Create a Clock Rig Using Xpresso in Cinema 4D

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Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey, here for school of motion in this lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the basics of espresso in cinema 4d espresso is a very powerful tool that may not be the easiest thing to wrap your brain around at first. But once you get in there and you start to understand how to hook everything up, you'll have a very powerful new skill at your disposal that you can use to unleash some real power in cinema 4d. 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 the site. Now let's hop into cinema 4d and get going. So this is the finished version of the rig that I'm going to post on my website. Um, and if we click on the clock, uh, I basically have all the parts of the clock under this Knoll here, and I have made some user data controls for the clock.
Joey Korenman : Um, and I'm going to show you guys how to do this in this tutorial. Um, but let's just see what the clock does. If I am going to make this a project, a thousand frames. So we have a little running time here and I'm just going to hit play and show you guys what happens. So the, uh, the second hand is ticking every second, it takes one more tick, uh, and you may barely be able to see that the minute hand is rotating slowly. Basically right now, this clock is running in real time. Uh, and there are no key frames here. This is all express. So, um, so if we click on the clock, we have some options here. Uh, we have the time multiplier, one equals real time. So right now this is set to one. This clock will literally keep time. If you, if you set it to the current time and you run cinema 4d for a long time, it will tell you the time.
Joey Korenman : Uh, so I can't imagine any scenario where you would actually want that in a motion graphics piece. So let's, let's make that 100. All right. And now let's hit play again, and now it's going a hundred times real time. So now you can see the, uh, the minute hand is actually moving pretty quickly and the, our hands even starting to move. Um, and I've actually added some options here to, uh, get rid of the jumpiness, the, the ticking of the second hand. So you could have it be a little bit smoother. Um, and then I've even added a control to get rid of the visibility of the minute hand. Sorry, I have the second hand, um, in case you really want to crank up the speed here, let's say you needed some sort of, you know, time-lapse clock. I mean, you could, you can crank this number up besides you want.
Joey Korenman : Um, and then there's some controls to set the starting hour, um, minute and seconds of the clock before it starts running. And then this spline down here, this is actually, if I set this back to one, um, this is actually the spline that controls the animation, uh, of the secondhand. So this, this motion where it kind of, you know, Springs forward and then jiggles a little bit, that's actually created by the spline. So, uh, express so is extremely powerful. It is, I think, far more powerful than expressions and after effects. Uh, and I'm going to show you guys how to build most of this rig, not all of it, cause it would take too long. Um, so I have a copy of this clock, uh, with all of the rigging and express and everything taken off of it. So first of all, if you've never used express, so let me try and explain, uh, what it is and how it works a little bit.
Joey Korenman : Um, so express, so is sort of the, uh, cinema 4d version of expressions and cinema 4d has many, many ways to use, uh, code and, and sort of, you know, different ways besides key frames to animate things. Um, there's coffee, there's, there's now Python. Um, and, and then there's espresso, which is probably the simplest way, um, of sort of creating behaviors and, and things like that. So, um, in order to use express, so you need to put an espresso tag on an object in cinema. Now, one thing that, um, is very different about espresso, uh, as opposed to after effects, is that the express so itself, the, the nodes and behaviors you create, they don't actually have to be applied to the object that you want those behaviors to affect. What I mean by that is if I create a new Knoll and this is, this is pretty common, actually a lot of designers do this.