Now, sometimes in real life, light tends to bounce tangent to objects. Because of this, sometimes light rays can bunch up, thus creating a optical “hotspots”. Examples of this would include the crazy patterns of light on the bottom of a pool, or the light projected through a glass marble, or the concentrated light following an ant from a menacing magnifying glass. This effect isn’t only with transparent-curved objects, but those are the easiest examples to see. This phenomenon is called “Caustics”. (an interesting side-note: the word caustics actually comes from the Greek word αυστός, meaning burnt, or Latin causticus, meaning burning. (Thank you Wiki!))

To turn on Caustics, click on the “Effect…” button on the left of the sidebar, and choose “Caustics”. (Again, I leave it all on default.)

Sweet. Now, let’s make the scene a little more realistic. When you have light in 3D space shining in a room full of objects, most renders will show you exactly that. However, in real life, when light shines on objects, what we see is a reflected spectrum of light. Also, in real life, that light now has the ability to continue on other trajectories (other than your eye) and reflect off of other objects in the room. Because light is bouncing off of a red ball onto a white floor, then to our eye, directly under the ball will have a shade of red to it. This is called “Global Illumination”.

Click on the “Effect…” button on the left of the sidebar, and choose “Global Illumination”. (You guessed it, default.)

Global Illumination, or GI, takes a few passes at a frame, in order to find the trajectory of “photons”. This will SIGNIFICANTLY raise you render times, so for me, I uncheck GI until I’m ready for my final render.

Thats it! Good Luck and be sure to comment a link to some of your renderings, or thoughts on this tutorial!

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The idea started years ago with a few church tech guys meeting around a table for lunch once a week for encouragement and to push one another. Then they decided to make the table bigger… by starting a podcast. 170 episodes later, they (we now. I joined somewhere in there) have decided to expand the table even more… by having a FREE conference called Gurus!
The word “Conference” may be a little misleading. It’s more like a “User Group”. There won’t be a leader standing on a stage woo-fully telling you everything that you are doing wrong. Gurus is for production and creative media minds to get together and talk, encourage, push, and inspire the church. We have over 100 people registered so far, with still a while left for registration. We have tons planned! From a ChurchTechTalk Live Podcast, to 25 or so smaller “User Groups” where we go in-depth to incredible guests like Barton Damer, Brad Zimmerman and Chris Thomas.
Registration is free and the dates are July 13-15, in Louisville, KY at Southeast Christian Church’s new Student Ministry Center, called the Block.

I’ll see you there!

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