Building And Setting Up A Cube And Pyramid Puzzle Using Xpresso In Cinema 4D
Hello! My name is Ilir Beqiri. I am a self taught motion designer, living and working in Tirana, Albania. I've been involved for almost 17 years in this industry now, working for different local studios and as a freelance 3D generalist and animator, accumulating a lot of knowledge, tips and tricks and experience along the way. I've made use of several 3D packages in my carrier ranging from Lightwave, back in the day, Blender and Cinema 4D. I've also had my fingers dipped in to Houdini here and there, but never used it on any project, so far. I've sticked to Cinema 4D during these past 10 years. More than a year ago I decided to contribute back to the community of Cinema 4D users and knowledge sharers by posting some short and some not so short silent videos containing several techniques as well as quick tips and tricks.
As you all know by now, Mograph is a rock solid feature of Cinema 4D, but equally important is Xpresso, a visual scripting language, that enables you to not only write simple expressions to drive some attribute in the project you're working on, but also create tools that help you finish that project in less time, with less efforts, without having to know even a single word of code.
In this tutorial series i will try to teach you how to set up and rig a 3 by 3 Rubick's Cube puzzle using pure Xpresso in Cinema 4D. The setup I will show you is both easy to use and flexible, making use of Xpresso only. You can animate every move possible, keyframe the moves, or if you're an expert on this subject, you can play and solve it live as the timeline plays forwards or even backwards. It's possible to animate the cube scramble itself or solve itself, using the exact moves that you decide, change the length of time for each move, it even allows even double moves. I will show you how to build two important puzle types, a cube and a pyramid, which is slightly more complicated, but very powerful. You can later decide to change the different pieces with other geometry and build other types of puzzles as well as a lot of interesting motion graphics elements for use in your particular projects. The video is quite long and detailed, so I've decided to divide it in two smaller parts, that you can more easily follow.
Building the Rubick's Cube setup, step by step, I will try to teach you some basic and advanced concepts on Xpresso, so that you can hopefully use them in your later projects. I will show you how to use Matrices in Xpresso to create different types of constraints and manipulate the transformation of objects in your Cinema 4D scene. You will see how I set up a custom timer tool that will work wether the time goes forwards or backwards. I will even make use of it for laying out the UVs of an object and and learn a lot about other Xpresso nodes.
In the begining I wanted to record a commercial tutorial on the subject, but later decided to release this one for free, for everyone to watch and learn. Of course, finding the right subject, studying, planning and recording a video tutorial series is something that takes a lot of time and energy. I would make good use of the money and be able to produce other videos on 3D motion design. But I thought to myself "What better way to show to an audience of interested people what it is that I'm trying to teach, than creating a full training series for free". May be later they will be more interested in buying some of my future training videos on the subject. So, this is how it will work: the training is free, for you to see, learn and share with others. You can watch the videos in HD on my Vimeo pn Youtube channels. If you find it right in yourself to contribute to other training series, like this one, and I already have some of them in mind, you can spend some small money, buying this series on Gumroad for the symbolic value of 5 dollars. Bundled with the series of videos, the buyers will also find the scene files for this project and some more examples.