Creating Particle Typography in Cinema 4D

Music : [jingling bells]
Music 2 : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey, here for school of motion in this lesson, we're going to get lost deep in cinema 4d. It's a long one. And I throw out as many tips and tricks along the way as I can. The idea for this lesson actually came from a freelance job that I did, where I needed to have some snowflakes animate on some type, but I needed full control of those snowflakes, how the animated on and off and where exactly they landed. I go through every single step, including some steps that I tried, which didn't work. I want everyone to see that even artists with a lot of experience have no clue what we're doing sometimes. And we have to fumble around until we find the right combination to get the desired result. Don't forget, 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.
Joey Korenman : Now let's hop in and get started. All right, illustrator. Uh, we haven't spent a lot of time in illustrator on school of motion, but that might, that might change. So the first thing I want to do is lay out my type. Um, so I'm just going to grab the type tool and I'm going to type in happy holidays and make it a little bigger. Um, and I found a font and I'm going to, um, I'm going to link to it. So you guys can download the same font if you want. It's a free font off of deaf font, which is an awesome website where you can download hundreds, maybe thousands of free fonts, um, and not all of them are great, but some of them work in this particular font I grabbed because it's very thick. And if you're going to be making type out of, you know, a whole bunch of particles or snowflakes, you need that font to be pretty thick so that when you actually form it, it's readable stope.
Joey Korenman : So by typing it in, this is a type layer, which cinema 4d can't read. So I need to convert this to outlines first. So you do that by selecting the layer, you go up to type and you say, create outlines. You can see now it's created the outlines for that. So I'm just going to save this in my demo folder. And I'll just save over this. This is, this is me, uh, preparing for this tutorial. So I'm going to save over this holiday type illustrator file now, replace it. And when I save things in illustrator to go into cinema 4d, I always set the version to illustrator eight. Um, and I've been doing that ever since I've had cinema 4d. I don't know if any of these later ones will work with it, but illustrator eight definitely works. So that's what I pick. Okay. And that one's good to go.
Joey Korenman : So now the next thing I needed was some snowflakes. Um, and I didn't want to have to make my own snowflakes. I wanted to just kind of, you know, get some and you know, so I Googled Google is your friend. And I found some free snowflakes at this website, all silhouettes.com. I'll link to that in the notes for this tutorial. Um, and so I just wanted to grab three or four that I could then use MoGraph to kind of randomly assign and create a cloner with them. So why don't we pick for snowflakes? Um, so let's take this one. I'm just going to copy it and in a new illustrator file, I'm going to paste that one. Okay. Uh, one quick note is, uh, when you, if you do this, if you don't use the same snowflakes as me, or if you use something else, make sure open up the layer and make sure that all of these compound shapes have been grouped together.
Joey Korenman : Um, it'll make it a lot easier. And cinema 4d can act a little funky if you have too many splines that haven't been grouped. Okay. So a and I'm going to rename this layer SF. Oh one. So snowflake oh one. All right. So we've selected that one. Um, maybe we can take this one too, so copy. And I'm going to make a new layer and paste into that layer. So that'll be SF oh two. All right. Let's grab a couple more. Why don't we take a, this silly one here? We'll copy that paste. And this is SFO three. And then one more, maybe this one we'll copy.