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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation

• Select the Display tag in the Object Manager and then switch to the “Ghosting“ tab

in the Attribute Manager

• Activate the Enable option and click on the “Calculate Cache” button at the bottom

of the Attribute Manger.

That’s it! All you have to do now is ﬁne-tune the Ghosting to ﬁt your needs. For example, you can change the

Draw and/or Shading Mode (click on the small arrow next to the Draw Mode parameter); you can use the Frame

Before and Frame After values to deﬁne how many frames should be displayed before and after the current

frame; a Frame Step value of 1 will display every frame. Raising this value to 2 would halve the number of frames,

a value of 3 will display only a third of the frames and so on. This gives you an impression of how quickly and

easily you can ﬁne-tune Ghosting to suit your needs.

Tips: The way in which HyperNURBS work presents 3D Ghosting with a limitation: If a Display tag has been

assigned to a polygon mesh that is a Child of an active HyperNURBS object the Ghosting will not be displayed

after the cache has been calculated. To resolve this you can either deactivate the HyperNURBS object before

and reactivate it again after calculating the cache or assign the Display tag to the HyperNURBS object in the

ﬁrst place.

3D Ghosting only works on objects that have been animated directly (e.g. a cube animated using Keyframes)

without having to calculate the cache. If a mesh has been deformed by a skin a cache will have to be created.

However, the cache must not be cleared every time a change is made to the animation. Simply click on “Calculate

Cache“ and the 3D Ghosting data will be updated.

Welcome to Projection Man

1. Introduction

Once you have completed this tutorial you will be able to save a great amount of working time and maybe even

create scenes you never would have been able to without this tool. This tutorial is primarily geared towards

matte painters but can also be used by any 3D artist to keep from having to texture a great number of objects.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term “matte painting”, here is a brief description of what this is: Matte

painters mostly work in the movie industry and create (paint) background imagery for movie scenes. These

backgrounds are for the most part so realistic that the viewer assumes they are real-world backgrounds. An

example of matte painting is a scene in which a king on his horse rides across a virtual landscape that, on the

one hand, does not exist in the real world and on the other hand does not have to be built in 3D. The matte

painter paints the desired background and the king and his horse are simply composited into the scene.

Advancing technology has also made it possible to create matte paintings in 3D using a computer, which makes

it possible to animate a camera and maintain a correct angle of view of the background. This would not be

possible using traditional 2D techniques. The disadvantage (if you can call it that) to using 3D matte painting is

that a “single image” cannot be used – the scene must be modeled and all objects must be textured. And this

is exactly where Projection Man comes in.