Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Flower Bloom Animation: Animating the Flower Bloom

Photo of Handel Eugene

Instructor Handel Eugene

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  • Duration: 16:45
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Animating the bend & twist deformers to create the flower blooming animation.

In this tutorial we'll learn how to animate the bend & twist deformer rig to create the flower blooming animation.

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Transcript

- All right, welcome back. So in this final lesson, we're going to complete our flower animation by keyframing our deformers from our rig to make our petals bloom. All right, let's go into Cinema and let's get started. One thing you'll notice in between lessons is that, inside of these Null objects, I renamed the deformers to match their respective groups and parent objects. So, right now, this is our Inner Petals folder, so I renamed these deformers IP Bend Bottom, IP Bend Left, IP Bend Right. IP, of course, standing for Inner Petals, that way it makes things a bit tidier and cleaner. I did the same thing with our Main Petals, so inside of our Main Petals, I named them MP Twist, MP Bend Edge Right, and again, MP standing for Main Petals. Again, this is to keep things tidy and clean, and of course, you know, there may come a time when I'm in my timeline and if I have multiple bend deformers and they all have the same name, Bend, it's hard for me to know which bend object belongs to which group. That's why I like to name my bend deformers. Also, too, you'll notice that our displacer deformers are still currently turned off, as well as our subdivision surface. I have them disabled. That's just going to make my scene run a bit smoother, run a bit quicker. That way, I don't have any lag whenever I'm keyframing and animating. So, first thing we're going to do is drop in a Floor object into our scene. This is just going to give us a little bit of context as far as our flower and its animation. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to drop in a Bend deformer, and this bend deformer is going to serve as my global bend, which is going to bend everything. So as this flower's blooming out and animating, rising, I want this to kind of bend forward towards the camera, so that's what this bend deformer is. Drop it into our Null object. Let's bring it up. Let's bring it up around here or so should be good. Let's adjust the size. We're going to make this 100 by 200 by 100, and we can test that out really fast. And yeah, so this is bending our flower, and of course, we're going to want to check Keep Y-Axis Length. Next thing to do is...let's go in here, and we have our stamens turned on. I'm going to turn them off temporarily. So, click on our Stamen, go into our corner objects, and let's just turn off these two sweep objects. Again, this is just going to make my scene a little bit lighter, and I'm going to focus on these once I get to that portion of our animation, but for now, we're just going to turn them off. The splines should be enough for us once we're animating. And then, the first thing we're going to animate is our inner petals, so let's click on our inner petals, and let's open this up, and we have all these beautiful deformers at our disposal to animate. First thing we're going to do is click on our Bend Back, so Bend Back. And we're going to start animating this deformer first, but before that, we to need to adjust our scene timeline. Right now, it's set to 90 frames as being where our scene ends. We're going to set that to 150, and let's just drag this here to extend that out. Going to turn off my Global Bend Deformer here and we're going to move to frame 120. And the flower right now, it's in its final state, right? It's in its final bloom position, so we're actually going to be animating backwards, so we're going to have the flower fold, and then we're going to have it animating unfolding afterwards. So right now, it's completely unfolded, so let's set a keyframe at its current state at frame 120, then we're going to move backwards in time. We're going to go to frame 25, and we're going to adjust our Bend Back. So, right now, our Strength is at 54 degrees. We're going to want to bring this down, or up, really, to around 6 degrees. Looks good to me, and obviously, right now, the petals are intersecting, so we can fix that by adjusting our left and right bend. Thankfully, we've got this rigged up to fix that. So, let's go to frame 120...yeah, as we're scrolling, you can kind of see that animation already. Let's go to frame 120, set a keyframe on the Strength for the Bend Left, then go back to frame 25. And let's bring this up to around 81. You can get in a little bit closer, see what's happening. So, around there, around 81, where we want that to be. So, that's a IP_Bend_L. Let's do the same thing with our Bend Right, set a keyframe. Let's go to frame 25. And we're going to bring this down around 95. Negative 95 should be good. We've got a little bit of intersecting, that's okay. Let's scrub this. Yeah, it's still intersecting on each other, but we can fix that with our Twist deformers that we have. So, set a keyframe on our Twist deformer. Go to frame 25, and our Bend Left and Bend Right is having these petals fold on each other, kind of wrapping together, which is nice, and our Twist is going to help us kind of get rid of the intersecting a little bit that's happening. Yeah, so this is our Twist deformer, so we're just going to twist these, like so, down to negative 11, which is good. We still have some intersecting, but we still have one more Twist deformer that should resolve that issue. So, let's animate our upper Twist, which is going to affect all of our petals, so let's click on our keyframe at frame 120. Let's move to frame 25, and let's bring this down, like so. Yeah, I really want this to twist. Okay, that's animating nicely, but it's still intersecting, so I think we need to make some adjustments to these deformers. So, let's take a look at our Bend Right. So, let's make that minus 40. Our Bend Left, let's bring that upwards around here, like so, and that should...yeah, get rid of the intersecting that's happening. So, it's just a matter of tweaking, adjusting, kind of [inaudible] there, seeing what looks good and fixing as you go. Okay, so we have our inner petals, that's all animated. Let's go ahead and move on to our main petals. So, like before, with our main petals, the first one we're going to want to animate is our MP_Bend_Back, so let's set a keyframe at frame 120. Let's go to frame 0, actually, and we're going to make this 0 degrees. Let's bring that back up to around 0, like so. Okay, now we can see that's animating, and again, you can see our main petals starts animating first around frame 0, then around frame 25, our inner petals start to animate as well. So, let's go ahead and animate our next bend deformer on our main petal, which is our Bend Left. So we'll set a keyframe at frame 120. Move forward to frame 0 and make that 90 degrees. Okay. All right. Looking good. Let's do the same thing with our right petals. Set a keyframe at frame 120. Let's move forward. Set that to minus 51...or about there. All right. So, we've got some intersecting, as well. That's okay. We'll fix that. Our next deformer is our Twist deformer. Let's go ahead and set a keyframe. Frame 120. Let's go to frame 0, and we're going to make this 15 degrees or so. Okay. All right, that kind of helps our intersecting for sure. Okay, so our next deformer is our MP_Twist, so let's go ahead and click on that. Let's set a keyframe at 120, and then move backwards in time. Let's go to frame 0, set a keyframe, make that negative 90 degrees or so. Around there. Set a keyframe. Let's just scrub that to see what that looks like. All right, cool. It's looking good. So, that's our main petals. Our next petal to animate is our outer petal. So, let's open this up, and our outer petals, the first deformer we're going to animate is our Bend Back's strength, of course. So, let's go down here. Let's take a look at this. Let's go to frame 120, set a keyframe on the Strength, and then, move backwards. I'm going to set a keyframe, bring this back up to around 50 degrees or so. Okay, and there's no intersecting, but I think we can wrap this around each other, these petals, a little bit better. So, I believe that's going to be my Bend Right. Yeah, we want this to kind of fold and wrap on each other, so let's set our keyframe at 120. Move backwards in time. We want these to kind of wrap against each other, so let's set that to...so, turn this up. Around there should be fine. All right, it's looking not too bad. It's looking pretty good, actually. So, let's click on our stamen, and all we need to do for our stamen is right now, there's some intersecting that's happening once it animates up, so we're kind of piercing through our stamen a little bit. So, let's first turn these two on, and we just need to click on our Outer_Stamen. We want to animate the radius. So that way, we can kind of just squish it in a little bit. So, set a keyframe at minus 1, and we're just going to...as you can see, it's kind of protruding out here. So let's just bring that down to around minus 5 should be good. There you go. Okay, that's looking cool. We've got some animation going on here. So, next thing we're going to do is click on our leaves, we have our Basil Leafs, and we're just going to add some subtle, simple bend animation to these as well So, let's open this up, click on our Bend deformers. I'm going to click on all three, that way, I can animate all of them at the same time. Let's set a keyframe. Frame 120. Let's just have these kind of bend out, like so. Somewhere around there, 170, and that's just going to add some additional animation and life to the flower plant. All right, cool. Next up, we need to animate the position of the flower, so we're just going to animate this whole Null, just have it raise up. So, let's click on our flower. We're going to set a keyframe on the Y position. Just click on your keyframe there, move backwards in time, and let's just bring this down about 100 centimeters, or somewhere abouts there. Set a keyframe, and that's going to animate up as it's blooming out to kind of create a nice animation. And then, the last thing we're going to need to do is just animate our global bend. So, let's set a keyframe. Actually, on frame 0, we're going to have the bend Strength be at 0%. Then we're going to move forward to frame 120, and then we're going to have this bend about 30 degrees should be nice. That way, as it's coming up, it's also bending. And I'm just grabbing my timeline to see this animation. Let me click away. Yeah, you can kind of see what this looks like. It's not bad. It's looking pretty good. Looking pretty good. Okay, well, I'm pretty happy with this animation. I think the only thing that's left to do is to render this out as a preview and see what this looks like at real time. So, before I do that, I'm just going to go through each of my petals, and I'm going to turn on my subdivision surface and my displacers, so that way, we can get our final look of our flower petals in our render. Let me just turn these on. Turn on our displacer, and let's go to our Render Settings. Let's click on our Render Settings up here. We're going to switch this to Hardware Preview. Click on our Output, we're going to make this 0 to 150. Going to make this a QuickTime Movie. Click on my Options, just going to make this H.264. Hit OK, and I'm going to save this out, and I'm going to pause the recording, going to render it, and I'll see you guys once we get backs, and we'll wrap up this lesson. So, this is our final animation, and a render of what our flower bloom looks like. In this video, we brought everything together by animating our flower blooming out using multiple Bend and Twist deformers for our rig. This also is our last lesson, which means conclusion of this tutorial series. I hope you enjoyed this one and learned a thing or two. Again, my name is Handel Eugene, and thanks for watching.
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