Cinema 4D Tutorial - Animate a Simple Character in C4D Part 1: Face Animation Using Pose Morph Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

everybody it's EJ from I design comm and
today we're going to be talking about
simple character animation inside of
cinema 4d so what does that mean
well first we're going to be doing a
very simple character like this little
sushi guy right here going to be
animating him we're going to do the
facial movements and stuff like that and
basically just how how you can
creatively animate in cinema 4d without
needing to know how to rig or do any
kind of eye care or anything like that
but just using deformers pose morph and
some other tips and tricks and other
cool stuff to animate a simple character
such as a little sushi guy right here so
let's just go ahead and jump in and
animate this little dude alright so
simple character animation we're going
to be using deformers pose morph just a
little bit of pose morph and just some
kind of tips and tricks on how to
animate simple faces and stuff like that
so here I have a little piece of sashimi
with some sushi on top and we're gonna
we're going to animate this guy but
first we want to uh add a face we need a
face for this guy so let's go ahead and
like I said this is going to be a very
simple character so the eyes are
basically just going to be role spheres
and we're going to make this a child of
the salmon guy here and so let's just
position this over here and really what
we could do I guess is use a symmetry
and place that sphere underneath there
so now we have symmetrical eyes and
kind of adjust the size and the spacing
of where we want this
move that down a little bit
sure it's kind of intersecting the
little piece of rice here and basically
this rice is just uh just some noise and
displacement channel and with our cell
shader using the light in my scene I
have tons of tutorials all about cell
shaders and lighting and stuff like that
but basically that the displacement with
the lighting in the shading here you see
we have a slight light blue and you're
getting this really nice texture for
that for the rice ball that makes up our
sushi guy
so and then there's our main light in
our scene so everything kind of updates
with the direction of our light so you
can see that's really picking up the
nice displacement on the little rice
ball that's looking good so I'll just
leave it as though so let's actual
actually texture our eyeball so let's go
ahead create a new material we'll rename
this eye and we're going to do some cell
shader for this as well so let's go
ahead and first apply our material to
our sphere and let's just do some
renaming so this is the eye symmetry
this is our eye
and so now we need to go and grab our
sail shader handy-dandy cel shader and
we're just going to make a little
highlight so you can see it updating our
scene up above we're going to make this
white we're going to have a nice white
highlight and then just black and you
can see that it's using our camera as
the light source we don't want that we
want to use the lights in our scene and
actually the light and our scene looks
pretty good sometimes the light won't
pick up the highlight very well so let's
just for example say that we like the
lighting in our scene like this you can
see that our highlights kind of blending
into our rice so if we wanted to I'm
actually not going to do it off in this
instance because I think it looks okay
is you could just create a separate
light and just use this as the eye light
and go ahead and say okay in the project
i want to just include the eye symmetry
and
we can exclude the main light exclude
those eyes
let's see if that works I think we might
have to go into our cell shader and go
and exclude this main light
actually maybe include go ahead and
include the yep
will include the I light here and there
we go so now we can adjust just this I
light and that will update our I
highlight so I went and did that already
anyway so maybe I'll just keep that
don't need any shadows so the eye light
that's going to include that um
buh-buh-buh
be
affecting yep so that's only affecting
our eyes and then we can adjust adjust
the main light
that will not affect our eye at all now
we have two different lights both
controlling different things now we have
full control over that specular
highlight on our eye that's all well and
good if you want just to shrink it down
just a tiny bit
boom looking good
good so there's our eyeballs now he
needs a mouth right so let's go ahead
and give this guy mouth so what what you
could typically do is go ahead and
Photoshop and like draw a mouth import
it as a texture and all that good stuff
but what I'm going to do and it's a
workflow I like to use is using a spline
shader to uh to create our mouth and so
spline shader if you've if you're
familiar with this mind shader have a
couple tutorials about it and I use it
for text as a material so let's go ahead
let's create a new material here and
we'll name this mouth
turn off color turn off luminance and
we'll give it like whatever color we
want to have our mouths of maybe like a
pink or reddish kind of thing going on
turn off reflectance and now in our
alpha I'm going to turn that on
and we are going to apply a let's find
it all the way where is it where is it
effect there we go
spline so you'll see by default this
just loads up some text and like I said
you could typically use this to just use
text as a material so you can do sushi
and that updates of course we have to
like scale this down in here just so it
can fit so usually 50 50 or something
like that and then we also need to
Center this up in our view here and
typically I think if I do 50 and 50 that
should nope nope no that doesn't
actually if I align this yep and 50
there you go 50 and 50 usually if you're
working with an actual spline will
Center that but we're not going to use
this for text so we're going to turn off
this text spline because that's on by
default and what we're going to do is
just build a spline and drag and drop it
in here and use that to project a spline
as a texture so let's go ahead let's
move this out of the way let's create a
line so let's go into our front view
here and we're just going to draw a
mouth on this guy
have a nice happy smiley mouth he's so
happy and just kind of tweak this a
little bit and make sure these lined up
oh I think that looks good going to do
the line to the center there and cool so
this is our mouth and it's just a spline
so it's not going to render or anything
like that
the first thing we need to do is go
ahead go back into our material lender
editor and define the the spline we want
to use to create our little texture
we're going to drag in that mouth thing
we just drew and you can see that now we
have this little like lipstick kind of
lips thing going on so let's actually
let's go ahead and apply that to our
little rice ball here and you can see
that it applied to our little sushi guy
he looks like a clown or something
move this out of the way and then we can
just adjust this we can do let's e-flat
that's good yep flat and then we'll
until-- it we don't want it to tile and
that's already looking good that's all
lined up and nice but we actually just
want to fill this this spline with a
color so again this isn't our alpha
we're using the color from our luminance
and you can see that we have this
outline so we have this fill option
where you can use a you can fill that
with color and there you go so we just
fill it up that shape with a with our
color and our luminance there so the
thing to keep in mind is that you'll see
that our original spline
has sharp edges but you can see that we
actually have rounded it and that's due
to the fact that by default we have a
line width so basically it's this it
strokes our spline that we made we can
kind of tone this down actually like a
little bit of this line thickness or
this line width because it not rounds
out the edges of the mouth without me
having actually go in and edit the
spline itself so the great thing about
using this is number one you have to go
into Photoshop and make edits in there
you can do all of your edits in here and
the nice thing as well is we can go into
this mouth and say that maybe that's a
little bit too wide let's go ahead maybe
scale this down a little bit go ahead
and adjust these points and will happen
is that I'll actually automatically
update
in our view here and right now it's only
showing the outline we can actually fix
fix this by using a fill color and then
just going and loading any color and now
it will actually look correct in our
viewport let's turn off our light
visibility in here now we can actually
see our smile and we can
and you'll see that that won't actually
automatically update and the reason for
that is because we're technically
animating a material and we need to go
into the editor here and turn on that
animate preview
and now
that'll update
so cool so basically now we can just
animate this spline to create a you know
our to make our sushi dude talk but
we'll we'll mess around with that a
little bit later so we got the mouth hmm
the mouth is good
we can turn this I think we can turn
that off and still remain yep turn that
off just to clean up our you port here
and the next thing we can do is start
animating this guy we got the face going
what's actually
let's group this and sneak up rename
this eyes and
two
the mouth in there and this will just be
face and I can spell face there we go
and so now we have all the face
structure face features in one under one
null now what we're gonna do is we're
gonna make this sushi kind of get
surprised and jump up in the air like
he's just really super surprised got
caught off guard I don't know maybe he
saw one of his sushi friends being eaten
but he's kind of freaked out so what
we're going to do is the way we're going
to animate all this stuff is by using a
pose Morphin I love using pose morph
because you can animate separate things
with just one slider control let's go
ahead go to character tags go to pose
morph and you'll notice that I put it on
the face so basically what I want to do
is control both the movement of the
points of my mouth spline as well as the
size or scale of my eyes here so the
things I want to control is up the just
for the heck of it let's just say we
want a control position we need to
control points because we need it we're
going to be moving the points on our
spline so on the mouse spline so we're
going to need to record the point
position parameters and parameters we're
going to need because we're going to be
adjusting the parameters of our sphere
so radius and stuff like that to kind of
make his eyes grow with surprise and
hierarchy so if we have hierarchy
enabled it'll not only record everything
on the object that the tags apply to but
also all the children underneath that
objects hierarchy so not only the snow
but everything under it so make sure you
have that hierarchy selected or it will
only look at the object that tags
applied to okay
so now we can go to our tag we already
have our base pose already set up so our
first pose we're going to double click
and rename this to surprise
just start editing things and let's just
increase the eye size oh he's really
surprised like what and we can adjust
the mouth here so instead of a smile
he's gonna have like a really he's gonna
get like a like a Oh like face like that
he's gonna do is a face and let's go and
just make this into more of an oh
and again this is all being recorded all
these changes we're making are being
recorded in our pose morph so that's
looking good
we have his mouth I will select all of
these and maybe shrink it even a little
bit more that looks good
and
this is all stored so now if we bring
our strength down you'll see
prized and adjusting the strength and
going back to our base pose so all we
have to do is keyframe that strength and
that makes him super surprised looking
one thing I forgot to do is another
thing I like to do with my eyes so I
already have my pose morph selected if
you want to make any kind of changes at
all make sure you're in your edit mode
on your pose morph and make sure you're
on your base pose so now you can start
to do stuff without screwing everything
up so we're just modifying the base pose
so let's go ahead and the one thing I'm
going to do is kind of make a little
cheeky kind of look for his eyes and
I'll show you what I mean about cheeky
so what I like to do to add a little bit
more cuteness or character to the eyes
is go ahead and get a where is it a melt
deform er I'm going to be using a lot of
deformers and weird ways in this
tutorial so I'm going to make this a
child of the eye you'll see that it's
squash in our eyes here
and it's not really what we want let's
bring the strength down to zero let's
turn the radius let's give it a little
bit of strength
turn the radius down we're going to get
rid of all these vertical randomness and
the melted size we're going to make just
make that 100 we don't want any noise so
basically what I'm gonna do if I move
this meltdown
is on the radius bring the radius up
this
side of the song let's move this
underneath and center that underneath
the actual I that we want so that's
looking good the radius you can see
what's going on here and actually this
melt
see what's going on if I move this up
you can see what I mean by
little cheeky eye looking things so it
looks like his cheek is kind of covering
the bottom of his eye we can turn on the
the cemetry object again so this is just
kind of giving a little bit of character
to our eyes and we can go ahead and
adjust the fall-off so right now it's
pretty sharp what if we want to kind of
make a little bit of fall-off so we'll
make some linear fall-off orient this to
the positive Y now it's looking up and
we'll just adjust our fall off so it's
not so sharp you can see what's going on
now where it's not so sharp so you can
see the difference between the two we
have this sharp edge maybe that's what
you want but I like to have just a
little bit of fall-off just so it's a
nice nice rounded edge
and the nice thing about this is you can
then just adjust how much chiki chiki
eyes you want just by adjusting where
the melt áformer is so with our melt
áformer added we can go back to our
surprised pose and we'll just move this
melt to form or down because we actually
don't want any of that kind of cheek
showing on our eye so we'll just move
that melt to four more down and now you
can see that that has now been recorded
onto that surprised pose there cool so
one other thing while I'm in here is if
you want to say keyframe a blink so
let's go ahead and do that or just do
we'll just add another pose and this
will just be the blink pose
and this is going to be very easy
because the only thing we're going to
edit now is just the scale on our eye so
that's just very simple
that's the blink
do
what I do all right let's
I don't know what I did there I think I
did something wrong here oh you know
what I did I know what I did
so this let's go back to our pose and
you'll notice I adjusted the scale on my
eye the reason why it didn't record cuz
I'm a ding dong and I didn't have this
recording scale so let's turn that on so
this happens all the time so it's
actually good that I did this so if
something's not working you probably
didn't enable something you should uh so
scale is enabled now it's going to start
recording scale all that stuff and now I
can go ahead add a new pose blink name
this blank and now I can adjust the
scale of the sphere and now
there we go now we have our nice little
blink action going on and actually you
can see that we have it's it's kind of
like a flat ball so what I can do is
kind of shrink not only on the Y button
on the Z as well
think that's good alright so there's our
blink there's a base pose and there's
the surprise put