Hi guys! For the first time, I try to tackle quite a big project in C4D:
A full-CG music video (3:40 min) with two detailed characters, acting in 9 locations, for a total of about 80 shots.
I aim for a quality comparable to say, a prerendered videogame-Cutscene. Not Hollywood-Blockbuster, but also not too far away
What I have:
- A powerful rig (AMD 3950X, 128 Gbyte RAM) nvidia RTX2080Ti, big SSD, Redshift, C4D R23
- A detailed storyboard, already roughly cut to the music, so I know where I need to go.
- I drew some artboards to have a visual guide for color, composition, etc.
- The Characters are ready and animatable via mixamo-Motioncaps
- A lot of detailed assets (guitars, tools, decoration)
- Big scenery setups (landscapes, a āsliceā of ocean, etc.)
- Some test-rendered animation snippets, that prove that I can actually achieve a good quality with my assets.
What I donāt have
- A deadline
- A Team. Itās just me, so everything needs to be really efficient
- Experience with the usual workflow for a project of this size. Maybe Iām doing it all wrong
Where I struggle:
When I completed all the assets, I thought: ok, now the fun part starts, letās animate! But in this stage, I want to keep creative control over the assets, even if those are spread cross several scenes/shots. So my first take was to merge all the assets and the characters into a single scene file, sort everything tidily into layers and manage the different shots as āTakesā. Should I need to update an asset, I would do that in the base take, and all sub-Takes would update accordingly.
In practice, performance is just not good enough to fluidly animate the characters, even when only a subset of the objects is activated via the layers. I thought, managing everything via layers would free up enough resources, but it aināt so. The scene-file alone is 1.6 Gbyte big, just to give an idea. Also, the take-system does not work with the motion-clip system, so that would require additional workarounds.
So, the next option would be to have separate scene-Files for the shots and load in the Characters as xRefs. I didnāt even try that as of now, since I read of so many problems with the xRef-System, and even of ultimately broken scene files. So Iām really afraid of that place and donāt want to go there Is that a thing you pros use? Maybe itās gotten better? Any caveats?
The last option would be to give up central creative control over the assets and just break everything up. Should an update occur to, say, a char, I would have to just redo the shot with the updated char. I would really prefer not to go that route
So, do you guys have any hints for me, how to tackle such a big C4D-Task?
Thanks and best regards!
keppn