In this tutorial I’m going to show you a really cool workflow for morphing between splines using Cinema 4D.  This kind of spline morphing animation is awesome for using in conjunction your 2D workflow in After Effects by applying a Cel Shader material to your splines.  The nice thing about using the Cel Shader or just flat colors in the Luminance channel of your material is that when you use Cineware, these type of scenes render out super fast as a Cineware layer in After Effects because you’re not doing heavy shadow or shading calculations.  So to begin, I’ll go over the thinking behind the method I chose and how to achieve a nice, smooth spline morph.  Then, I’ll show you how I build a spline that is able to be affected by effectors to morph from one spline shape to another.  I’ll demonstrate how to use the Inheritance Effector to achieve this morph and ways to make your morph look super sexy and bouncy!  Finally, I’ll show you an alternate method of using MoSplines to morph and the shortcomings of going that route.

Here’s one of my previous tutorials that shows you how to create the 2D illustrative materials using the Cel Shader that I’m using for the objects in this tutorial:

Using the Cel Shader to Apply an Illustrative 2D Style to 3D Objects in C4D

And here’s the scene file I used in this tutorial that you guys can mess around with:

DOWNLOAD CINEMA 4D SCENE FILE