Following the creation of my 3D assets I could begin to animate them within Cinema 4D.
As most scenes had already been created for my animatic, I could re-use them and focus on making the animations happening on screen as visually pleasing as possible.
To add a sense of dynamics and give the impression the 3D models were inhabiting and interacting correctly within their 3D environment I added a number of small details.
The first scene in need of this was when the vehicles entered to clear the trees. To give the trees a sense of realness, I wanted a trail of leaves to appear as the bulldozers pushed them away. To do this I added a cloner object to the back of every bulldozer and set its emit time to match when it starting pushing its first tree. I could adjust the variation in rate and direction at which they were emitted meaning every trail could be unique.
The next task was to create rope dynamics that would shown interaction between the watch parts and the vehicles that were delivering them. This was achieved by creating a spline and subdividing it to level 25. I could then add hair constraint tags to the points at either end of the spline and pin these to different objects (i.e. between the vehicle and the watch part). I could then add hair dynamics, giving the illusion of a wire.
Adjusting the hair dynamics, I could edit settings such as the wires rigidity or elasticity, depending on how I wanted it to look. To make this spline visible I needed to add it to a loft nurbs object and group it with a circular spline of 2cm radius.
Finally I wanted to design a way for the Vehicles to grow out of the watchmakers table. Rather than using plugin such as xbreaker or thrausi, I opted to make it using in-software methods. This involved slicing up a plane object using the knife tool, so that it resembled a cracked floor and disconnecting all of the polygon faces. I then added dynamic tags to all the individual elements so they could break upon collision with another object. This meant I could add a transparent cube with a dynamic tag to the top of every vehicle and the result was the illusion of it breaking through the plane object.
I could then add a cloth surface to the plane and bump it out so the plane became 3D, meaning it would also break into 3D chunks.
