I’m back with yet another way to create a 2D effect in 3D fast and easy using Cinema 4D! In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to recreate the popular cel animation style paint stroke/splash effect you see in a lot of 2D animations using Cinema 4D without third party plug-ins. The workflow I’ll demonstrate is super flexible and applicable to achieving a bunch of different cool 2D paint stroke looks for revealing an object, writing on text, or painting on screen. BONUS: Paint live by combining this tutorial with my tutorial on realtime animation using Cappuccino.
And here’s a scene file demonstrating the technique that you guys can mess around with:
DOWNLOAD CINEMA 4D SCENE FILE
Here’s one of my previous tutorials that shows you how to create the 2D illustrative materials using the Cel Shader that I’m using for the paint strokes in this tutorial: Using the Cel Shader to Apply an Illustrative 2D Style to 3D Objects in C4D.
Here’s another tutorial I mentioned in this video on using uniform mode on splines to have objects follow in sync along a spline.
In addition to this paint stroke style, be sure to check out Matteo Forghieri’s C4DAPT Challenge winning entry (vimeo.com/112196771) for a really genius method on how to create a different type of streak that is produced from an actual object!
And if you want to learn more about how to use Cinema 4D in your 2D workflow, check out my Mixing 2D & 3D with Cinema 4D & After Effects Lynda.com course where I go over some creative ways to use the tools in C4D for a mainly 2D workflow inside of After Effects.
Nice effect… I think the “real” logo might come too fast at the end. It almost feels like a fade.. other than that, it looks awesome!
thanks bud! yeah it could have been a bit cleaner transition in After Effects
Great stuff! I love your work! But mine does not render in picture viewer :( please help.
Thanks Remco!
What isn’t rendereing? The metaball or splines? Did you make sure your hierarchy is correct and that metaball is enabled?
The metaball but only when i render a single frame when i do render all frame it works… Tested with your scene also. Thanks for reply
Ah I see what your issue is. Notice in my tutorial to render a frame I had to hit play in the timeline for the streaks to appear, you need the metaball sim to actually play through that way to make it visible on whatever frame you want to render. So if you want to render frame 30, you have to play the simulation into frame 30 and hit render.
Additionally you can “bake” the sim by saving the file out as an Alembic file and opening that Alembic file in C4D.
Hope that makes sense!
wonderful ! Learned a lot this year and will surely embrace this one. ! Here’s my 13 secs 2015. I’m not there yet, but well on the way. http://youtu.be/JkVVpcTM9Cg
Is there a way to somehow bake this for faster playback? I tried mograph bake and it did not work. -Thanks!
Mograph cache tags only caches mograph animation so that wouldn’t work. But there is another option! you can bake it by saving out the PLA as a Alembic file and then importing that Alembic file. The PLA will be all baked and uneditable but it will playback fast!
Thanks EJ, I will try that out soon!
Hey I am a german student and I love this animation and it would be perfect for my project. But I wonder how you get the path on which the sphere is animated on. I tried it with a simple spline but it didn’t work. Maybe if you have a tutorial for that, could you please post it ? I would be sooo grateful! Thanks. Btw your logo is just awesome! :)
It’s by using an align to spline tag is all. Create your spline and then apply the Align to Spling on whatever object you need and then drop that Spline into the Spline field on the Align to Spline tag. Hope that helps!
thanks :) yeah, it helped !
This is really awesome, EJ!
But I wonder if this workflow would turn out good with a non 2D shader. What are your thoughts?
No better way to find out than to try it out! :)
I`ve tried making a water trail, but the topology of the metaball just gets too much messy for the result to look good. That means it doesn`t work D:
Hi EJ, How did you add that slight movement to your eyedesyn cursive on 26:36? Kind of reminds me of stop motion.
I’m having a tough time with this, given it doesn’t even start from the beginning.
this is so amazing. i am new in cinema 4d and i know only the basics. how can i aply this style to any text. for example i have a title and i want to apply this style. is it posssible?
I’m actually having the same problem in R16: Nothing renders at the moment. As you can see, I’ve pushed play and I see the metaballs working as they should in the viewport, but nothing in picture viewer. Any ideas?
Great tutorial, thanks. I would really like to know how the logo resolve is done though.
hi Ej – can you tell me how you build up that pink emitter item?
many thanks!
Hi EJ: So the eyedesyn logo animation in the end is blended in AE with certain effects? From your c4d window i couldn’t see the transition from strokes to the final logo :)
Hey Cissy! This was all done in C4D for the most part, the only thing I did was render them in layers and perhaps retime them or color correct in AE but a majority of the work was all C4D!
Hi EJ! Awesome effect! Thanks for posting a tutorial for it!
I’ve been struggling to get the nice brush stroke shapes though, it seems no matter what I input for hull values/scale ect, all I get from the metaball on the tracer is a big ol’ blob and not the nice ‘paint effect’
Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!
For anybody else who has a hard time with giant blobby metaballs, remove the tracer objects from under the Metaball’s heir-achy, and adjust the metaballs’ scale.
Then dumb the tracers back in- wash rinse repeate till you have the beginnings of a sexy brush stroke!
Hope this helps somebody out :D
Thanks for the tip! You could also turn off the Tracers as well by clicking the green checkmark and that will deactivate it! :)
My final render not same viewport, can you do the tutorial about that.
I live same problem, i think..its about render.
Final render isnt same with preview
I’m stock in the giant metaballs effect… could you please explain me a bit more detailed how you’ve solved that? You’ll help me to get a lot of frustation out xD thanks!!!!!!!!
This was a long time ago, but make sure your “editor” and “render” settings are the same in your metaball
Very important and thanks for calling that out, Anthony!
Hey EJ!
I came across this tutorial and am following along as I apply this stroke effect to my current project. I’m having a hell of a time trying to figure out why I can’t reduce the size of my metaball streaks. They’re huuuge. I have a feeling that it might have to do with the fact that I’m not trying to let the emitter die, but actually last throughout the entire animation, like a handwriting stroke. Can you help me out with that?
Sounds like the issue is too many emitters emitting and therefore creating too many objects for the metaball so it will always be thick. Less object/particles, the smaller you can make the metaball. Good luck!
I can’t find out how to make smaller the meatballs or know how to reduce the object/particles…
I don’t know how to make less object/particles the metaball still big
Metaballs get bigger because of there being more particles, if you wanted less particles, you’d need to make bigger sphere particles. I don’t understand why you would want less particles if you’d want a bigger stroke as you need more particles to get bigger strokes.
hello, is there a way to output line styles ? the export to ai only output basic line style and thickness, but nothing fancy calligraphy style lines, any ideas??
Variable strokes won’t output as there’s no information sharing like that currently in any exports unfortunately! best bet is to just lay out the basic look in C4D and then create the variable thickness in AI
I have been struggling with learning C4D for a few years now and I just wanted to say that your tutorials give me inspiration and hope that I can one day fully wrap my head around this as well as After Effects. Thanks for sharing all of your knowledge with the world in a clear, concise, fun, and USEFUL way. :)
aw thanks so much nicole! really appreciate the kind comment! it’s so great to hear that you’re gaining more confidence in learning c4D! you should check out School of Motion for some great fundamentally based classes on AE and C4D!