Create a Claymation-Style Animation in Cinema 4D

- Hey there, Joey here for School of Motion, and in this lesson, we'll be creating a very cool Claymation look in Cinema 4D. I originally started messing around with this look to help out my good buddy, Kyle Predki, for a project that he was working on. He needed to achieve a Claymation look for some characters, and this is what we came up with. And now, I'm gonna pass along what we learned about creating this look to you. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to texture and animate somethin

g that looks like clay, right out of Cinema 4D. Pretty cool, right? Don't forget to sign up for our free student account, so you can grab the project files from this lesson. As well as assets from any other lesson on this site. And now, let's jump in. So, here we are, I have cinema scene set up. And I don't wanna walk you guys through the whole process 'cause it would take too long. I just kinda wanna show you guys the Claymation part of it. But, just to show you guys what's in the scene, I have

a camera. I'm using the physical renderer for this scene, because I want to feel realistic and I want it to have Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion, and depth of field and things like that, and the physical rendered is much, much faster at those things than the standard renderer. Also in this scene, I have a lighting set-up. These are just omni lights with area shadows, and I kind of have a three-point lighting set-up here. And then this guy, that says "Psyche," this is actually a plug-i

n that I have developed to make seamless backgrounds. Which is something that we have to do constantly at Toil, and there's many ways to do it. But what I did was sort of create a rig to give you tons of options. So, you can pick color, you can add gradients, you can have a lot of options with the way the floor looks. If you look over here, if I do a quick render, you'll see that I have a pretty standard white Psyche environment. The lights are reflecting onto it. And I've kinda put this noisy t

exture on it, just to kinda give it a little bit of a dirty look. But there's a million options with Psyche and I will be releasing it shortly. So, watch out for that. Let's get started with the Claymation look. So, what I wanna do is create a really simple animation, where we have a ball and it sort of drops into frame and splits into two more balls. And it looks kinda like clay. So, there's a few keys to the Claymation look, and it doesn't just have to be Claymation. It could just be any kind

of stop motion. But, after having done a few stop motion projects, it's clear to me that there's a few things that specifically give stop motion that look. One of the things is animating at a slower frame rate than you normally do. Normally, we work at 24 frames a second or 30 frames a second. Or, if you're in Europe or somewhere else it might be 25 frames a second. For stop motion, we use 12 frames a second. So, half the number. I'm gonna set my... I'm gonna hit 'Command + D' and I'm gonna set

the frames per second, 12. And I'm gonna go to my render settings and I'm gonna set the frame rate to 12 here as well. Alright, so that's step one. Step two is; instead of animating everything using key frames that Cinema will automatically interpolate for you, which is gonna give you a really smooth motion, you're better off using a lot of key frames and trying to hand animate every single frame. Because, in real stop motion, that's what you have to do. Unless you're some amazing stop motion ar

tist, You're gonna have a lot of little imperfections in your movement. And this is gonna give it a hand-made look, that is kinda of inherent in stop motion. The last part is the texture, which I'll spend some time explaining. So, why don't we just start out by making a sphere, alright? And I'm just gonna lift it up, so it's kinda resting on the floor. And if I render this, you'll see that on the surface, with some lighting, it doesn't look like clay at all. It's very smooth. It's too perfect, a

nd that's the main thing that you have to kinda figure out. When you're trying to come up with a material or a shade that looks organic and looks real, a lot of times what you're really doing is making it look less perfect. Kinda beating it up a little bit. So, let me show you guys this shader here that I've already made. When I render it, you'll see that it does... a little bit, it kinda adds a little bit of bumpiness and noise to this sphere. But, what I need to do is actually make the sphere

editable, because this texture has a Displacement channel. Displacement channels do not work on objects that have not been made editable. So, I'm gonna hit "C," make the sphere editable. Now, when I render this, it's gonna look a lot different. So, you can see, now it's kinda of getting a little bit irregular. And it almost looks like someone's kind of mushed it. It's not a perfect sphere anymore. And, just to amplify that, let me go into the Displacement channel here, and I can up the height to

10 centimeters. So, it'll probably look funky but it'll show you even more that this sphere is being totally squished and turned into a completely different shape, when you render. So, we have this nice sphere that we can animate with, but when we render, it's kinda turned into this other thing. So, what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna show you how I created this texture. And, were gonna try to dial in a look, and then I'm gonna show you how to animate it. Let's take this texture tag off. So, whe

n you... Double click Make a New Texture. When you work with textures in Cinema, it's helpful to understand what all the Texture channels do. So, let's call this texture "Clay 2." Because, once you really understand what these channels are used for, with some experimentation you can pretty much get close to any real texture. There are some textures that you may need V-Ray for. You may need a plug in, or you may need someone who really knows what they're doing to kind of help you out. A lot of ti

mes, all you have to do is think about surface properties to help you with these channels. So, let's start with the Color channel. The Color channel is pretty obvious. It dictates the color of the object. I was kind of going for a "Silly Putty" look. So, I picked this pink color. Now, let's apply this, so we can see what's going on. So, that's step one, Specular is one that I see a lot of people have trouble with. Specular is basically like the glossiness or shininess of a surface. Color is... i

n other 3D packages it would be considered the Diffuse channel. It's, sort of, the overall lighting. But, Specular is sort of like the hot spots you get when you see a light sort of reflected in a shiny surface. There's two main options for Specular; there's width and height. So, Height, and you can see this little preview here, it actually shows you pretty good what's goin' on. Height is, sort of, the intensity of this hot spot. And you can even see up here, on our model, that as I tweak the he

ight, it changes a little bit in the preview. And then the width is, sort of, how much that hot spot spreads out over the surface, okay? So, if you think about clay or Silly Putty, it's a little bit glossy, just a tiny bit. But, not very much. It's kind of like a big matte surface with a tiny bit of glossiness. So, the width of your specular might be pretty big, but the height's gonna be very, very small. Okay, and let's just render what we have, just so we can kinda see where we are. So, this s

ort of looks like clay a little bit. It's kind of got this matte surface and the lighting's definitely helping, and, just so you guys know, I don't have Ambient Occlusion or GI turned on yet, or depth of field, because that's something you save until you're rendering because the renders will take much longer as we're working here. So, this specular feels pretty good to me. Now, if we were trying to make this feel metallic, like a metal ball, or if it was something shiny, like a marble, then you

would need probably a thinner width but a bigger height, so you get more of a sharp, hard surface look. So, those are the two... Those are color and specular. So, now let's kind of go through the rest of these. So, Luminance. If we turn Luminance on, by default, it turns this white. Luminance is a channel that is not affected by light. Okay? So, if I make this ball have pink in the Luminance channel and I render this, you'll see that it almost appears to be glowing. And, if I turn the Specular c

hannel off, and the Color channel off, and use luminance, there's no shading at all, it's just a pink ball. So, the Luminance channel can be used for a few different things. But, what I like to use it for sometimes, it's kinda a cheap way of simulating subsurface scattering. And subsurface scattering is kind of this technical thing that happens. Think of if you hold a leaf up to the sun, you kinda see the sun through it. Certain kind of soft materials actually absorb some of the light, and it ki

nda wraps around and you see it on the other side of the object. You can simulate that in Cinema 4D, but it takes a lot of render time. So, any easy way just to, kind of, flatten things out and simulate that a little bit, is to have the color and the Luminance channel have the same texture or the same color in them. And then, in the Luminance channel, you can just adjust the brightness. So, at zero, it looks the same as with just the Color channel. At 50%, we're getting some shading, but you can

see it's kinda washed it out a little bit. So, I'm just gonna keep that at like 10. What it's basically doing, is it's just gonna brighten up these dark areas a little bit. I'm gonna go up to 20 and see what that looks like. It's just kinda flattening it out a little bit more, kinda like clay would be. So, that's the Luminance channel. Then, you've got the Reflection channel. Which, by default, in cinema 4D that allows you to see the reflections of other objects in an object. Silly Putty or cla

y is not reflective at all, so we don't need that channel. Fog, normal, glow, these are ones that I don't use very often. Diffusion is a channel that can help you make parts of this clay shinier than others or duller than others. We may end up using that, I'm not sure yet. Transparency is pretty obvious, Environment is sort of like the Reflection channel. It actually let's you have global reflections in every object, based on an HDRI or another image. The Bump Map is interesting, and we are gonn

a use that. So, when we start using that, I'll explain what it does. An Alpha channel is used to cut out parts of an object with a matte. Specular color works with the Specular channel, and you can change the color of these highlights that are falling onto this object if you want to. We don't need to, in this case. Now, displacement is the key to this whole "clay" thing. So, let me show what the Displacement channel does. If we add a Displacement channel, first we need to assign a texture to tha

t channel. What the Displacement channel does, is it literally reshapes the geometry of the object, when you render. What I usually use in the Displacement channel is noise. If I just render this, you'll see it's gonna look really weird. Let me crank this up, so you can really see what's going on. So, you see how it's kinda made a mess out of this thing. By default, what it's doing is it's taking all of the points of this sphere and moving them out from the object, based on this noise right here

. Things that are black don't really move. Things that are white move outward. However, it's kind of limited by the number of points in the object. So, it's not very smooth. If you click this button right here, sub polygon displacement, and now we render... And it's gonna take much longer now, but you'll see it actually creates new geometry and renders. So, you can get some really funky results with this. And, what's great about this, is if you have this object as a model, it would have a ton of

polygons. It would be kinda a pain to work with. But instead, you have this sphere. And when you render it, it kind of looks like what you want it to look like. It's a nice way to work and you can get a lot of cool results without a lot of processor while you're working. So, what I wanna first use this Noise channel for, is I wanna just have it generally mush this sphere out of shape a little bit. We can use just your normal noise for this, but obviously, right now, this noise is too small. Eve

n if I take the height way down, let's say to 20 or something, you'll see that it's just too... There's little pits in it. What I need is for it to look like a big fist took it and squeezed it, and it just didn't quite make a perfect circle. So, what I'm gonna do is go into this noise share, and I'm gonna turn the global scale up. Let's try 500. That basically scales the noise up over all. You can see that now we're kinda gettin' this cool result. Now, we're getting a lot of these little faucets

here because of the faces of this sphere. So, what we need to do is turn on round geometry. Now, you'll get a smoother result. This kinda looks like a lump of Silly Putty, and you're kinda there. But, it's still very, very smooth, okay? This may be a little harsh, we may not really need that much displacement. Now we're gettin' somewhere, this is kinda like a little lumpy ball of clay. The next thing I wanted to do was, in addition to this overall lumpiness, I wanted some little divots and groo

ves in it. The Silly Putty's in different pieces and you squish 'em back together, but there's these seams and these weird little bits. What I wanna do is have some different noise affecting this. This is where the layer shader comes in. If you never used it, it's super duper powerful. It's sort of like a little mini Photoshop inside of Cinema. The way it works is this; we already have a noise shader in our Texture channel here, so, since that's already in there, if I click this arrow, and I go

up to layer and click that, you'll see now it's changed the noise shader into a layer shader. If you click that, you can see what we have now, is our noise shader inside the layer shader. It sort of copies what you already had into a layer shader, but now you can add more things to it. You can add effects, you can brighten, adjust hue saturation, colorize things. But, you can also add more layers. So, let's say I wanna add another noise layer. Now I have two noise layers; The one that I've scale

d up, and now I have another one. If I change this from normal to screen, I can mix between the two and create kind of a mishmash of them. So, what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna click this little icon here, to go into the new Noise shader. Now, the default noise doesn't really look the way I want. I'm kinda looking for something a little gritty, almost like your finger nails kinda dug into the clay. When you're working on the noise shader, there's a million options here. It can be a little confusin

g, but really, the only one's we're really gonna be messing with are the type of noise, the global scale, and then, down here, we're gonna adjust the brightness and contrast. All this other stuff can be useful, but, in this case, you don't even have to worry about it. I wanna find a dirty looking noise, so, over here you can see, if you click on this noise, there's a lot of different noises and you won't know what they are. However, if you click this little arrow that they've hidden over here, y

ou get this nice little browser that shows you what they look like. They're tiny little thumbnails, but once you click 'em, it kinda gives you a preview up here. So, I clicked on this guy down here, which is called "Poxo," and I'd love to know where these names came from. Because there's some really silly ones. Gaseous, come on. Poxo kinda looks a little bit dirty, and what it kinda looks like to me, is black dirt with little white specs in it, which is kinda cool. So, what I'm gonna do, is I'm

gonna hit this back arrow here, to go back to the layer shader. And I'm gonna set this to screen. And you can see that, if I adjust the opacity, I'm bringing those little white flecks up along with my noise. So, if I render this now, you'll see that I've got my overall "smushed" effect. But, now I've also got all these little bumps in it, and those are way too heavy. So, I'm gonna turn those way down. And I think they might also be a little big. I may want them to be a little bit smaller. So, I'

m gonna go into this Noise channel, I'm gonna change the global scale to 50. Alright, now we're getting' somewhere. And these bumps, I don't know, it's not quite looking like I wanted. I'm gonna look for a different shader. Maybe the specs are a little much. Maybe we need things that are a little bit more connected to each other. So, I'm gonna try this Buya one. That is great, that it's called Buya. That's not too bad, let me look at one more and see if I like anything better than that. What abo

ut this one? This one's funny, wavy turbulence. That's kinda interesting, see, that feels a little bit better to me. I just need to tone it down a little bit. It almost feels like someone was touching the clay, or they rolled it on a surface and it kinda picked up the properties of that surface. So, now I can actually just adjust the influence of this noise, okay? So, now we're getting kind of a clay texture. Let's say I also wanted to find something that maybe felt almost like finger prints or

something. I'll click shader again, add another noise shader. And go in and try to find something that's a little bit wavy like fingerprints. There's a few different ones. This one, Verona, it doesn't really look like fingerprints. But, if we manipulate it, it might feel like fingerprints overlapping. Why don't we try that? Because what you'll see when I render this, the white areas come out of the clay, right? And the black areas stay where they are. So, what I actually want is these wavy whit

e parts to be indented into the clay. So, what I'm gonna do is actually swap Color 1 and Color 2. I'm gonna set Color 1 to white, Color 2 to black. So, now the wavy parts a white. Then I'm gonna come here, set this to screen, and I'm gonna turn this way down. Let's see where we're gettin' now. Okay, so you can see we're mixing all of these things. We're getting this really interesting noise. As I turn up this new one, I can see that the scale of it feels way too small. So, I'm gonna turn this sc

ale up to 500, see what that does for me. Okay, just adds a little bit more of a "ridginess" to it. And this feels pretty good. So, in terms of the overall shape, I'm happy with what the Displacement channel's doing. Now, the surface still feels very, very sooth. One thing I like to do if I use the Displacement channel is just copy the channel, and I just click this little arrow, next to layer, to copy that. And it copies the whole layer set-up. If I come to basic and now turn on the Bump channe

l, and click this arrow and hit "paste channel," It pastes the whole set-up into the Bump channel. What the Bump channel does, is it affects the brightness of the surface, based on a gradient. It's basically simulating the Displacement channel, but it doesn't actually change the geometry at all. So, it renders a lot faster, and a lot of times that's all you need, is a Bump channel. In our case, we really do wanna change the shape of the object, so, use the Displacement channel. However, if you h

ave the same texture in the displacement and the bump, it sort of amplifies the light on pieces where the displacement is expanding the object and it keeps them a little bit darker where they're not being expanded. If we render this now, with the Displacement and the Bump channel, it just gives us a little bit more contrast. You can kinda see, over here, you're startin' to get some nice highlights here. If I crank this up a little bit, you'll see it darkens this area a little bit, brightens this

area. What I wanna do in that Bump channel, is I wanna lessen the influence of the big, overall noise. Because that's really manipulating the shape of the object a lot. So, it's changing what the light's doing to it. But, these little textures that we've added, these could actually just help add a little bit of grit to the surface. You can see now it's sort of getting this lumpier, dirty look. What I'm gonna do, actually, is I'm gonna get rid of this fingerprint noise, here, and I'm gonna chang

e it to something that's a little bit more grainy. Let's try this, this Luka, alright? And see what this looks like. And I'm gonna turn the strength of this bump down because it's a little bit heavy. That's feelin' good, I may wanna scale down these textures a little bit. They're feelin' a little bit big. That one's fine. This one I've turned all the way off. Let's check this. Okay, so this is pretty decent. It might be a little bit irregular, I could keep messing with the Displacement channel a

nd get this perfect if I wanted to. But for now, I'm actually pretty happy with this. So, now we have all of our channels that we're gonna need. Just to see what happens, I'm gonna take the Bump channel, and I'm gonna copy my setup there, and put it in the Diffusion channel. And I wanna show you guys what it does. If it looks cool, we'll keep it. And if it doesn't, we'll toss it. So, what is it does, is it keeps areas that are white, and it keeps them shiny. Areas that are black, it kinda makes

them dull. So, you can see it kinda has the effect of making the object feel dirty a little bit. So, if I turn the brightness of this down a little bit. There we go. When you have a texture in here, you actually have to change the Mix strength. Let's change that down to 50, and see if it's just gonna help us get a little bit... And even that's too heavy. We just want a little bit of grit on this thing. I actually like that. It makes it feel like these grooves are actually kinda blocking the ligh

t. Maybe they're a little dirty. And that feels pretty real. This will take a minute to render, but just to show you guys, if I turn on Ambient Occlusion, turn on Indirect Illumination on the physical renderer. As this is rendering, when you have pretty detailed, really nuanced textures, and you have decent a lighting set-up, and then you let the renderer use all of the tricks it has up it's sleeves, you can get a pretty photo-realistic result. Without doing any compositing or anything, and ther

e's also no depth of field on here. You look at that... I could nitpick some things, but I bet that if you showed that to somebody and said "Look, I took a picture of a ball of Play Doh." They would believe that that was real, okay? So, now we're gonna use this as our texture. I'm gonna show you guys how to animate a quick little animation. Then we're gonna set it up to render and fire off that render, and we're gonna check out what it looks like. We have our textures, we're happy with that. So,

what we're gonna animate is this sphere. What I thought would be cool is if it fell into the frame and splatted outwards. And then split in to two balls. So, a pretty simple animation, but it'll give you an idea of the work flow you can use. You can definitely go crazy with this technique, and make full on Claymation movies, if you wanted to. In order to make this feel like stop motion, we're gonna need to animate pretty much every frame. We can have Cinema help us every once in a while. But to

get that imperfect look, we really want to do as much of the work ourselves as possible. In order to do that, especially when we are deforming the ball, we want to use Point Level Animation. Point Level Animation means we literally go into point mode or polygon mode and we use a tool... By the way, I'm bringing this modeling menu up by hitting "M" and then looking at the options it gives me and deciding I want the brush, which has the "C" next to it. So, I hit "C" and it switches to the brush t

ool. Literally coming in here and manipulating this mesh with the brush tool. I want Cinema to put key frames on the actual shape of the mesh. By default, Point Level Animation is turned off. The way you turn it on is down here in your standard layout. You see position, scale and rotation are on. This "P" is for parameter. These little dots here, these are for point level. So, what you wanna do is turn this on, and you wanna turn on automatic key framing. Then you need to actually add a point le

vel animation track to your object in the timeline. Before we do that, why don't we first animate the dropping of the ball, okay? When you're doing stop motion animation, and this is one of the things that is really cool about it, is that it doesn't really let you cheat very easily. You have to plan out your moves ahead of time. Now, in Cinema, the beauty is that we can always go back and fix things real easily. In real stop motion, you can't do it very easily. So, you really have to be precise

and think about what you're doing when you're animating and use animation principles and things like that. I want this to feel pretty quick and pretty bouncy. I'm thinkin' this ball is gonna drop into frame pretty fast. Like, this quick. If we're animating at 12 frames a second, it's gonna fall probably in two frames, maybe three. Probably three, just so we can actually do something here, in this tutorial. What we're gonna do, is we are going to start with this ball out of frame. I'm gonna actua

lly put a protection tag on this camera, because we are gonna have to switch between our editor camera and our actual render camera quite a bit. I can see now, I wasn't actually looking through my render camera. So, let's bring the ball back down and let's line up this camera where we want it. So, now I'm going to put the protection tag back on the camera, so we don't accidentally move it. If you've never used one of those, it's very handy because now I can't move the camera. It literally won't

let me move it. But, if I click here and go to the editor camera, I can move around. So, when I start modeling the ball and sculpting it like clay, I can see what I'm doing. So, we're gonna start with the sphere up here, out of frame. Alright? We're gonna set a key frame. So, then we're gonna go to the next frame. Here I'm gonna turn on automatic key frame. I want the ball to fall pretty far into the frame. So, this is the floor. I don't want it to quite hit the floor yet, okay? And maybe what w

e do is we just have it enter the frame here. We'll go to the next frame, and it falls almost all the way to the floor. Then on the next frame, it's on the floor. But, it's gonna be really smushed and flattened. So, if we just do a quick preview, that's pretty quick. Splat. And we're gonna have to add some good sound effects here too. You can see it feels a little jerky. It doesn't feel perfect because I kinda hand-did those. Decided I want this to be fast, it's gonna be a certain number of fram

es. The beauty of Cinema, though, is that you can always change it. So, if I decide that this move to this move feels a little too much, I can just come up here and fix it. Now, because this ball is moving fast at the beginning, it should also be a little stretched out, vertically. Now, I could sculpt that, and that's probably what I would do. But it would just take longer. So, in this case, I'm gonna just use the "Y" scale. So, I'm gonna start on a frame where I can tell... It should be like th

is, and it should be a little bit smaller on "X" too. "Z" should match. Now, that's really elongated. It's pretty cartoony but it's funny. As it's falling, it's accelerating, so it's a little bit, if we step backwards, it should be a little bit less elongated here. Then, as it hits, it's gonna totally flatten out very quickly. So the "Y" is gonna flatten out like this, and then the "X" is gonna be like this. Now that we've done that, we're gonna have to move it down again 'cause now it's not on

the floor. So, now it is. So, what we've go so far is this kind of animation. Great. Now, what you could do at this point is go into point level animation mode and start making this feel like someone hand did this. And we can even go in and tweak, and just kinda mush around some things here, so it feels a little less perfect. I'm gonna switch my layout to animation, so it's a little easier to work with. I'm going to take my sphere, drag it onto my timeline. You can see I've got some position and

scale key frames on there. So, with sphere selected, what I want to do is say "create" and add a special track, PLA. Then, with PLA on, auto key framing on, I can go to a frame like this, hit "M" and then "C" for brush. And I can mush some of these points around, kinda mess it up a little. You can see it added key frame point level. So, I can do that same on this frame. Then, on this frame, I want it out of frame. When it lands here, What's gonna happen, is it's gonna land and split into two ba

lls. The center is gonna kinda drop down, like this. These ends are gonna split out like this. So, it's gonna start like this. Then, it's just gonna keep spreading out fairly quickly. I think I wanna try and make it feel like it splats and splits. It almost snaps back, it kinda hangs for a second, like it's gonna return to normal shape. Then it pops into two different balls. So, it's gonna, basically, very quickly, splat. So, on the next frame here, this part's gonna be a little lower. These par

ts are gonna be a little bit more stretched out. You can see, I'm really not trying very hard to make this perfect. I'm gonna scrub back and forth, a few frames at a time. Just try and get this to feel good. That feels good, and we'll go to the next frame. I should probably have the bottom of this come up too. One thing I do want to be careful of, 'cause what I'm noticing is that the bottom of this, it may not be intersecting the floor anymore once I move these. So, I just need to make sure that

it's always intersecting the floor. If I do a quick little preview of this, it's feelin' pretty good. Splat. Splat! Now, it feels like it probably needs to come out a little bit further there. You wanna start elongating these too, because the mass of this clay is sort of splitting, here. Here's a good example of why Cinema is actually a lot easier than Claymation. From this frame to this frame, feels like a little bit of a big move. All I have to do is take this PLA, and move it one frame. I wi

ll now get two frames, it will interpolate that for me. As long as you don't do that very often, you can get away with it. In stop motion, you would have to go back and try and make this frame, and put it in the middle, and it's a pain. You really don't wanna have to do that. So, once I played it back, it actually felt pretty good. Let's see here. I think I may actually want to get rid of that frame. There we go, yeah. It needs to feel fast. So, it splits. Alright, now at this point, this move i

s gonna start decelerating, because, basically, the tension wants to pull this back together. So, it starts to decelerate. It's still moving a little bit. It's gonna hang there for a second, but it wants to pull back. And I think it'll probably hang for maybe another frame or two. Really start to stretch, like it's reaching. Let's see what we got. I think I want it to be a little more extreme, so, I might just realize that I'm having too many frames. There we go. I may wanna actually speed thing

s up after I animate a couple of frames. So, let's have one more frame here, where it starts to even... it almost starts to pull back a little bit. The top starts to pull back, the bottom is still kinda movin' away. And here's where we're gonna have a big pop. What I'm actually gonna do, is replace this model with two spheres. The easy way to do that... First let me name this Sphere 1. I'm gonna put a display tag on this. I'm going to say "use the visibility setting." And at this frame, it's 100

. I'm gonna go forward one frame, and set it to zero. This is what the animation looks like so far. Boing, there you go. It's quick, and there's some things that I don't love about it. I think it's really just this frame to this frame. I think this frame might be a little extreme, I may wanna pull that back a little bit. There we go. So that, now, it feels like it's still moving outwards a little bit. Then, I feel like these need to move in a little bit. So, now what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna m

ake, on this frame, I'm gonna turn off automatic key frame for a second. I'm gonna make a new sphere, and I am going to apply. Let me go back to standard layout for a second. What I wanna do is add one sphere here and one here, and kinda match the position as closely as I can. So, I'm going to make that sphere smaller. Go into object mode and try and... I'm gonna use some of these views here, to help me figure out how big that sphere should be. It probably wants to be about that big. It needs to

be on the floor. Let's see, I must have moved my floor. It's actually at nine centimeters. So, that's a mistake, but we'll work with that. So, that is now on the floor, and we're gonna scoot it over here. You can see that because of the way I've been using my mush tool, my brush tool, I haven't actually shaped this object that correctly. But, from the viewpoint of the camera, it's working fine. That's really all we need to do. We're just faking this whole thing anyway. So, I'm just gonna make t

his look correct. So, that ball's there. Alright, I need to make it editable. This would be "Sphere L" I'm going to take this other sphere, name it "Sphere R," and I'm gonna move it over here. I'm gonna apply the clay material to both. Then, I'm going to put a display tag on both of these, as well. And, I'm going to have the opposite happen to them. I'm gonna have them be invisible, until this frame. Invisible in this frame, visible in this frame. If I say "use visibility," on this frame it's 10

0%, on the previous frame it's a zero. Then, I can just copy that display tag onto this sphere. So, now I've got this, and then it turns into spheres. I must have done something wrong, because... Let's see what I did. 100, there we go. Oh, I know what I did. Sorry, folks. Let me do this one more time. This always confused me, the visibility tag has two things you can key frame. You can key frame this "Use," or you can key frame the visibility. What I want to key frame is the visibility. So, visi

bility: 100, visibility: zero. There we go. Now, copy that onto here, so now, when we go to this frame, it switches to these two spheres. Now, these two spheres are too perfect right now, for sure. So, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to select them both and I'm gonna use the brush tool again. I want them to feel a little bit stretched at the beginning, like they are kind of pulling away from each other. What I'm gonna do, is have them start... And I just kinda go back and forth, like this. Un

til it feels like a good match. I'm also going to animate the position of them. I'm going to turn on automatic key framing now. I'm gonna move them, so let me switch back to animation here. And, I want a position key frame on them, on "X" and "Z." So, I'm going to select both of these, and then I'm gonna put key frames on "X" and "Z." Now, I want them to basically move away from each other pretty quickly, then decelerate and come to a stop a little bit slowly. I'm going to go into my overhead vi

ew here, because it will be a little easier, because we're kinda looking at them at an angle. On the first frame, after the pop, I actually want them a little bit further apart. On the next frame, even further apart. Like, really far apart there. I think I put it on the wrong key frame. There we go. The reason it's not showing up in my timeline, is probably because my view is set up wrong. If I go "view, show animated," then turn on automatic mode. Now it's actually gonna show me Sphere L and S

phere R. So, we have this splitting into two, they fly apart. They need to be a little further apart in this frame, be a little further apart in this one. They're moving where they're kinda framed weird in the camera now, so I can always move the camera. Maybe we'll do a stop motion camera move too, that'd be kinda cool. They break apart 1, 2, 3. Let's do one more move, but they're already starting to slow down now. Then, on the next frame, they move a little bit more. Just a tiny bit. Then one

more frame where they move a little bit. If we preview this, you can see there's a little hitch in the movement. If we figure out what frame it is, it's this frame here, where this object doesn't move very much. So, let's fix that frame. If we come in here, you can actually see... It's kinda tough to see, but you can actually see where the key frames are. You can kinda see the line it's creating. What's more important is you can see the space between them. So, you can imagine your curve. Like, d

o you have this quick move, then a little slower, then a little slower, then a little slower, and then this last one should be even slower. So, if we go to this last frame... Here we go, even slower. Let's do the same thing with the other sphere. I'm hitting an object and hitting "S," which will zoom this view to the selected object. So, we have a big move, a little smaller move, a little smaller, little smaller. Actually, this one I animated much better than the other one. Now, let's preview th

is. Okay. It's workin' okay, obviously we still need to do a little bit of sculpting on these. Now, we can do the point level animation on these guys. They start out flattened, like this. I'm gonna go into my modeling brush tool. As they decelerate, they will slowly form back into spheres. I'm gonna go ahead and just go into my editor camera, here, so I can actually see what's happening. What I wanna do, is make it feel like right, at this moment here, they're really still pretty stretched. Then

, it snaps back, and it snaps back pretty quick. It maybe even kinda overshoots and pushes him a little bit, and then comes back out. Let's see what that's lookin' like. That's actually kinda what I had in mind. Now, it feels a little slow, that move at the end. So, what I could do, is speed that move up, or I could slow this move down in the beginning, because, the speed that they split apart, I kinda like. The beginning now feels a little fast to me, so, what I'm gonna try to do, is just slow

down up to there. I gonna take all these key frames, move 'em down, take all these key frames, and just stretch 'em out three or four frames. Then, move this back. Let's see what we get now. Yep, there we go. So, we get this nice little splat. Now let's deal with this camera. At the beginning, here, the camera's in a good spot. At the end, it's not in a good spot. This is a really short animation, I'm realizing. But that's okay, it's really okay. Let's take off the protection tag. Turn off autom

atic key framing, 'cause we've got the animation in a pretty good spot. Our camera, here, I like where it starts. So, I'm gonna put a key frame on it. I'm just gonna hit "F9" and have the key frame on. By the time it ends, here, frame 20, I actually want it to be looking that way. Which is kinda weird, it's very imperfect. The beauty of stop motion. What I just did there, putting a key frame here and a key frame here on the camera, you could actually do that now, if you have software like Dragon

frame. You can have motion control systems that will smoothly move your camera. We're not going for that look, we're going for the imperfect look. What I wanna do, is come into my curve editor. I just hit space bar over the timeline, bring up my camera curves. I don't need the scale key frame, so I'm gonna delete those. Rotation I do, but I really only need, I believe... Let's see here. Oh, I think I just erased my camera key frames, let's undo this. There we go. Let's try this one more time, de

lete the scale key frames. There we go. So, we're gonna go into the curves, check out the position curves, here. You can see that there's an "Ease out" and an "Ease in." I don't want that, because that's too computer generated. So, I'm gonna hit option "L," I actually need to go back into key frame mode, select all the key frames, hit option "L," and then do the same on rotation. What that will do, if I go back to the curve editor, is it makes linear moves, instead of ease in, ease out. I'm gonn

a go back to my key frame editor, here. And I'm just go every so often, and I'm gonna select position rotation. I'm going to add keys, like this. I'm just going to create by hitting "Add Key At." Then, I'm just gonna move these around a little bit. What I'm doing is I'm, overall, keeping the same move. But, I'm adjusting the speed that the move happens at. So, instead of this perfect move, it's gonna be a little bit jerky. Then, maybe what I can do... Let's take all of the action, the balls drop

ping and splitting, and let's delay them half a second, six frames. Let's spread out this camera move, so it lasts another few frames afterwards. Let's make this 30 frames. Here's our animation. Again, we're gonna need a good "splat" noise here. Let me do a quick render here, and let's see what this is gonna end up like. I think I still have Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Illumination turned on. So, this will give you a pretty good idea of what this is gonna look like when it renders. For the fi

nal render, all I'm gonna do is turn on Depth of Field and make sure that we're following focus, so that we get a little bit of depth of field. And just kinda help soften things up a little bit. I'm not really gonna do any post-compositing or anything on this, because this tutorial was really all about how you can get this look in Cinema. There's other things you could do in After Effects or Nuke. You could simulate a little bit of light flicker. If you don't have a very tightly controlled studi

o, it's pretty hard to get rid of flicker when you're shooting stop motion, that's one of the things you have to avoid. You could add that, you could add film grain, which always makes things look a little bit more like they were shot. Especially if you have depth of field and you're sort of selling the idea that you shot this on your 5D or something. Well, who am I kidding? Most people don't have 5D, 7D. I really hope this was helpful, I hope you guys learned about a few different ways to key f

rame, some point level animation, the texturing system, how you can use displacement and bump to get things to look realistic. Thank you guys so much for watching this, I really appreciate it and I will see you guys next time. Thank you. Thank you for watching. I hope you learned a lot and enjoyed making this Claymation style animation in Cinema 4D. If you have any questions or thoughts, definitely let us know. And, we would love to hear from you if you use this technique on a project. So, give

us a shout on Twitter @SchoolofMotion and show us your work. And if you learned something valuable from this video, please share it around. It totally helps us spread the word about School of Motion and we appreciate it a lot. Don't forget to sign up for our free student account to access the project files for lesson that you just watched. Plus, a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. Thanks again and I'll see you on the next one.