Bomb Guy

Character created and animated in CINEMA 4D really makes a bang!

Student Andreas Gaschka's thesis work is a great example of how CINEMA 4D can be used to create an animation in a nostalgic Nintendo game look.

Designed as a teaser film for the fictional run-and-jump game Bomb Guy, this animation successfully re-creates the look of classic console games. Andreas wanted to come as closely as possible to giving his animation an 8-bit look by intentionally omitting elements normally used to create realistic-looking 3D such as phong shading and antialiasing. Color gradients and traditional 3-point lighting were replaced by dithering and flat illumination.

Since the project had to have a stereoscopic look basically no post-production compositing - as is usual for motion graphics - was done. With the exception of the game interface, the entire film was created directly in CINEMA 4D. Only to achieve the dithered look was it necessary to use Photoshop and After Effects to composite layered Multi-Pass renderings. All textures were created in Illustrator and Photoshop.

CINEMA 4D's entire software palette was used in the creation Bomb Guy. All modeling was done in CINEMA 4D. The character was rigged using MOCCA and XPresso and the individual animation loops were saved as Motion Sources and mixed using the R11 Motion Layer Timeline. CINEMA 4D's newly-added Pivot object was used during Bomb Guy's run through the level. All effects such as sparks, waves or font animation were created using particle tools, Thinking Particles, MoGraph and/or XPresso.

The Sketch and Toon module and Multi-Pass rendering were used to create the desired look. Spatial View's SVI Stereo 3D Editor plugin was used to create the red-and-green 3D look, which was easily imported into the CINEMA 4D viewport. In order to simplify rendering, Andreas used the values generated by the plugin and passed them on to cameras in CINEMA 4D via XPresso Expressions. CINEMA 4D's Layer Browser helped greatly for maintaining a good overview of the complex scene, which also helped speed up workflow.

Andreas states, "I love working with CINEMA 4D because it's an easy-to-use 3D tool that offers me the flexibility I need to realize my ideas. Especially the new features offered in R10 and R11 are very well structured, thought out and allow for fast, results-oriented production, even when working with tight deadlines.

More information:

www.gaschka.tv

Complete movie:
http://vimeo.com/5820479

3D version:
http://vimeo.com/5898568