11.0

4
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What‘s new in R11
Your character’s walk cycle has been completed and it can walk from point A to point B. After viewing the
animation you decide the character’s head should move more dynamically. So you create a new layer and
record the keyframes for this more dynamic head movement. After you have finished you can play all layers
simultaneoulsy or turn individual layers off (and on again).
Not happy with the new head movement? No problem. Turn the corresponding layer off and create a new layer
for animating the shoulder movement. So you decide the shoulder movement is a little “too much” and want
your head movement back after all. Two clicks and it’s done – simply turn your shoulder layer off and the head
layer back on. The Animation Layer System bears one invaluable advantage: You have your head animation back
and you now want to see what it looks like if the head leans a little to the left and a little to the right. All you
have to do is copy the layer containing the original head animation and experiment on the new layer. If you
don’t like the result simply delete the new layer. The Animation Layer System offers innumerable possibilities
for creating perfect animations and lets you quickly get the animation you want.
Onion Skinning: 3D Ghosting
Even though the 3D graphics world is full of technological advances with no end in sight, we can also use this
technology to integrate very useful techniques that stem from the very traditional days of 2D animation, even
dating back to the 1960s. One of these cornerstones of traditional animation is the so-called “onion skinning”
method of animation, an essential tool for displaying the progression of movement of an animation. Onion
skinning displays the frames of animation before and after the current frame as “ghost” (semi-transparent)
images with increasing transparency the farther away they are from the current frame. Traditional 2D onion
skinning basically consisted of images drawn on translucent paper that was placed over a light box or relied on
dexterous animators who flipped back and forth between pages containing sequential images they had drawn.
As you can imagine, the CINEMA 4D R11 onion skinning (called 3D Ghosting) feature is much more versatile.
You can, for example, define the number of frames before and after the current frame that should be displayed,
their color and even the how they should be displayed (wireframe, Gouraud shading, etc.).