This is what I do to Root Beer floats! (Taken with instagram)
Flip-Stylin’
A game that we are doing this weekend.
Next Gen Night of Worship
Normalcy in the life of Student Ministry (Taken with instagram)
Driving (Taken with Instagram at Bardstown Rd. & 265 Off Ramp)
Another Nifty Checkbox
I have ran into a problem before, but have avoided trying to find a fix until this week. Let’s say that you have a complex image with alpha that you want as a layer in Cinema 4D. This image may come from Photoshop and has a rough, maybe partially transparent areas that would take forever (forever = more than your client can afford) to re-model in Cinema and may not look right.
In the Cinema 4D Material options, you can set the color to take the image as a texture, and set the alpha to use that same image texture, and this works great. In all of my previews, everything works fine. Except when you turn on Ambient Occlusion. Ambient Occlusion is when objects in a scene are close together, they will take on minor amounts of color from each other, as well as taking light data from each other. For example, if you have a sphere and a cube that are touching, the area around where they touch will have some shadow areas, making it look more realistic.
Here inlies the problem: With the default settings of Ambient Occlusion, objects with transparent alpha will still be clear, but will project shadows as if they weren’t. That isn’t right at all. Then I found this check box:
Whallah! By clicking this, Cinema will now evaluate the transparency.
The Speed of Creativity
Picture the scene.
Christmas Vacation in Iowa. No WiFi.
We’re driving back to Kentucky. By we, I mean my wife is driving, letting me “work”. (I say “work” and not work, because sometimes it feels like what I do is play around.)
We’re somewhere in the middle of Illinois. I get the idea staring through the window.
I find my iPhone. Go to Camera. Switch to video.
I set the phone on the dashboard and hit record.
Wait.
Hit stop. Plug the phone into my MacBook Pro.
Import into After Effects. Apply some filters. Magic Bullet. Loop it.
Within mere minutes, I have created a loop that, in my opinion, looks awesome. I don’t know how it will be used, but here is the thing: I was moving at the speed of my creativity!
Usually, at least for me, creativity is much faster than my workflow. I can come up with an idea, a visual, and it takes me hours, days, sometimes weeks to have that idea become finalized. In the past, I would have to lug a camera, get back home to some huge G3, capture the footage, edit, apply effects, etc. You know. But, I got to catch a glimpse of the elusive future, where one thinks of something, and moments later it is done.
Understand, that with this comes responsibility. Not everything that gets created “instantly” is a piece of art. Who knows if that video I made in the Jeep will ever see the light of day. But I created it to hone my skills, to make something, to worship the God who gave me these abilities. And it didn’t take an hour to render!
You are not the customers, you are the servants
This is where I am right now
