Yes, I'm measuring out my life in coffee spoons (as Prufrock sang), but I'm also measuring out coffee in 3D toons. This short 3d animated explainer video catalogs the health benefits of coffee (my favorite drug). There was a satisfying cosmic balance in knowing that even as I was animating a movie about coffee, coffee was a large part of what animated me to finish the project.
This project gave me an opportunity to experiment with different textures and focus on the new node editor workflow for Redshift in Cinema 4D, which was introduced in 2022.
The joyful character in the piece didn't change too much from my initial sketch in Illustrator, though I did make his torso longer for the animation. (The overly long legs didn't look right when the guy was crouching, and I needed him to squat in the last scene for a big jump.) I built and weighted the character with C4D's toon rig.
The cups of coffee were animated with a straightforward pose morph. The hand only needed to be flexible enough to grab coffee.
In the swim scene, the wave deformation was driven by an animated vertex map and fields. The incomparable Chris Schmidt (Rocket Lasso) has an excellent explainer video of how this works. It's a great technique, and for the style I wanted here, it worked better (and with less work) than X-particles.
The balance-beam scene took longest to render. The yellow wall is designed with a coffee cup in mind (the corrugated plane is meant to suggest a coffee sleeve). The original script had more data points to put into the center circle area, but they were cut (too many percentages and the eyes start to glaze over!).
In another draft, I animated the coffee splashes in Adobe Animate, but as the only 2D animation in the project, those splashes didn't quite fit.
