In this tutorial we are going to have “Fun with Splines” and make a little highway system in cinema 4d. We are going to us the spline wrap deformer and a bit of dynamics to simulate traffic and make cars go vroom!
Grab the scene files here: gum.co/5highway
Check out my other spline tutorials in my tutorial page!
Looking for free rigs to practice animation? Be sure to check out the Shop page!
So you want to get a quest for creative pursuits like modelling and 3d sculpting on an oculus quest? You’ve come to the right place. I will eventually make a video, but for now you got a nice written article. Some of the info is incomplete because i haven’t bought/got everything myself yet, but i will fill it up as time goes by, so make sure to follow me on twitter 🙂
Set up ( stuff you need)
1 piece – Oculus quest. This is the wirless vr headset of choice. It basically has a mobile phone in it, so it’s completely standalone, unlike most VR headsests which need a computer. But some software doesn’t run on it. For example medium and quill. And the software that does have mobile versions (haven’t tried them myself) but they seem almost identical, just slightly less graphically intensive.
If you want to use PC vr software ( the stuff that doesn’t run on the mobile device)
Router: you want to get a separate 5ghz router. I use a XIAOMI MI ROUTER 4A DUAL BAND WI-FI AC1200 GIGABIT, it’s dirt cheap and performs really well. Your computer should be directly plugged into it. And you should keep everyone else off this network. The router should be in the same room as you want to use the headset. Make sure the wirless setting is set to have 2 different networks. You can even turn off the 2.4ghz one. Some routers have a setting to combine 2 networks into one and let the device choose. This does not work for the quest. It’ll stupidly pick the 2.4ghz one.
Virtual desktop: this is a remote desktop app, so you can access your computer, but it also lets you play VR games. But recently facebook decided to limit it’s abilities to do that. So after purchase, you have to side load an updated apk. It can launch steam VR games/apps and Oculus games directly.
Sidequest: is a side loading app for your pc, that loads stuff onto your quest. Makes it all a lot more convenient. Also its like an app store for developers where they can beta test their programs. So useful all up. ( you will need to register as a developer to enable developer mode on your quest)
Steam VR: this is where you will be getting most of your games, and it seems to be the software that other programs leverage to get games to work across multiple headsets. So you need to install steam, and then the steamVR software addon inside steam.
Oculus store: you need to install this to be able to purchase and play oculus games/software. For example this is the only place to get “medium”
Revive (beta): this injects oculus games into steam. The developers don’t officially support Virtual desktop, but it’s the only way to get medium working wirlessly at the moment. Because virtual desktop doesn’t support “vulkan” which is what medium is writen on/in ( way over my head). Keep in mind that wirelessly, there is no pressure sensitivity in medium at this moment.
Viveport: This is HTC’s equivilant of a game/app store. It’s main advantage is that it has monthly and annual subscription, which gives you access to a large number of apps. Notable Gravity sketch and Tilt Brush. So you can try them out. Also has a pretty large collection of games. Some better than others.. It’s a good way to try a whole bunch of stuff out.
Cross-Buy: It’s a useful feature when buying from the oculus store. Since the apps are different for the mobile quest and PC VR, the oculus store lets developers mark their programs as cross buy. So when you buy a quest version, you also get a PC version. This is important to consider because the viveport subscription doesn’t do this. So for example gravity sketch has cross buy. If you buy it on the oculus store, you can use it through your PC or you can use the standalone version just in your quest, without it being connected to your computer.
GOOD NEWS! you can get oculus link to work with the included cable now! It’s not very long, but you already have it, and if you are doing seated VR its perfect. this just happened, and i just tried quill and google earth, and it seems to work great. You just have to enable the beta channel in your oculus app on your pc.
Buy an oculus link cable. But make sure you have a proper usbc port on your computer.
There are also some alternatives available ( google it) they are special cables. There are lots of reports online that people have lots of trouble with the cables, even official ones. Sometimes it takes 3 tries for the headset to be initialized. So eh..
I will fill this section more once i get my hands on a cable, they seem to be out of stock everywhere right now.
And finally remember: VR is still in early days. It’s like the early days on the internet, if i had to draw an equivilancy. It’s like when youtube started getting popular. There was some good content on their which made you go: “wow.. This is gonna play a big role in our future” but the majority of stuff was still crap and hacky workarounds.
The quest can feel uncomfortable if incorrectly fitted, which is very easy to do. This guys video here helped me get it on comfortably.
When you first start up, do the “first steps” app with the robot. It’s fun and shows you what VR is capable off when developed properly. Then try Creed demo ( should already be installed). That is a VR experience which really shows you the strong side of VR.
Once you get all the PC-VR stuff set up, oculus store has a free game called “bullet time” one of those awesome games which is very short, but lets you feel how awesome VR can be with the right development. Apparently Robo recall is a full version of that demo. But less humans, more robots. Haven’t got around to testing it yet.
So there you go. I’m trying out this new thing for my free articles. If you enjoyed them and want to buy me a coffee, you can buy me one through gumroad. Trying to figure out this whole making tutorials full time thing without charging people for the content.
The spline deformer lets you deform objects along a spline, it can also deform cloners and other things. In this tutorial i also tell you about the difference between cloning on a spline and deforming along a spline.
Looking for free rigs to practice animation? Be sure to check out the Shop page!
A free rig AND a tutorial?! No way! Yes way! Get the free bouncing ball Rig, AND learn to make a basic animation utilizing squash and stretch!
If you like this rig don’t forget to rate it on gumroad ( in your library, click download and you’ll have the chance to rate it)
Looking for other free rigs to practice animation? Be sure to check out the Shop page!
Got this question about rigging a vacuum from Joey https://instagram.com/joey_g_motion So here is the solution i came up with. The hand still can detach if you pull the vacuum too far, perhaps if people are interested i can make a part 2 and figure out how to limit the distance of the vacum, but in reality i think thats a waste of calculations that you computer has to do, when you can just make sure the vacum doesn’t go further than needed while animating.
Looking for the Other Rail spline tutorial? Not actually about train on rails? Check it out here: https://ace5studios.com/rail-spline
Check out this spline animation tutorial for more spline animation goodness: https://ace5studios.com/spline-animation-tutorial-c4d-dont-use-pla/
In this tutorial I will show you how to get a carriage to follow a spline realistically In cinema 4D. I will explain what is wrong with default spline and how to fix it.
Looking for the Other Rail spline tutorial? Not actually about train on rails? Check it out here: https://ace5studios.com/rail-spline
Check out this spline animation tutorial for more spline animation goodness: https://ace5studios.com/spline-animation-tutorial-c4d-dont-use-pla/
Ever need to copy keyframes from one object to another? What about needing to flip the keyframes for the other foot? and offset them? Well this is the tutorial for you!
Check out this spline animation tutorial for more spline animation goodness: https://ace5studios.com/spline-animation-tutorial-c4d-dont-use-pla/
This is a question that comes up a lot, and recently came up on a FUTUR livestream with Gary Vee.
As always the answer is: “it depends”. Some people think the answer should be a hard no. Others think it’s not such a bad thing.
I think the answer to this is pretty simple. If you want to do free work to get your name out there, pick the client yourself. Offer your services to a charity or any nonprofit organization that you care about. Or even if it’s a for profit organization, do it for them as a gift, but pick the company yourself and make like an homage to them. If someone comes to you and asks for work in exchange for “Exposure” that should definitely be a hard NO! That job is going to be hell, and going to drag on forever, and you are not going to get any exposure for it. So if you do free work, make sure it’s on your terms and you’ve picked something that will give you exposure. Make sure they have a large following on social media, and a large following that’s relevant to your potential clients. If you do character rigging, 13-18 year old fans of knitting won’t really help you.
For example recently I saw a Bee farming non-profit was asking on instagram about getting a character done, so they can educate children on the importance of Bee’s to the environment. I like the cause, i want to make a bee character for my portfolio, win win.
The other option is if you are doing something you have never done before and it’s something you want to figure out. Then perhaps thats a good deal for the both of you. BUT you got to remember the wider picture. If you agree to do free work, that means that company is 100% not going to pay someone to do that work. So you’re potentially either taking money away from your fellow workers, and maybe helping a business that has no business doing what it does ( since it can’t secure funds to pay you for your services).
There is also the option if you are working in an intern capacity, where you are not being paid, but you are actually learning valuable skills that you want to get. In these cases, remember you can always leave, don’t let them exploit you. Make sure you are still benefiting from this experience. If you’re just photo copying stuff and getting people coffee, you aren’t really learning. You might be building relationships for future work, but thats pretty hard to assess, so go with your gut.
So to summarize: Make sure you are benefiting from this free work. If you believe in the cause thats also great. DO NOT work for “exposure”.
Hope this was interesting for you. What do you think? Do you ever do free work?
Cheers,
Aleksey
I have recently been receiving a lot of messages asking for help. And generally i’m a helpful guy, i answer questions, make tutorials etc.
But more and more i’m getting the following messages, and they are all the same. First the person asks me how i am and then asks me to explain something that could be googled. So i decided i need to write a little tutorial on how to ask people for help.
So first Example of how not to ask for help:
The next one is slightly better, because at least he tells me what he wants and doesn’t waste my time with small talk.
But they are both bad, and i don’t really want to answer them. The thing is there are people who message me randomly out of the blue and i answer and help them, and have been over the course of many years. Some even pay me when they can, have a lot of good long term relation ships springing from just people asking me questions. But these people seem to be just lazy and just want me to do their work for them.
So… How should you ask a question that i would want to answer?
Obviously if you’ve purchased one of my products and have a problem with it feel free to reach out, or if you’ve downloaded one of my free rigs and it’s not working correctly, don’t be shy and message me about it 🙂
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Aleksey
People often ask where to start and what to do to become a 3D artist like me.
Im not sure i’m the right person to ask, since i just kinda stumbled into this by accident. But there are some very important things i learnt, which i wish somebody told me earlier, so i will share them here.
1. This is not a stable, predictable or lucrative career. If you need money, if you have to support your family, this is really not the career for you. It’s super unpredictable, skills you need shift yearly. You might spend a year learning something, just to have a piece of software come out that renders all those things you learnt obsolete.
You really got to love what you do, because it’s gonna be hard. It’s like the story of people who go to Hollywood to become actors. It’s kinda like that, but you add global outsourcing to that.
Now if you’re still here i have some useful info for you.
2: EVERYTHING is a remix. Everything you see made is rehashes and reworks of the work made before by other artists, thinkers etc. Current copyright laws kinda throw a spanner in the works, but it just means you have to be more creative in your efforts. This is something that no one ever told me, and i always tried to come up with everything myself. That is a mistake. Copy, transform, combine is the secret to success.
The reason for this is simple: There is nothing truly original you can come up with. All the things you imagine and create are influenced by things you have seen/read/used before. Invention is an iterative process, hitting things with your fist, turned into rocks, turns into hammers, jackhammers etc.. So you might as well take a good analytical look at the things that are inspiring you and figure out what it is that you like about them and implement that into your work.
Watch this video it goes into more details with a stunning amount of examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
Also this is fun to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjmaOj3_sKk
And you can see this pattern not only in Disney movies, you can see it throughout Hollywood. And throughout human history in architecture, art, stories, books, myths etc.. It’s all an iterative “small steps” process.
3: Getting good takes time. Developing your own style takes lots of work. Just keep doing it. If you can tell your work sucks that is the most important thing. Because if you can see it sucks, it means you will be able to see when it stops sucking. The biggest problem is people who think their work is awesome. Because they can’t improve. They can’t take criticism. So if you think your work sucks, congratulations! You might become a worthy artist.
Ira glass the gap, is a great speech to listen to, nice and short too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfA9OH6dAQ8
The missing chapter is a great video which talks about all the work that great artists made that no one has ever heard about: https://vimeo.com/87448006
4: Find people who inspire you and copy them, and try to get your work to be like their work. It’s the fastest way to grow. Don’t pass it off as your work, be clear that you are just recreating work that you find inspirational. This is very important, the internet has made everything very small and searchable. You will be exposed and no one will work with you. But while you copy you will learn and start to understand what it is exactly that makes the work you admire great.
This is something more specific to mograph and tv commercials, but nevertheless this guy makes amazing videos explaining concept development and the thinking that goes into creating cool stuff: http://www.division05.com/#episodes
5: Color theory is a topic which can hugely affect your work. Once again, grab color combinations from other places, photos, works of art, nature etc, and use them. Then slightly adjust them as you need. This is the best way to start out while picking colors. But also try to figure out why certain color combinations work and others don’t pay attention to what you associate certain colors with and then try and figure out why. It’s all about observation.
Great color theory video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1FK8n7WgY
Bonus tips:
I’ve found a great way to judge your own work, or try to figure out what’s missing. Is put it up side by side with the gallery of an artist you admire and see if your work looks like it belongs there.
Use pinterest to collect work that inspired you, you can sort it into boards and turn to it when you need references. Also its a great place to put your own work and see how to feels on a board full of works that inspire you.
Some good pinners to follow:
https://www.pinterest.com/bixorama/
https://pinterest.com/em404p/boards/
https://www.pinterest.com/characterdesigh/boards/
https://www.pinterest.es/raoul1983/
So there you have it, a quick list of stuff i wish i knew when i was starting out. If you have any stuff you think would be helpful to beginners and professionals alike post it in the comments. Im sure there are lots of things i wish i knew that i do not know yet 🙂