Cinema 4D to Aero (Beta, so it crashed like a whole bunch)
This week I took a figure from Mixamo and imported into Cinema 4D to animate. I chose the “stoic female body” as I had planned to add a little animation to her to be in line with my Brown Recluse character. I wanted her to do a slight “throat-slit motion” to someone in the grocery store (we have a whole thing going here).
Getting the character into Cinema 4D was easy, and Mixamo is a great tool that offers a lot of pre-built figures. I wanted to do a stoic one so that I could use the keyframes to build the sassy action myself.
The cool part about uploading the figure from Mixamo was that each of the body parts could all be manipulated individually, and had details all the way down to fingers on both hands ready for movement.
I only moved the arms and the spine to get the desired motion. I also added a few other assets to fill out the details of the scene like grocery aisles and a floor.
The next step turned out to be a bust. After exporting the scene as an fbx file from Cinema 4D, I tried to upload it to the desktop version of Adobe Aero because I am an Android user. Every time I tried to upload the fbx file into Aero, it crashed. On the seventh crash, I decided to fold. The project never made it to Aero (RIP).
The best I could do was screen record the scene in Cinema 4D:
I played back the subtle motion from 3 different views to show all of the body parts that are moving to create the animation (subtle lean forward as hand goes to hip, etc.). I laughed a lot doing the motion along with her to figure out which part of the arm does what to mimic the motion onto the figure. Overall, great fun.
