Balloons

I made my first animation last night just to see how it all works.  Turns out it's not nearly as complicated as I had imagined it to be.

It's pretty simple.  The balloon is a tapered sphere with a tiny cone and torus added to make the knot.  Add the white material, duplicate both and make the other material black.

Then I put both balloons into an emitter, which is a tool that spits out particles.  After that it's simply a matter of turning the particles into balloons, adding wind and selecting a camera angle.

The background is black because I added an alpha channel.  The idea is that I can load it into After Effects and insert a background or other cool stuff.  I've never touched After Effects before, so the idea is daunting, but I'll give it a shot and post the results here.

Cinema 4D

In the time since my last Props post I have converted fully from PC to Mac.  Actually, it's a Hack-a-Mac, but it's virtually the same thing.

That created a bit of a problem.  For 3D purposes I trained myself to use Rhino 3D fairly well.  I liked the program, but there wasn't much support for it out there in the way of tutorials, user community, etc.  Not like with 3DSMax, which has a HUGE user/support base, but is technically kind of a mess.  The problem is that neither of these programs are available for Mac (a problem I've encountered more than once).

So I needed a new Mac-based solution - one with the ease-of-use and intuitive GUI inherent to Rhino as well as the online community of 3DSMax.

Enter Cinema 4D.

I've been playing around with it for about a week now and decided it was time to try my hand at a tutorial.  As easy as the thing is to use, there's still a bit of a learning curve.  So I picked the intro tutorial over at Greyscale Gorilla's site and here are the results:

(click to enlarge)

Basically, it's a 3D render of a bunch of randomized spheres.  I cranked up the anti-aliasing, saved it as a TIF, then ported it over to Photoshop and added a slight vignette and adjusted the curves.  Now that I look at it again I probably saturated it a bit much.  But I never was that good with curves.  Guess I need some practice.

So that's it for now.  I'll continue playing around with this software.  If I come up with anything interesting I'll be sure to post it here.

UPDATE:

The next tutorial was all about Gamma.  The idea is that the default gamma in Cinema 4D is set at 1, but most monitors are set at 2.2.  So you have to adjust your render settings to reflect this.  It all has to do with lighting and falloff, which as a result affects reflection as well.  Take a look:

You can see that it opens up the light quite a bit.  The decreased falloff increases the strength of the light over distance.  It also allows for more realistic color reflection.  Note that the reflected spheres are purple-ish in color. 

Keep in mind that there isn't an actual "light" element in the 3D file.  Everything is reflecting the background sky, which in this case is a simple studio setup with  a couple of kinos opposite each other.