Motion Design School - Rigging and Animation in Cinema 4D Free Download

Motion Design School – Rigging and Animation in Cinema 4D Free Download

An online course on how to bring almost any 3D character to life, whether it is a person, a robot, or even a jellyfish.

If you want to animate characters without leaving near and dear Cinema 4D, you are in the right place. In this course, you will learn how to create a rig that can be quickly and easily animated manually or automatically.

Whatever character you have, whether it is a person or a robot, a centipede or a jellyfish, understanding the basics of rigging together with simulations, xPresso, and a bit of Maths will make you practically almighty. We will start simple, with questions: Do you need a rig at all? What cases do require it? And when can you avoid it substituting it with clusters, vertex maps and deformers? After that, we will gradually proceed from using Cinema 4D’s standard systems to creating our own ones.

This course is for those who have very recently discovered Cinema 4D. You should be prepared that rigging requires a high level of concentration as well as some experience in working with 3D. At times it won’t be that easy, but rigging is the only way to bring your character to life.

SECTION 1
Rigging basics
Rigging isn’t the first stage of working on a scene. Before you start working on a rig, you need to realize how models themselves are being created as well as to know how to work with animation keyframes and speed graphs. And in general, it is important to recognize situations in which you can avoid creating a complex rig.

In short, before you start working on a rig, you need to understand what it should look like and whether you need it at all. I’ll explain all these in detail in the introductory series of lessons.

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SECTION 2
Feel the power
of CMOTION object
So, you’ve decided that you need a rig. Are you sure, however, that you need to animate it manually?

In certain cases, such as walk cycle animation, you can make it with the CMotion module. With a couple of clicks, you’ll create automatically animated walkcycle along any spline. Combining several CMotion objects, you can achieve outstanding results.

In this lesson, we will show you the full power of the parametric motion generator. We will use one of the most difficult cases as an example – the animation of a centipede crawling on a complex surface. Animating such a scene manually would be much more time consuming. In a few words, CMotion objects provide huge opportunities and significantly save time.

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SECTION 3
Animation based on simulation for more advanced results
If you don’t like setting a lot of keyframes, this section is for you. I will explain to you how to create a rig which combines the best of both automated simulation and manual keyframing. Neither of these two approaches separately will give you such an advanced result as their combination into one smart-ass rig system.

By the way, if you are still avoiding simulations because you have no idea how to cycle them, don’t worry, I will show you how to do it in this lesson.

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SECTION 4
How to rig a whole human
(and not only) body
In this section, an epic adventure on rigging a two-legged and two-handed character is awaiting you. We will start by analyzing the Сharacter Object Advanced biped template, its features and limitations. After this, we will move on to rigging and skinning. We will talk about character animation and find out how characters can interact with an environment and objects.

Actually, with the help of Character Object, you can animate not only people but also birds, fish, cats and a whole lot more.

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SECTION 5
Creating an advanced FACS face rig from scratch
You may be an amazing animator recreating scenes of happiness, hate, or epic battles on the screen, but all of this will never look plausible if your characters have poker faces on.

Learn how to create a face rig in detail and no one will ever ask your character: “Why so serious?”

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SECTION 6
Rigging robots and advanced techniques
In the beginning, there were humans, and then they created robots. Same story here, in our course. And that’s the lesson where the complexity of the course reaches its peak. All that hardcore with xPresso, Maths, vectors and matrices will open immense opportunities to you, and you’ll get answers to the questions:

— How to make fingers automatically place themselves naturally on any surface?
— How to make legs bend the way you need them to, in all the necessary joints?
— How to make a tool to apply an animation from Mixamo motion capture to your character with a few clicks?

To sum up, the main thing of the lesson is controlled automation and, of course, robots.

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And much more…
We regularly add and improve course materials. This is not the end of the story, but only its beginning.