[flow_default] Transcription: 02 - Where's the Speed Graph.json

transcriptions/02 - Where's the Speed Graph.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "02 - Where's the Speed Graph.wav",
+  "text": "Hello there, Bass Camper, Joey here. And in this short video, I'm going to show you how to work around the fact that there is no speed graph inside of Cinema 4D. Some of the techniques I'm going to show you are things EJ is going to cover in much more depth a little bit later in the class. But I kind of wanted to give you a heads up because I'm sure that many, many students taking this class right now who have taken animation boot camp are wondering where's the speed graph because in After Effects there are two graphs and in Cinema 4D there's really only one. Alright, so let's hop in and take a look. So as I mentioned, if you've taken animation boot camp, you're probably wondering where the speed graph lives and this paper airplane may give you a little bit of PTSD causing a few flashbacks, I'm sure. So in After Effects, if you were going to animate something like a paper airplane where there's a really curvy kind of loopy motion path, well, you would place your keyframes all over your scene and you would sort of adjust the motion paths and do all that. But in Cinema 4D, there's actually a tool that makes that completely unnecessary and makes this process a lot easier. And what Cinema 4D allows you to do is draw splines and then have objects follow the motion path of that spline. So you can see here I just used the basic spline tools and I drew a path. I should note it's a full 3D path. It kind of swoops around like this. And all I need to do now is tell the airplane to follow that spline. So what I'm going to do is go to my airplane just so you're aware of how it's built in case you're curious. The airplane was built using very simple modeling tools like the ones you've learned, taking a plane and basically manipulating the vertices on it, putting it inside of a symmetry object so that I only had to model one half of the airplane, and then beveling the edges just a little bit with the bevel deformer. I then grouped everything in a null, and that is what I'm going to apply this next step to. And what I'm gonna do is right click, go to Cinema 4D Tags and apply the Align to Spline tag. And this is a very simple tag. All it does is it causes an object to follow a spline. So I need to tell the tag which spline to follow. So I'm gonna drag this spline here right into this little dialog box. And then if I zoom out a little bit and I start animating this position, let me zoom all the way out, I'm gonna hit H so I can see my full scene. If I scrub this, you can see that the plane follows the spline perfectly. And if I turn on this tangential option, then it will also turn and follow the spline. So just like I would in After Effects, probably a better thing to do here would be to add a new null object and to call this, I don't know, something like follow and to actually move the tag onto this null and then parent the airplane to that. That way, what I can do is animate this position, but then I still have total control over the airplane if I want it to bank and turn and do things like this. And so you can probably already see how this makes animating this a heck of a lot easier. By the way, I need to say again, EJ is gonna cover the Align to Spline tag a lot more in future lesson. But just to show you how easy this is, if I put a keyframe here on zero, and then just like we taught in Animation Bootcamp, basically go to the end and then animate to 100%. And then go back through the animation and put keyframes where the speed is going to change. So the airplane's kind of dropping, it's falling here, so it's gonna be accelerating probably until it gets to about here. So I'm gonna put another keyframe there, right? Then it's gonna slow down as it kind of gets to the top of this hill. So another keyframe there, and then it's gonna accelerate all the way to the end, okay? And then what I can do is just hit the tab key and on the align to spline position property, which is a one-dimensional property, all I need to do now is use my value graph to get the acceleration to work the way I want. And this works the exact same way as animation boot camp lessons in After Effects. So it's going to be already kind of moving, right? And then it's going to be accelerating all the way until it hits that key frame. All right? And I'm probably going to have to move these key frames a little close together, but let's just get the basic idea right first. Then between this key frame and this frame, it's actually going to be slowing down, right? If you remember in animation boot camp, steepness equals speed. So I'm going to flatten it out there, but not totally. I want it to almost come to a stop and then I want it to accelerate all the way to the end. Okay, then I'm gonna go back into keyframe mode. I'm gonna select all these keyframes and right now this animation is taking three seconds to happen, which is probably, that actually doesn't feel too bad. There you go. I'm gonna speed it up just a little bit and I'm not gonna complete this because I don't wanna waste your time, but you can see how without having to use any sort of speed graph, you've already been able to do something that in After Effects would have been a lot more difficult, okay? And we did it just using the Align to Spline tag, pretty simple. But what happens if you have something like this? So here we have a simple setup where there's a bunch of little cubes and this mouse just kind of animates between them, okay? And let's say that I wanted that mouse to do really hard eases that all felt exactly the same in terms of the ease influence. But the problem is that we've got a 3D motion path here. And if I look at the curves here, you can see that this mouse moves all over the place in X, Y, and Z. The values go up, they go down. And this is a perfect example of something in After Effects that'd be very difficult to, I guess, control the spacing for without the speed graph. Remember in After Effects, the speed graph controls every value at the same time in the same way. And so it'd be handy to have something like that in Cinema 4D. Before I go any further, I want to just point out how this motion path was built. EJ has already touched on this, but I want to reinforce it because it's a really important tool inside of Cinema 4D. So here's my mouse and you can see the motion path for it. And if I click on any of these keyframes, the properties for that keyframe pop up over here. And by default, this key preset is usually closed down like this. And if I open it up by clicking this teeny tiny little arrow here and I unclick auto tangents, now I'm actually able to adjust the tangents on that key frame. I generally also want to break the tangents and turn off, remove overshooting. All right, so there's three things. Turn off auto tangents, turn on break tangents, turn off, remove overshooting. What that does is it now gives me total control over the spatial interpolation of these keyframes. And sometimes I even need to go into my four up view so that I can really see, for example, if I want the mouse to kind of pull away a little bit from the squares before it moves to the next spot, it's a lot easier to see that in one of these views like this. Okay. Um, so I can come in here once I've, once I've, uh, set these properties correctly. And let me just do it one more time, turn off auto tangents, turn on break tangents, turn off, remove overshooting. And now I have total control over what the mouse does as it approaches and leaves every single position that I've set. Okay. Cool. So now I've got all of these keyframes. And if I at the curves for them you can see that they're really kind of kooky and all over the place It's gonna be tough to control all of these so here is the trick and I will say before I show you this trick Typically in Cinema 4d. I try to avoid doing this trick Because it's a little bit hacky, but it does actually work another way I could have animated this is by using that same align to spline tag. But sometimes using that tag as you'll see when, when EJ covers it, um, it's a, it's a little bit hard to get exactly precise. So sometimes you do want to animate this way just by setting keyframes. So here's what I'm going to do. Uh, first thing I'm going to do is create a new null object and I'm going to name it time. Okay. Next thing I need to do is drag the time null into my timeline. I should note that I am in animate layout mode, so that's why you can see my timeline down there. Just in case you don't see it on your screen, just go up and select the animate layout, and it should automatically set up very similar to the way you see my screen. And you can also hit Shift F3 to bring up the timeline if you have a different layout and you wanna keep it that way. All right. So I've dragged my time null object to the timeline and you can see that now the time object appears there. Now what I need to do is with the time null selected in the timeline, go to create and add a special track called a time track. These special tracks are basically key frameable things inside of cinema 4D that let you affect other tracks in various ways. So this time track right now it has a key frame on zero and a key frame on 90. And if I look at the graph for this, you can see that it's just a linear value curve. There's absolutely nothing happening. And it's literally going from zero to 100. And that is actually in percentage. It's basically saying start at zero% of the animation and animate all the way to 100%. The next thing we need to do is tell Cinema 4D which animation actually looks at that time track. And the animation that looks at it is the animation that's on the mouse layer. Now here's the problem. Now that I've dragged the time null to the timeline and I then click on my mouse, well my mouse keyframes don't pop up anymore on the timeline. The reason for that is because by default the timeline in Cinema 4D is in something called automatic mode. So if I go to view and I turn on automatic mode, what it's going to do then is it's going to try to figure out automatically which properties to show me on the timeline and it does that based on the settings that I have here in the View Show menu. So right now I have various settings turned on that are sort of default settings. But you can see that Show Animated is turned off. So if I enable that, it will only show me properties that have keyframes on them. Now since the time null didn't have any keyframes on it when I dragged it to the timeline, what happened was Cinema 4D turned off automatic mode. If automatic mode is off, then I can drag other things to the timeline and it will show them to me as long as I don't have show animated turned on. So I turned show animated off, the camera that I just dragged shows up there. If I go back to show animated and I turn automatic mode back on, it will show me everything in my scene that has keyframes, okay? EJ is gonna get into this more in one of the lessons, okay? So now, I need to tell the position keyframes, and I actually, I can delete these scale and rotation keyframes, I don't need them. I can take these position keyframes here on the mouse layer, and you'll notice that when I select them in the properties here, there is an option for a time track. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the time track that's attached to my time null and just drag it right in there. Okay. Peace cake. So now what happens is these position keyframes don't actually control the animation anymore. What controls it is the time track. Okay. And so what I need to do now is first, um, I need to go to, um, I need to go to the very last key frame on the time track and move it so it's aligned with the last key frame from the key frames that I set. And you'll see why in a minute. Then what I need to do, and if I just kind of scrub through this, you'll see the animation plays exactly the same way as before. Nothing's different. But now what I have is I have this one property that's controlling the entire animation, which is kind of like what the Speed Graph does. And so what I can do now is go through and add a key frame on the time track everywhere that there's a key frame on the position track. And I can do that by holding command and just clicking on the timeline. Okay, so now on the time track, I have key frames done that, I can actually move these things around. Right? And you can see that now it gets to that position faster and then goes to the next position. Okay? So you can actually adjust the timing of the animation really easily with a time track, but I'm more interested in the spacing. So what I'm going to do is go into the graph for the time track, select every single key frame and hit option E, which sets those key frames to default easy ease. Then I can hold the command key and just click one of them. And since they're all selected, it will ease them all the same way. All right. And if I don't want them to come to a complete stop, I can bend them all upwards a little bit like that. And now if I play this animation, you can see that I now have eases that all work the exact same way across my animation. And if I decide, for example, that I want to make this animation a little bit longer, let's say I change the length of this to 180, right? And then what I could do is decide, okay, well this is a really big move. So I want that move to take longer. So I can just adjust the time track here. I don't actually have to touch the position track and I can just move all these down a little bit. All right. And then between this key frame, this position and this one, well, that's quicker. So that one can, can stay where it is from here to here. That's a really big move. So why don't we scooch all those down? Right. And then from there to there, maybe add a little more time. And then finally, it just kind of moves off screen quickly. And I can always go back in to my time track, select all my key frames just like this, easy ease them, adjust them again. And they will all have the exact same easing profile. Okay. So this is a little bit of a strange way to do it, but as you can see, it works really well. It is pretty powerful and it's a good option to have in your back pocket if you're missing the speed graph. One last thing I want to show you is that although there is no speed graph in Cinema 4D, you can see something that looks like the speed graph. So if I go into my F-curve menu here and I say Show Velocity, you'll see now that we have a very faint visualization of the speed of our animation. You can turn this on on any track you want to. You don't have to just do it on the time track. You could also do it, for example, on position tracks. But you can see that it starts to get really messy and loopy and isn't that easy to use when you have multiple properties. When you're just focused on one property, it can be helpful if, for example, I want to match the speed of these two moves, right? I can pull the Bezier handles just on this ease. And I may actually have to break the handles here. the where it is f-curve, show velocity. And that's it. I hope these tips help you out when you're animating. I know that Cinema 4D is a little bit different than After Effects. And so if you're comfortable in After Effects, all those same animation principles apply, but things are called different names and there's a few different buttons you have to know about. That's it. And I'll see you later. I",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 1016.99
+}