Using the Cinema 4D Inheritance Effector Part 03: Make Particles Swarm Along Splines w/ Mograph

The Inheritance Effector is probably one of the most underrated and underutilized effectors in the effector menu.  In part three of my Inheritance Effector tutorial, I show you how you can fake particle or object movement that follows or swarms along a spline path that would normally only be able to be achieved with an Emitter or Thinking Particles and Xpresso.  Using a combination of the Inheritance & Spline Effectors along with other Mograph Effectors, you can achieve close to the same effect as the Emitter or Thinking Particles as a simpler alternative in your normal workflow without having to touch Xpresso.  Specifically, this tutorial demonstrates the powerful combination of using the Spline Effector with the Inheritance Effector to achieve a “swarming” effect.  As in Part 2 of this series, you can also add a Dynamic Tag to the Cloner Object to make sure your clones don’t intersect one another with this technique.

Here is a sample video where I utilized this technique to make a swarm of butterflies each land onto their own individual flowers:

Inheritance Effector Tutorial: Part 1

Inheritance Effector Tutorial: Part 2

Using the Cinema 4D Inheritance Effector Part 02: Faking Thinking Particles with Mograph

The Inheritance Effector is probably one of the most underrated and underutilized effectors in the effector menu.  In part two of my Inheritance Effector tutorial, I show you how you can fake particle movement that would normally only be able to be achieved with an Emitter or Thinking Particles and Xpresso.  Using a combination of the Inheritance Effector and other Mograph Effectors and Deformers, you can achieve close to the same effect as an Emitter or Thinking Particles as a simpler alternative in your normal workflow without having to touch Xpresso.

Here is a spot where I utilized this technique:

Inheritance Effector Tutorial: Part 1

After Effects Preset: Bacteria

This is a Trapcode Particular 2.0  preset that creates a field of bacteria particles floating about that is compatible with After Effects CS5 & above. I used this in a previous project to make some text form from a group of bacteria. Have fun playing with germs!

Download “Bacteria” Preset

Using the Cinema 4D Inheritance Effector Part 01: Trigger or Offset Keyframed Cloned Objects

The Inheritance Effector is probably one of the most underrated and underutilized effectors in the effector menu.  In part one of my Inheritance Effector tutorial, I show you how you can trigger or offset keyframed animation applied to an object that you cloned and offsetting the animation with falloffs.  This is just touching the very surface of what this effector can do!

Have you used the Inheritance Effector before?  If so, what for and how have you used it?

Inheritance Effector Part 2

Inheritance Effector Part 3

Adding Center Crosshairs in Cinema 4D Viewport

Ever been wanting center crosshairs in your Cinema 4D viewport like you have in After Effects? Having that center crosshair is a huge help when making sure your composition is centered.  Watch my quick tip tutorial to see my simple solution.

Download the Crosshairs Photoshop file

[UPDATE:  Maxon saw my tutorial and actually created a plug-in that adds a crosshairs to your viewport, but you can only get it unless you're a member of Cineversity.  You can find it here.]

Continuous Animation Without Keyframes in After Effects & Cinema 4D


Save time & keyframes!  In this tutorial, I’ll show you a few ways to achieve continuous, keyframe-less animations inside of After Effects and then Cinema 4D using expressions, Mograph Deformers, and Xpresso.

Showreel 2012


Finally got around to putting out my 2012 (more like 2011) reel. This is a collection of what I’ve been hard at work on over the past year or so. I’ve got to say in 2011 I learned a lot, worked on some of the coolest projects yet, and met a ton of very cool people in the industry, and 2012 is looking to be even better year! I appreciate all of you who have visited my newly update blog over the past few months and I hope you’ll stay tuned in the coming weeks and months. I plan on putting out some Cinema 4D tutorials and some more free stuff! Here’s to 2012! Keep on learnin and hustlin!

DC Animators Meetup: Cinema 4D Workflow Tips (AKA If You’re Still Using Zaxwerks, You Should Punch Yourself in the Face)

Here’s a presentation my buddy, @daveglanz (www.daveglanzproductions.com) and I gave at the DC Animators meetup in October.  We walk through some recent projects we completed and showed our workflow and some hopefully useful techniques.

Flexing the arm particles

Client: Premier Health
Producer: Flux71

Here’s an ad I worked on with Flux71 studios for a health care provider.  I used a combination of mograph effectors & modynamics to create the particles, not thinking particles.  Nice thing about cloners is when you add the dynamics tag to it, it works nicely with all the wind/turbulence/etc effectors that you normally use for thinking particles.  When I rendered everything out of C4D, I brought it into AE and had to reverse the animation.  The way the dynamics works, I could only have the particles on the arm fall and move towards the iPad object, not the other way around.

Give the Gift of Joy & Salvation Army Bells

Client: Salvation Army
Agency: BrownBag DC

It’s that time of the season again: HOLIDAY ANIMATIONS! I got to have a bit of fun with this commercial for Salvation Army. No character rigging or anything, didn’t quite have the time to get everything completely rigged, and with the simple walk cycle, it was easy enough to just fake it. Always fun to work on something for a great cause. I encourage all of you to donate something to a charity this Christmas and do like the ad says!

For this second ad, I just did a simple cloner object move, really tried to get the bell reflections down.  Simple, but hopefully still sends across the message.