Every successful project starts with a great idea and finishes with skillful production: It’s truly the magic behind the curtain. In production, our designers and animators lead this industry with their creativity and technological mastery, keeping up to date as tools rapidly evolve. And they’re not stingy about what they’ve learned! They love to share with digital creators, leading seminars, teaching classes and doing interviews and podcasts.

So, when Maxon invited us to participate in their C4DLive event at Siggraph 2019 (annual computer graphics conference), we jumped at the opportunity. Maxon is the maker of Cinema 4D (C4D), the software we use to create 3D imagery. To talk about Maxon’s recently released software features, we created an animated short film using C4D and Arnold (an external render engine that creates physically accurate renders) and then prepared a presentation explaining how we did it. The result was this charming animated short: Buckets.

Created by our creative lead Duarte Elvas and senior 3D designer and animator Jake Allen, the theme for the film was inspired by a picture from Carmichael Collective, showing the cross section of a pinata. “What you see on the outside can be deceiving,” says Duarte, “What’s inside can really surprise you. We thought it would be really fun to play with that idea.”

In short? Buckets is a whimsical invitation to stay curious. From a shark full of strawberry jello, to a teddy bear that pops his seams to release a bucket of plastic grenades, each scene opens a different object to reveal a spill of the unexpected.

“We really love the C4D software and created this film to showcase a lot of the new features,” adds Jake. “Using C4D’s dynamics system, hair tools, and the new Volume Builder, we were able to bring the project from start to finish in 30 days.”

Aiding the process, Duarte and Jake built a script called Spring break.

“Normally, when making springs on points for soft bodies and rigid bodies, the artist has to place each spring one-by-one, which is a time-consuming process,” Duarte explains. “Spring Break lets you make a selection of points and automatically creates a spring constraint on each point selected on your object.”

It works like a charm! Try it out yourselves. The code is open, so feel free to check out the source code, modify it, and build upon it. Download that here.