Conceived through the Cinema 4D users over twitter, CubePong allows designers and animators around the world to contribute on a single project utilizing Maxon's Cinema 4D.

As anyone will tell you, the greatest way to learn is through experience. What CubePong gives you, is a first class ticket to behind the scenes of how the world's greatest designers achieve their breathtaking motion graphics.

So how does it work? 

  1. Using the Event Registration page, sign up for the next CubePong. We've broken each round down into 30minute time slots which ensure you'll get the file when you have time available. As seating is limited! Be sure to get your name in early.
  2. Before the start of the event, a list of contenders is generated and emailed to all participants, thus ensuring you know who is going to give you the file and who you'll need to pass the file on to when you're done.
  3. When CubePong starts, a Cinema 4D file is generated and ponged to the first contender. Once you receive the file, you will have 30 minutes to create and animate.
  4. Once your 30 minutes are up,  you upload the file to the CubePong ftp and notify the next contender and @CubePong via twitter that the file has been uploaded.
  5. Once everyone has added their special animations and additions to the file, it's rendered and put online together with the open scene file for everyone to enjoy.

 Important things to remember when CubePonging

  1. This is a collaborative project, try make as little tweaks as possible to other people's work and use it to build on and enhance the project further.
  2. To help start the creative process, we're theming each round of CubePong, so be sure to let the week's theme drive your creativity.
  3. Your entire animation must be placed in a null object with your name on it. I.e. 05_twittername_(F 80 -150)
    (I’m the 5th participant, my twittername and my animation starts on frame 80 and ends on frame 150).
  4. Clean up after yourself. Make sure your animation has a clear start and end frame. Use the visibility lights to turn your animation's visibility in the render and editor on at the start of your animation and off at the end.
  5. You're more than welcome to use the previous animation as a start to your animation, just ensure you do not take away from their core idea or affect their animation in anyway that it becomes compromised.
  6. Try to keep the animation as light as possible. I.e. Keeping any heavy simulations or cache calculations down to a minimum.
  7. The final animation is rendered over a network render, so please ensure that if you have any particles or simulations that you bake them and that they will render over a network.
  8. To help people follow along, keep all communication over twitter with the hashtag #CubePong.
  9. If you sign up, please make an effort to participate, if for some reason you cannot play on the day, kindly let the following person on the list know and he / she can grab it from there.