Overview

Learn how to create a simulated claymation-style animation in Cinema 4D. Master the techniques for achieving a realistic clay look, including setting the correct frame rate, hand-animating key frames, and applying appropriate textures. Follow along as the instructor demonstrates creating a simple animation of a clay ball dropping and splitting into two balls. Discover the key elements that give stop-motion animation its distinctive appearance and how to replicate them in 3D software. Gain insights into lighting setups, rendering options, and custom plugins for seamless backgrounds. By the end of this tutorial, acquire the skills to texture and animate clay-like objects directly in Cinema 4D, opening up new creative possibilities for your 3D projects.

Syllabus

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for School of Motion. And in this lesson, we'll be creating a very cool Claymation look in cinema 40. I originally started messing around with this look to help out my good buddy Kyle pred key for a project that he was working on. He needed to achieve a Claymation look for some characters, and this is what we came up with. And now I'm going to pass along what we learned about creating this look to you. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to texture and animate something that looks like clay right out of cinema 40. Pretty cool. Right. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on this site. And now let's jump in.
Joey Korenman : So here we are, I have a cinema scene set up, um, and I don't want to walk you guys through the whole process because it would take too long. I just kind of want to show you guys the Claymation part of it. Um, but just to show you guys, what's in the scene, I have a camera, um, I'm using the physical renderer for this scene, um, because I want it to feel realistic and I want to have global illumination and ambient inclusion and depth of field and things like that. And the physical render is much, much faster at those things than the standard renderer. Um, also in the scene, I have a lighting set up. These are, uh, these are just Omni lights with, um, area shadows. And I kind of have a three point lighting set up here. Um, and then this guy, uh, that says psych, this is actually a plugin that I have developed, um, to make seamless backgrounds, um, which is something that we have to do constantly at toil and, um, you know, there's many ways to do it, but what I did was sort of create a rig to, to give you tons of options.
Joey Korenman : Um, so you can pick color, you can add gradients, you can, uh, have you have a lot of options with the way the floor looks. Um, if you look over here, if I do a quick render, you'll see, I have a pretty standard white psych environment. The lights are reflecting onto it, and I've kind of put this noisy texture on it, just to kind of give it like a little bit of a dirty look. Um, but there's a million options with psych and I will be releasing it shortly. Um, so watch out for that. Um, so anyways, so let's get started with the Claymation looks. So what I want to do is create a really simple animation, um, where maybe, you know, we have a ball and it sort of drops into frame and splits into two more balls and it looks kind of like clay.
Joey Korenman : Um, so there's a few keys to the Claymation look and it doesn't have to just be Claymation. It could just be any kind of stop motion. Um, but after having done a few stop motion projects, uh, it's clear to me that there's a few things that specifically give stop motion that look. So one of the things is animating at a slower frame rate than normally do. Um, normally we work at 24 frames, a second or 30 frames a second, or if you're, um, you know, in Europe or somewhere else, it might be 25 frames, a second for stop motion. We use 12 frames a second. So half the number. Um, so I'm going to set my, uh, I'm going to hit command D and I'm going to set the frames per second 12. Then I'm going to go to my render settings and I'm going to set the frame rates 12 here as well.
Joey Korenman : All right. So that's step one. Um, step two is, um, instead of animating everything using key frames, that cinema will automatically interpolate for you, which is going to give you a really smooth motion. You're better off using a lot of key frames and trying to hand animate every single frame because in real stop motion, that's what you have to do. And unless you're Leica or some amazing stop motion artists, um, you're going to have a lot of little imperfections in your movement, and this is going to give it a handmade look that is kind of inherent in stop motion. Um, and then, uh, and then the last part is the texture, which I'll spend some time explaining. So why don't we just start out by making a sphere? All right. Um, and I'm just going to lift it up. So it's kinda resting on the floor.