CApruzzese

The standard C4D render... I know it's not popular but I like it and have learned to maximize well enough to save a lot of time tendering. I find playing with the lights can get me along way to a nice image in the standard render.

set pieces

Fortunato I wanted a large contrast between him and Montresor. hope it's not too large a contrast. Rigging was more straightforward with this one as his only "extra" feature is that his hat has dynamics added so the top parts will jiggle as he moves.

I have made headway, finally, on my new gothic horror animation - Edgar Allen Poe's Cask fo Amontilado. The sets are built for the most part and the characters designed. This one, Montresor is now rigged. I really wanted to have cloth simulated robes but I still can't get that to work without serious intersections of the meshes. I tried the C4D cloth and Particles cloth. I ended up on my old standby, surface deformer and a little jiggle deformer. Rigged with Cactus Dan's tools. I strayed from the character look I've had for the last 8 films and went with anthropomorphic animal characters. Fortunato will be a guinea pig. Montresor is based on plague doctors from the black plague era.

I have to agree.... there is something creepy about them and to think at the time we thought they were so cool and real looking!

I am using Affinity Publisher almost exclusively now. A client uses a 12 year version of Quark and insists I use that - please kill me. I started with an amiga program called "Pagestream" in the 80s which I think they still make somehow!

Animation nodes will be on my list of things to learn. I use Mograph quite a bit so I'll need to replace some of that functionality. I started 3D with something called Turbo Silver pro on the amiga in the 80s, then went to Lightwave and finally to C4D. I have a feeling I'll be missing programs to do things more and more as I get better in blender.. X particles is hard to beat and I love cactus dan's rigging tools.

I have been thinking of learning blender for 10 years and this is the farthest I have got, and it's not so bad now with the new interface. I can not afford C4D anymore and I will hold onto V19 for the next few years and learn Blender the meantime. I have over 80 plugins in c4d and I use most of them quite a bit. It's a huge investment and another reason I stopped upgrading. I am a big believer in doing the best you can with what you have. Blender being free makes it easier to just take my time and learn it until Cinema stops working one day. The studio I worked with for a TV show is also thinking of changing Blender, they don't want a subscription software and C4D is just too expensive for the upgrades they put out for them. I have been graphic design as well for over 30 years and know Quark (ugh), Indesign and now Affinity Publisher so learning another 3d program as a back up seems fine to me.

I will have to get used to the modifier keys in Blender, which was one of the reason I never learned it before to be honest. I am drag and drop kind of guy at heart. If I had money to invest and it looked like blender was about to be my main 3D software soon, I think e-cycles would be high on the list. You are so right about the add-on being overwhelming... its amazing and intimidating!

I tried both cpu and gpu. I also don't use C4D physical renderer much because it is just too slow for me as well. I am not going for realism as a rule so the standard render engine works really well for me and I know how to optimize it to get what I want. I didn't use the Denise setting but I bet you are right they would save a good amount of time. Cycles is, without a doubt a good render engine and a great deal. I sort of was thinking it is faster on C4d than in blender because Insydium does an amazing job on everything they work with. Seems like that might be right. Evee is perfectly good for a lot of things but pretty inaccurate as final render, but accuracy isn't always the thing you are looking for in every project.

I finally put some time into Blender to see how the new version stacks up to C4D on a small test animation. I made everything in blender but did do a pass with some motion blur in After Effects as well. It was much easier than before to learn but that's not saying it's easy... just better than before. I have 20+ years in Cinema so it's not going to be easy to figure out by comparison. I did get something accomplished though and that's something. Cycles is pretty slow! I'll be using C4D and my 80+ plugins for it in the near future for most things but there is potential with Blender. My blog post on the subject

My one beef with xparticles is the explosia tags etc. I like how they work with everything it's the rendering part. I end u using tubulence fd for all my smoke and fire as it redners super fast and anyting with explosia takes so long i give up on it!

They also released a video on presets and some other stuff last week. I did the maintenence agreement, against my better judgement, I would rather just do upgrades when i need them but at least it looks like I'll be getting some thing interesting for the money.

Great job! This show has amazing affects. My spouse is not a sci-fi fan at all but saw teh start of one episode and just said... "this is TV show? How can it look so good?" Gettign all the detail in your model can not have been easy.

C4D does have Pyrocluster, which works off of thinking particles. So you can do something of what you want with it. I remmeber when it came out it seemed pretty amazing but it's prtty awful expecially compared to the plugins we have now.

good job! You really had to plan to keep the eyes from passin in front of background objects I bet!

A lot of this poem is more stylized speech or usng symbolic or somewhat obscure words for effect. I dont think many people used quaf instead of the word drink and nepenthe was just as obsure i think. It is a poem and not a story so he has more leeway with language i think. I read a lot of stuff from the early 1700s on so its more familiar sounding to me i bet. Thanks again for the kind words. I was pretty aprehensive about doing such a well known and well loved piece. Keeping it intestesting in such a limited setting was a big challenge.

I think I am done! 4-5 solid months of work. This time I added both English and French subitles. https://youtu.be/W9KWKgqZvb8 Mostly Cinema 4D basic stuff used, but I did use Xparticles for the snow and embers. I made the spectre effects by rendering the woman seperately, using buffer objects to make sure her image was blocked by anything in front of her and added her in After Effects. I kept with my sort of stop motion look I use for all these gothic horror tales. I had issues with the cartoon character object Everfresh made, I think it's just too flexible for these sort of solid characters and will likely go back to Cactus Dan's toools no they are aviable again for less cartoon-y moving characters. At nine minutes it's double my usual short length. Editing in Final Cut X had become so easy and fast lately and it made adding the subtitles super simple. Keeping it interesting was not easy, it's just a guy yelling a bird in a room for most of it and i didn't want to go all abstract and pyschdelic as I had seen in other versions. I hope people like it, it was a lot of work and I think it's one of my better efforts.

I got one those we will expose your secrets big and small emails... 48 hours to pay something in bitcoin or else! I almost reponded just ask what my secrets big and small were - becuase i can't think of any and I would love to know what they are.

Shall be lifted.... working on the last shot, 50 shots in total over 9 minutes. In this one I want the man to be in the heart of the bird's shadow. I have a buffer object on the raven so I cna play with it's colour and visibility in after effects later. I am also going to try the camera slowly spining over the scene until to fades to black. After this I have to go back over the previous shots. I've been doign that all along but there is one more recent shot I am still not happy with. Then final corrections and add english and french subtitles which I haven't done before but the latest Final Cut X seems to make that easy enough to do.

Is there such a thing as mesh envy? I think I have it.

More and more I think the blue light on the raven was good idea.

A little more progress. Keeping the raven itself in shadows mostly. Partly becuase it's a good way to hide minorprblems with the fethers when the wings are folded, most more becuase I think it's more mysterious that way.

Moving ahead despite the holidays. "Perched above my chamber door." A little over 3 minutes into my 9 minute animation. The raven has finally showed up and next shot it is on the bust over the doorway where it says for the next 6 minutes. I lit in in a blue light, like comics do when they want to show black but not make everything too dark to see.

Many adaptions have it raining, but since it "was the bleak December" snow was more likely I thought. The snow is a bit of an issue with the shadows it casts from the hard shadow light source outside. Unless you see the snow in the window I turn it off so avoid it looking like there are bugs are something running over everything. I am at the point where he will open the window and let the raven in and I think a blast of snow will look more dramatic. I also forgot to turn off volumetric lighting my last render when it wasn't needed and it rushed the render time to 17 hours for a 16 second clip! I started it before bed and it was still going at lunch the next day!