Create a 3D sports logo animation

In this short video you'll learn how to turn paths from Adobe Illustrator CC and transform them into a slick high-end 3D sports logo utilizing the powerful tools inside of Cinema 4D Lite.

So let's begin where I have my shield logo design without the text in it.

And the text is not on it, because I want to add the text in Cinema 4D, because I want to utilize its awesome text tools that allow a lot more flexibility and editing ability inside of Cinema 4D.

So what I'm going to do is with all of my shield logo layers all nice they're separate layers I'm just going to go ahead and save this out.

And I need to save this in a format that is compatible with Cinema 4D. and that is this illustrator 8 format.

So Illustrator 8, hit OK and then we can jump into Cinema 4D.

So with an Adobe Creative Cloud membership you actually have a free version of Cinema 4D.

And the way that you open it is through After Effects CC.

So to open up Cinema 4D Lite in After Effects CC we just need to go to File, New, MAXON CINEMA 4D File...

We'll just be prompted to save a Cinema 4D file somewhere.

And I'll just hit Save.

And then we can launch Cinema 4D Lite So now that we're in Cinema 4D Lite, we can easily import our Adobe Illustrator file by going to File, Merge... and we're just going to merge that Adobe Illustrator file into our Cinema 4D composition.

What I'm going to do is uncheck Connect Splines.

So make sure that's unchecked.

And that will allow us more flexibility when dealing with our splines.

And I'll just hit OK.

And all I need to do is you'll see that our shield logo is down in the corner here.

I just need to zero out the coordinates on the X and the Y of our shield logo null.

And we can just scale this up a little bit if we want to as well.

And here are all of our Illustrator paths inside of Cinema 4D.

So what I'm going to do is quickly rename and reorganize our splines so they're way easier to work with.

And now we can actually add in our text using Cinema 4D text splines.

We can find text splines in the Spline menu.

And here we are.

The great thing about using text splines versus importing text paths from Illustrator is that these text splines are fully editable.

So we can change the alignment, we can change the actual text so we can change this to SPORTS.

And you can see that updates automatically and we can place this as we want.

So we have more flexibility making our text splines inside of Cinema 4D Lite.

You'll notice that we have our text splines in here, but they're not at a nice arc like our little banner element here.

So what we're going to do is utilize a Cinema 4D deformer to help make an arc on our text.

So what I'm going to do is grab a Bulge deformer.

And to make a deformer act on an object we need to make it a child of whatever object we want to deform.

So we'll first deform this UNITED text spline. and what we're going to do is just place that underneath our UNITED text.

And we'll just adjust this.

And you'll see that our bounding box doesn't fully fit in our entire text object.

So what I'll do is just adjust the bounding box here.

And what you're going to see is if I move this bulge deformer below our text spline, you can see we have this nice little arc underneath there.

So what I'm going to do is utilize a couple of bend deformers to then apply the arc to our logo.

So we have our splines, but these won't render.

If we hit the Render button here you're going to see that nothing shows up.

And this is because just like in After Effects CC a path without a stroke or fill will not render.

So the same thing goes with splines inside of Cinema 4D.

We need to use the splines to generate geometry.

One of the ways we can do that is by using a generator object.

And the generator object we're going to use is an Extrude object.

So this is the same type of extrude that you would be familiar with in After Effects CC or Illustrator CC.

To actually extrude splines we just need to make all of the splines we want to extrude a child of the Extrude objects.

We'll just place all of our spline objects underneath our Extrude.

And you'll see that actually only one of our splines is extruded.

To have all of our spline objects be extruded we just need to simply go into our Extrude object options and check on this Hierarchical button.

And what that will do is actually extrude all of our splines that are underneath our Extrude.

So on our Extrude object here we have a Caps option which actually allows us to add a really nice bevel or in Cinema 4D they're called Fillet Caps. you can see we have this nice chisel.

We can adjust the radius or the size of that chisel.

And we can also add more subdivisions to smooth out the rounding of those bevels.

So you see we have a nice smooth rounding on each of our extruded splines here.

You can also make this extrude object create a separate extrude object for every single spline object we have here by choosing this extrude object having it selected and hitting the C key.

And what that's going to do is basically make everything editable, but it's going to apply an extrude object to every single one of our extrude objects here.

So this is great.

This allows you to manipulate each of our individual splines with their own extrude objects.

So you can adjust each of their depths by adjusting this movement.

So you can see if I move this out by adjusting the movement here we're actually adding a longer extrude there.

So this is movement in the X, Y and Z.

So we're just going to worry about the Z with most of these objects here.

So now the texture and light our scene.

And what I'm going to do is just create a simple three-point light setup.

So we're going to have our main key light, our fill light and our back light.

So I'm just going to set this up really quick.

So it's a lights off setup.

I'm going to utilize some of the awesome content that comes in the Content Browser... for Cinema 4D Lite for free.

So a bunch of really handy elements here like 3D Objects, Materials, Preset, Textures and Cameras and Light Setups which we'll come back to later.

What I'm going to do is utilize some of the 3D objects in here.

And what I'm going to do is just double click on that to add it to our scene.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to load that into the scene and then I'm going to delete that object.

So all I want to do is utilize these nice Porcelain textures here and change them to the colors I want to create the textures for my shield logo here.

So if I go ahead and enter Interactive Render Region what this will allow us to do is see what this rendered image will look like when it is fully rendered.

And what I'm going to do is just right click on this little triangle here and choose Alpha Mode so I can actually see the background through here.

So it's not on a black background here.

You are going to notice that even though we have textures with reflective properties to it the only thing in our scene to reflect is the actual logo itself.

So what we're going to do is add some soft boxes to be able to add more interesting reflections to our logo.

So what we are going to do is again utilize our Content Browser, go into the Presets and we have all these really nice Light Setups.

So what I'm going to do is just bring in a Studio Softbox to my scenes and just position it in front of my objects here. and you won't see much of a difference, because we need to enable this Show In Reflection.

So that softbox will now show up on the reflection of our materials and adds this really nice highlight to our SPORTS UNITED logo here and really adds that nice high-end feel to this.

So what I'm going to do now is add another deformer to bend this logo to add a little bit more depth and interest to our logo.

So let's go to our Deformer menu here again, grab a Bend deformer.

And to make this Bend deformer act on all of these extrude objects we just need to place it in the same level of the hierarchy as all the other objects that we want to affect.

So we'll place it underneath this Shield Logo null.

And it's on the same level of the hierarchy as all of our Extrude objects.

We'll just adjust the rotation here, adjust the strength.

And we'll need to do a little bit more rotation here so it's facing the right direction.

And we'll also need to make sure our Mode is set to Unlimited so it's affecting all of our objects.

And to prevent the distortion of the stretching we'll just check on this Keep Y-Axis Length.

And that'll prevent that distortion maybe adjust the Strength just a little bit.

You will see I have a nice subtle bend that adds a lot of depth and character to our sports logo here.

So I have some nice animation to animate this logo in.

Let's just save this out and make sure we have our Anti-Aliasing settings to Best.

And we can hop into After Effects CC.

So here we are in After Effects CC.

We have this really nice animation for a nice promo open.

We just need to add our 3D shield logo to this composition.

And we'll just simply import the Cinema 4D file as we would import any other kind of asset.

And then we'll just drag and drop this into our composition again just like any other asset that we would use.

And you'll see that this is now in our composition.

And it's added into our composition as a CINAWARE layer. and right now it's set to a draft Software quality.

So that's just going to optimize our speed.

But if you want to see how this fully rendered asset will look like we'll just change the renderer to Standard Final and we'll get that final high quality rendered image from Cinema 4D.

So now we have to do is Ram Preview this.

So you can see by using CINAWARE we can easily composite our 3D elements from Cinema 4D into our After Effects CC composition without ever needing to render out of Cinema 4D.

So the great thing about this is the round-trip live 3D pipeline that we have going on here.

Say we need to iterate, we need to change the text on this logo.

All we need to do is hop back into Cinema 4D Lite.

Say we need to change this from SPORTS UNITED to say SPORTS LIVE.

And again this is the benefit of using these live text spline objects here.

We can easily edit this.

So I'll just say LIVE and just enter that in the text field.

That'll automatically update.

I'll just save out this file.

Hop back into After Effects CC and you'll see that update in our Comp through our CINEWARE layer.

So that roundtrip 3D pipeline that is live at all times allows you to iterate super easy.

So Cinema 4D Lite is a great way to learn and explore the world of 3D with its intuitive workflow, low learning curves and the tight integration with Adobe After Effects CC.

Cinema 4D allows you to be an artist and just get to creating.