From the course: Motion Graphics
Create a folding fan with the spot shader
From the course: Motion Graphics
Create a folding fan with the spot shader
- [EJ] Welcome to another Motion Graphics Weekly, where you up your mo graph knowledge one week at a time. I'm EJ Hassenfratz. Let's get our learn on. The Cinema 4D Pose Morph tag is a very powerful tool that I use in almost every one of my Cinema 4D projects. In this week's video, I'm going to be showing you how you can use it to easily animate a fan opening and closing. If you've never used Pose Morph before, hopefully by the end of this video, you'll wonder what you ever did without it. So let's go and jump into a new project here, and basically how I built my fan was just using a simple plane object. What I'm going to do is orientate this so it's facing us, so in the negative Z, and then I'm going to go to display and make sure I can see my lines. So I'm going to go to Gouraud shading lines and now I can see all my segments. What I'm going to do is just get rid of all my height segments but one and then I'm going to bring up my width to about 700. You can see we have some geometry that we can start manipulating to create our fan. So to be able to manipulate points and edges and move stuff around, I'm just going to hit C to make the plane editable, and then I can do my edge selection here. I have 20 segments, so if I select every other edge here... Like so, I should do every other edge. Then I can move this forward and since I did an even amount of segments, I now have an odd amount of edges that I can pull forward and create a fan. What I'm going to do because I'm going to actually be manipulating these edges to create poses to morph between, I'm going to store these edges as a selection. So I'm going to go to Select, set selection, and now if I click off and choose anything else, I can always go back to that tag and hit restore selection. Then I load that back up and I can adjust this again. So this is kind of like our basic folded fan geometry. We've got this nice zigzag going on, and now we can actually utilize the Pose Morph tag. To get a Pose Morph tag, I'm going to right click on my plane object and the Pose Morph is in the character tags 'cause typically you use the Pose Morph for character animation, but there's actually a lot of creative uses for your typical motion graphics workflow. So I'm going to go ahead and add this Pose Morph tag, and you're going to see all of these mixing properties. On the very basic level, the Pose Morph tag allows you to store different states or poses and allows you to morph between them. You can see that we can actually morph between different states of rotation, points, scale, parameters, all this stuff. But the only thing we're going to need to be storing is actually the scale and the points. Let's go ahead and with those selected, I'm going to go to my tag and you're going to notice that we're in edit mode and we have a few poses here. We have our bases pose and then by default, the Pose Morph tag creates a new pose that you can morph into. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to make a pretty flexible set up where we're going to have one pose where our fan closes from the center, and then we're going to have another pose where it actually collapses into the right, just so we have some flexibility for how we actually animate this. So for this first pose, this would be our center fold and then what I'm going to do is just go to my plane object, hit T, and I'm just going to scale this down to the center just like that. Then if I did this correctly, we should be able to adjust the strength. There we go. We actually have our plane object unfolding. It's kind of like an accordion or something like that. This is actually a really good workflow to animate folding brochures, folding maps, all that good stuff. So what I actually want to do is when a fan opens up, it actually flattens out a little bit. We don't have these rigid or tall zigzags. So what I'm going to do is go to my base pose here and select those edges again, restore selection. Go to edge mode and then we have our edges selected already. We're just going to bring this, all these edges in so it's a little bit more shallow. Now when I go to my centerfold again, when you make any changes to the base pose, it trickles down to every other pose. So you can see that we actually have that shallow zigzag applied to our centerfold. That's fine because we actually want that shallow zigzag for that base open pose, but for the center when it's folded up, we actually want to flatten that out and make that more of a deeper zigzag. So now you can see exactly what's happening if I go to my top view. I can see this is acting and animating way more like a fan. We can bring up this pose to 100% strength. Actually, we can go to our base pose and maybe even bring this in a little bit more shallow, something like that. Again, that'll trickle down into that centerfold so I can move this forward. So you have a lot of flexibility with editing these poses while you're in edit mode. That is our centerfold. That's looking good. Now let's create a new pose. So I'm going to add pose and then what we can do is fold this up and collapse it from the left to the right. How we can do that is by selecting the plane, selecting all of our edges by hitting command A, and then what I can do is hit T and what that's going to do is allow you to bring up this modeling axis tab. What this allows you to do is scale from different axis centers by pushing up the X to 100% of this object's boundaries. You can see that it's now flush with the right side of our geometry and now I can scale from this edge, which is really awesome. That's looking good and now with this pose, let's just make this right fold. You can see how we have this now collapsing to the right. We have a few different ways we can animate this fan and right now, it's not much of a fan. It looks more like a map, but all we have to do now is take this fan and place a bend deformer underneath it. Then I'll just go ahead and rotate this bend deformer and move it over. Let's just crank up the strength and you can see we're getting a bit of our fan here. We need to just change this mode from limited, which just deforms parts of the objects that are in this bounding box, and change this to unlimited. You'll see that now it's affecting the other side. I'm going to turn on keep Y axis length, and that will prevent any kind of stretching happening there. It's going to keep it in the original scale. Now what we can do is just adjust the strength as much as we want, or we can just move this bend deformer up in the Y and get this kind of arc that we want. So we can have a big arc or a smaller arc, and we'll need to crank up our strength a little bit more and even move this down... so we can get a full 180 degree turn there. That's looking good. So now with that bend deformer, we can go back into our Pose Morph and go from edit to animate, 'cause we're ready to animate between these poses. What we can do now in the animate mode is go ahead and let's just say we'll just stick with this right fold and we'll just animate from that. So I'm going to bring that pose strength all the way up to 100% and the nice thing about the Pose Morph tag is we can actually go higher than 100%. We can actually go lower than 0% so we can have some nice overshoot animation if we want to just by animating between those different values. So let's start at 104. Set a key frame. We'll go to frame 20 and then we'll just open this up. Actually what we can do, let's just animate a little bit of overshoot. So we'll set that at -7% and then we'll go to frame 35. No, let's go to frame 30 and have it at 0% so it's fully open. So let me just adjust my project length to 35 frames. Now you can see we have a nice fan opening just by animating that Pose Morph strength. So there you go. By using a simple plane object and a powerful Pose Morph tag, we can create a really fun animated fan. Don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy in the meantime. You can check out my other courses in the library. Visit my website, eyedesyn.com for more tutorials. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to be alerted when I post a new video. Join my Facebook page for daily mo graph inspiration, and keep up to date on all my latest mo graph creations on Instagram. Thanks for watching and I'll see you here again next week.
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