Posting this here today for National Hot Dog Day, the third Wednesday in July every year.
I started out creating just a model to use for my students in a class lesson, but felt like it could make a fun little sequential loop. The was a fun opportunity to show the story of a hot dog from start to finish. I like making short digestible loops that can showcase animation and design principles rather easily.
I found ways to incorporate anticipation, follow through, squash and stretch, ease in/out throughout the animation as examples to show my students. It help when you can show them directly in a project what the curves look like, or quickly change or toggle the animation to remove these features, where you are left with less desirable results.
I used two newer features in Cinema 4D in this one. They updated their Symmetry object to allow you to do multiplane symmetry, so for the bun I only modeled 25% of it and flipped it twice across different planes within the same object, that was a welcome upgrade. Also Pyro certainly seems a little more intuitive and reliable since the last version, that helped create a subtle flame within the grill and the puff of smoke that flashes when the lid lifts up.
I also wanted to make some that leaned into having sound design, that was a fun road to go down. I used the following sounds from freesound.org in the mix:
Plus this audio track:
I recorded my own voice that went "Mmmmmmm" but admittingly did not do my own burp at the very end.
Also just to make it more challenging I wanted one render that could work across HD, square, and vertical formatting.
Happy National Hot Dog Day!