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OK, OK – what else is possible with recording?
The above example was aimed more at the classic rendering of layers, but the system can do even more. Imagine you want to render a product for your customer in a selection of colour or even surface combinations. Until now, the only option was to animate material parameters or completely replace a material in the texture tag. However, the recording system also offers special override groups for such cases. Such groups can be filled via drag-and-drop from the Object Manager (we therefore always need a separately opened Object Manager for this) and assigned properties and tags in the Recording Manager. These tags do not have to already exist in the basic recording. In this way, new tags can also be assigned to objects that have inherited properties from a parent object in the base recording. In this context, we should also not forget the new material override
within the render presets, which can be used to replace all or just a few selected objects and material properties with properties of a separate material. This function can of course also be used specifically in a render preset and thus limited to individual shots.
and can be quickly exchanged between projects
Another option that I find very interesting is the variation of animations. After all, this is also just a collection of data that can be overwritten by recording. It is therefore conceivable to create a basic animation in the basic recording, then create a new recording and set additional keyframes there to further refine the animation. As recordings can also be grouped hierarchically and take on the properties of the higher-level recording in each case, step-by-step refinements of an animation can be realised in this way.
If changes to the animation prove to be a mistake, it is then possible to revert to a higher-level recording at any time in order to restore the old states of the animation. This is also ideal when it comes to adding secondary animations and you find working with animation layers too cumbersome. The project does not become uncontrollably bloated with additional recordings, as each recording only has to remember changes to the base recording or the parent recording. These data packages are often so small that there is hardly any difference compared to the original scene with just one recording. Not to mention the difference to the memory requirements of earlier methods, where a complete scene was always saved again in order to create variations.
However, even this path is not closed, as each recording can also be converted back into a complete scene, opened separately and saved directly. Even the loading of projects has been considered, as a new dialogue asks us in this case how to proceed with the existing recordings in the loaded scene and to which recording of the currently open scene they should be added.
You can find out more about Cinema 4D in “Cinema 4D – Deep Dive >> Camera Tracking, Calibration & Projection Man” by 3D & VFX trainer Helge Maus. This is a ten-hour video training course on motion tracking, camera calibration and projection man in Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. You can find more information about this online training and the DVD version here: http://www.pixeltrain.de/de/dvd-cinema-4d-motion-tracker
Maxon will be back at this year’s animago and will sponsor the new category “Best Motion Design”.
All further information about Maxon can be found at: www.maxon.net
