Artist & Animator

Cinema 4D Basecamp | School of Motion

I took Cinema 4D Basecamp through School of Motion in 2020 as a way to get more comfortable with the full 3D workflow, modeling, texturing, lighting, and animation. What I liked about the class was that it moved quickly from fundamentals into actual scenes, so the learning stayed practical.

Each assignment pushed on a different part of the toolset, which made it a good way to build a real foundation instead of just picking up isolated tricks.

Creative Foundations

These were some of the early pieces from the class, focused on modeling, texturing, and lighting. They were more about building visual control than telling a full story, but that groundwork mattered.

It gave me a place to experiment with materials, surfaces, and how small lighting choices can change the whole read of a frame.

Pixels

This one was a Tetris-inspired scene, and my job was handling the textures, the lighting, the camera, and the animated elements inside it. I also spent time testing different focal lengths to see how much depth and mood I could get out of the same setup.

That camera work ended up doing a lot for the piece. It gave the animation more character without making the scene overly complicated.

It's a Trap

For this scene, I worked from provided assets and focused on texturing, lighting, and animation. A big part of the assignment was applying squash and stretch in a 3D context and making the movement feel fluid instead of stiff.

That ended up being a lot of careful adjustment, but it was a good exercise in bringing 2D animation thinking into 3D space.

Up in the Air

The main focus here was animating along a spline path. That made it easier to control movement through the scene and gave the final motion a smoother, more deliberate feel.

It was a technical assignment on paper, but it also changed how I thought about guiding objects through 3D space in a way that still feels natural.

Rock Em Sock Em

This was one of the final projects in the course and worked at a bigger scale than the earlier pieces. The environment was already built, so my role was animating the scene and shaping the camera work so it all felt cohesive.

That made composition a big part of the job. It was not just about movement, but about where the viewer was being placed and how the scene should unfold.

Art & Animation - Patrick Flaherty