Hey guys, today we're going to have a look at some workflow techniques between Cinema 4D and After Effects. As an example, I made this phone animation. For those who only need a telephone animation, I made this little template that you can find on my Gumroad page. I

also made a second one with a tablet. So we're going to first animate the phone using MoGraph, then we're going to prepare the animation so we can use it in After Effects, and we're going to set the exports from Redshift so we can get different passes

to be used in After Effects. So we're going to switch to Cinema 4D. So first I got a phone from the GrabCAD website. Here we got the glass window. I just applied to Redshift materials. This one is just a basic material, and I used a plastic

preset with a dark gray as a diffuse color. And for the second one, I simply used the glass preset from the Redshift material. I applied the dark material to the whole device and the glass material only on the glass panel. So for the animation, I'm going to start by making a

new camera. I'm going to pick the standard one. I'm going to hit Shift + C and just type "Reset Transform". You could use the shortcut Alt + 0 as well. So I'm going to set up a position for the camera, and on frame zero, I'm going to add a keyframe on

the position and rotation. So this way, you're going to avoid messing up the camera position. I'm going to select the phone using Alt. I'm going to make this a child of a Cloner. I want the Cloner to be linear. I only need one clone here. I'm just going to rotate the phone

maybe the camera is a little far so I'm gonna move it in a little bit and on frame zero I'm gonna update the keyframe so I'm gonna select the cloner and I'm gonna add in an inheritance effector so here if I check in the effectors we see

the inheritance I'm gonna move down the cloner out of the frame I'm gonna create a null and call it target position cloner I want the shape to be allocator it's gonna show up as a cross in the inheritance effector we're gonna go to the effector

tab and we're gonna drag in the null object so now the phone is gonna snap to the null object so I'm gonna move the null object and position it like that for example by deactivating the effector the phone goes back to its original position and

when the effector is on the phone is going to move back to the null position I'm gonna hide the camera and I'm gonna switch to my camera view so we're gonna add a delay to the cloner I'm gonna move it down so when I hit play now

and if I activate or deactivate the inheritance tag the earphone is gonna move a little smoother so we're gonna start animating that so to have more control I'm gonna add a linear field switch to my front view I select the linear field and I want this to be one

centimeter I just deactivate the delay so when I now move my linear field it's gonna animate the position of the phone so at the starting of my animation I'm gonna just add a keyframe on X by hitting the GK I'm gonna move forward

One frame, I'm going to move the linear field on the other side and I'm going to add a keyframe. I go back to my camera view and activate the delay effector. This is what we get. We may tweak this a little bit. The delay effect is at 50 for now. I can

increase to 90 percent. If I now hit play, I find this a little slow, so I'm going to go back to 80. So this is what we get. I would like it to rotate a little more. I just select the cloner and I'm going to rotate this

180 degrees. So now we got this extra rotation. So once the phone is in place, I would like it to continue rotating. So with the cloner selected, I'm going to add a time effector and I would like to change the axis of the rotation. I would like to rotate it

according to the effector. So this is what I want. Maybe it's a little quick, so I'm going to set the rotation to 20 degrees. So we have the phone coming in and then it continues to rotate. Here we're going to make it disappear again and select the linear field.

I'm adding a keyframe. If I do that like in the beginning and I just move forward one frame and move the linear field, it's going to be a little quick. We could have animated the enabled instead, but animating the position will allow us to offset the second keyframe. We're

going to have more control over the animation. So now we're going to just organize a little bit. So I'm going to add a new null, call it 'mograph', and move everything in there. So to animate the content of the screen, we could do that in C4D, just importing

the content and use that as a texture, but it's going to be easier to do that in After Effects if the client would like, for example, to change the text this way we can avoid re-rendering the 3D. So this is the animation, so when I hit play the telephone is

moving, but if I go back here it should go back down, but it doesn't. And this is because of the delay effector. So to make sure the animation behaves always like expected we're going to get in the tags, mograph tags, and mograph cache here. We're going to hit bake

and by doing that we're going to be able to scroll in the timeline and the animation will always behave the same. So as we have cached out the animation we can deactivate the effectors, the animation will be taken care of by this tag. Now we're going to add some lights. I'm

going to start off by adding a dome light. I'm going to go to Redshift, Redshift render view, and I'm going to hit the render button. So this is what it looks like. I'm going to reduce the intensity and I don't want it to show in the background.

I'm going to add a new area light to add more reflections to the object. If I get out of my camera view, we're going to see that the light is cutting through the object. So this gives us some strange reflections. So I'm just going to move it

and adjust its size. I'm going to deactivate the dome light, go back to my camera view, and we're going to start placing those lights. So for this first light, I'm going to use it to have a reflection coming from the back, a sort of backlight like that. So this is to have just this little

Reflection going on here I find this to be a little strong I'm gonna set this to 10 I'm gonna reactivate the dome light and copy my area light I'm gonna enable it and I'm gonna move it in front of the phone

So when it's rotating I want the reflection to go through so I'm gonna move the light here and maybe rotate it when the phone rotates we're gonna have this little light sweep I'm gonna add a third light I would like another light sweep sooner in the animation

So I'm gonna just move it to the left and and this is gonna give us another reflection so maybe the lights are still too strong I'm gonna keep the backlight to 10 this one is really strong so I'm gonna set it to one and for this one we're

gonna set it to one as well I'm gonna add a new null that I call the lights using shift I gonna select all the lights and I'm gonna move them in the null We could also use a texture for the dome light but here I'm not gonna do that

I'm gonna set the resolution here I want 25 fps I just gonna check if my project settings are right it's ending at frame 100 I'm gonna set the end frame to be 100 as well I change the range to all frames so from 0 to 100

I'm going to hide the lights in the viewport so here I'm going to add a new null that's the phone position I'm gonna set the shape to cube and I'm gonna reduce this size for now It doesn't follow so if we want this to

follow the phone I'm gonna go to program animation tags and add an espresso tag so we're gonna import the null and the cloner we're gonna need a data node we're gonna get the object here and we're gonna connect that to the object of the data

node the data node has an index here which by default is zero so the index is going to be the clone number inside the cloner for index 0 it's going to be the first clone here we just have one so this is what we need

here we're going to get the global matrix and we're going to connect that to the global matrix of the null and this way the null is gonna align to the phone so when I hit play the null is following the phone but we still have a

little issue here I'm gonna pause the animation when I get back to zero the phone is moving but not the null this is simply because the cloner is a generator so to correct that we can just select the espresso tag go to priority and set

it to generator so if I pause the animation and go back to frame 0 this time it's gonna work here the null is in the center of the object so we're gonna add a plane as a child we're gonna orient it to x plus

I'm gonna reduce it so it's approximately the size of the phone and this way we're gonna be able to place it where we need just gonna move it right below the glass so this is just gonna be for reference I'm gonna make a new null

and this is gonna be the screen position so we're gonna go to tags and add a constraint we're going to choose transform and we're going to drag in the plane so this screen position is really in the same place as the plane we still can move the plane if we want and this

position is what we want to use in After Effects I just deactivate the plane the screen position I want this to be a cube as well I'm gonna make this two centimeters so here we still have the same issue with the constraint we're gonna have to change the priority to

generators so like this we won't be able to get the position in After Effects so we're going to go to render tags external compositing and we want to make a solid so if I now save that and I import that in After Effects

we're going to have the same settings that we set up in the render I'm gonna drag and drop that in a new comp so here we get the C4D animation we just have a little issue here when I saved I forgot to get back to my camera

view so if I now save it again and go back in After Effects it's going to update and the phone is in the right place if I select the C4D file and go to the effects we're going to have this newer plugin here we're going to hit extract and

we're gonna get the screen position and the camera we are still missing something you can see that the solid is not animated I'm gonna just reduce its size I'm gonna set this to 10 by 10 and if we want to get this animation in

after effects we're gonna need some keyframes so at frame 0 I'm going to select the objects I want keyframes on position and rotation so I'm going to right click animation show track so we get the timeline with the keyframes so with the keyframe

selected we're going to go to function back objects and we're going to bake this from 0 to 100 hit ok so this is going to make a copy so if I select the first we're going to get those keyframes and the second one is going to have

keyframes for the whole animation so I save that out in after effects I'm gonna remove those I select the c4d file and I'm gonna extract again the first solid here we're gonna delete it it's the one without keyframes and this one has all the

keyframes so if I now scroll in the timeline it's gonna follow the phone as expected so this is just gonna help us animate this screen it's not oriented well that's not an issue we're gonna be able to use it anyway I hide it and I create a new solid

so right click create a new solid so this one is going to be 1080 by 1920 let's say it's the screen resolution I make this a 3D layer by clicking on this little cube if you don't see it you can click the

option modes which will give us access to different options so I hit P to get the position and then shift R I get the rotation and shift S we're gonna have this scale so we want to parent that new solid to the screen position so I'm

gonna reset the position I'm gonna reset the orientations as well so now it should be aligned to the screen position I'm going to reduce the scale here we're going to have to change some settings to align this correctly so remember the solid is 10 by 10 so if

we want this to be centered the position should be five by five so now the white solid is gonna follow the red one I'm gonna hide this we're just gonna correct the orientation so I'm gonna set this to 90 and this one to 90 as well

I'm gonna reduce the scale some more 0.5 is not too bad it doesn't matter if we are a little bigger than the screen so like this we can have a solid that's following the C4D animation what's interesting with that

is now we could pre-compose the solid we're gonna call that screen I'm just gonna lock this panel and add a new one I'm gonna click on screen in the right side we're gonna be able to edit the content of the screen here we can really

add what we want I'm gonna add some color to the background I'm gonna add some text here we can see that the screen is not rotated right I'm going to hit R and I'm going to correct the Y rotation I'm going to set this to 180.

so now we're going to have the text following the animation so now we're going to render that out from C4D using Redshift I'm gonna go to the render settings and start the previews so we're gonna export the phone with an alpha channel to be able to

change the background in After Effects, we're gonna need the reflection pass and we're gonna need a mask for the screen. So we're gonna uncheck the first save here and we're gonna go to Multipass. I'll set the path for export and we wanna export OpenEXR files. We

want a depth of 32 bits, we're gonna add an alpha channel, and we're gonna need a multi-layer file in Redshift. We're gonna go to Advanced, we're gonna select the AOV tab. The AOVs are the passes we're gonna

click on through AOV manager, we're gonna drag in the beauty. We're gonna need the refraction, which is what we have here on the glass, and what we're gonna need is something to mask out the screen in After Effects. So to do that, we're gonna have to go

inside the object, I'm gonna deactivate the cloner. I'm gonna hide the glass inside the phone. I got this object that I made, which is the part that we're gonna mask out. So to create that mask, we're gonna go to Tags, Redshift Tags, and Redshift Object in the

object ID tab. I'm gonna click Override, I'm gonna set the object ID to one. I'm gonna activate the cloner again, fold everything, and go back to my camera view here. We're gonna get the puzzle map. I'm gonna select it, and here I want the

object ID. We could have different object IDs if we need. So this is one, it's gonna be the screen. We could also have the camera, which is this little part. So by adding the Redshift tag, I could set the object ID to two and maybe a global object ID set to

three, so the red ID is one, green will be two, and the blue is going to be object ID three. So, we won't see the puzzle map when clicking here. We're going to have to make a real render using this button here. You can see the different IDs we've

set up, so the camera here is green, the screen and the whole object, and this will be really easy to get in After Effects. So, I made three ideas here, but we're going to just use the screen to do that. We could have used Cryptomatte as well. It's going to

assign different IDs depending on the name or the material and so on. So, as it's quite simple, we're going to stick with the puzzle mat. I'm going to activate the cloner again here. We don't need the global illumination, so I turn it off this way.

We're going to have quicker renders. All right, so I'm just going to render that out and I'll see you in After Effects. So, here I imported the EXR files. I import that in my comp. So, if I solo this, we're going to be able to see the transparency. Then, I'm going to look for the

Extractor effect, and I'm going to apply this here. We're going to be able to access the different passes. So, here we got the beauty. This is the raw render of the image. Then, we got the puzzle mat, which is the different masks, and finally, we got the refraction

and we're going to be able to choose that from the layers. So, we're going to start off with the beauty. I'm going to unsolve everything. We don't need the C4D file anymore, so I'm just going to hide it. We just use that to import

the camera and the position I'm just gonna select those layers and set them to show layers when I click here they disappear but they are still there so it's just to have a cleaner timeline I'm gonna move the phone below I'm gonna make a new solid

I set the resolution this one is gonna be the background and so what's interesting here is we can really set the background to whatever we like so this is quite convenient we could add a simple ramp here so as the EXR is 32 bits we want the

project to be 32 bits as well so we could click here and change this in this panel change the depth in here we could also click here using alt we can just cycle through the different presets here on the ramp here we got some bending so to tackle that we could add a new

adjustment layer and add some green so this will help us break up the bending that's happening here we could make this more subtle next we want to mask out the screen using Ctrl+D I'm just gonna make a copy of the EXR file and in this one we're gonna select the

puzzle mat so we just need the red part we're gonna set the green to use the red channel and we're gonna do the same for the blue and so here we're just gonna keep the red part of the puzzle mat we're gonna use that to mask out this

screen I'm gonna click the options here and in the cache we're gonna use the luminance of the layer above we're gonna duplicate this once more and this time we're gonna need the refractions and we're gonna set this one to addition

so this will give us the reflections on the screen so we already have some reflections on the rest of the phone we may not want to add the reflections on this part so we could simply just reuse the mask we had before I'm gonna move it up

and here we're gonna use the cache and set it to luminance and so this way we're gonna be able to manage the reflection on the pre-comp separately from the rest of the object gonna set this to orange okay so I could duplicate these reflections

so now yeah you could just animate what you want in this pre-comp you won't be limited by what's happening in the 3D you can easily change things still in After Effects at the end something else that could be useful is the content of the screen

which is here we could also use the time remapping we could add a keyframe here delete the last one I'm copy pasting this a little later and then I'm copy pasting the first key when the phone disappears this way you're gonna be able to manage

the appearance and disappearance of the content directly alright I guess now you're going to add some phones in all of your upcoming videos thanks for watching and see you in the next one bye

[EN] Cinema 4D to After effect workflow using cineware and redshift AOV's

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