Learning Cinema4D: Week 03

I got sidetracked by a number of events which I couldn’t afford to miss this week and initially wasn’t going to blog about my most recent learning outcomes but later decided it will be good to at least give some insight into what I am currently working on including a few noted improvements and probably one or two rambles.

Well as you all know, my approach on learning Cinema4D has been to tackle a number of tools/functions and then incorporate it into a project.

That is why I was really chuffed to see an article by John Dickinson of motionworks about show-reels packed with tutorials. I do not like when people just regurgitate tutorials into their showreel without showing any implementation of what they learnt through the teaching process. It is absolutely fine to go through the entire tutorial steps to the result (I do it all the time and its one of the many ways one can learn) but your creativity comes when you are able to utilize the techniques into a personal project that isn’t an identical clone or just a reshuffling of the colors.

Now for my next learning process, I have chosen to tackle rigging, a few modeling tricks and more camera and lighting setup.

I started to think of what exactly to create. I didn’t just want to recreate tutorials or try to model a complex object but wanted something structured in such a way that focused on how to use these tools without diving too deep into hours of complex modeling and pixel pushing.

After deliberating, I realized I had the answer right in front of me. Like literally facing me. It was my current desktop wallpaper, which was created by leviatan from the anime, Yotsubato! I really liked the simplicity and emotion of the scene so I quickly began to break it down into some of the C4D elements I wanted to tackle.

The Card-box character will allow me to try my hands on rigging without worrying too much about the model.

The flower reminded me of Robert Ledger’s metallic flower tutorial, which is simply one tut I have been dying to try for a while now. So I decided to use my learning outcomes from that to make this floating flower sphere.

The pond will give me some reflections and possibly refractions to play with.

The particles above the sphere, I think will be smarter to create using trapcode particular to save on render time but I also want to try my hands on the particle systems built in C4D.

I will also be adding some more elements to the scene that will improve the narrative I intend to construct but will not disclose anything yet just to give that element of surprise.

Still in progress…

I am really hoping I wrap this up during or before the 2nd week of September.

My last note is about the Boole function (which in my last post, I couldn’t find in the interface.) I was able to locate it in the Modeling panel. It can also be located in the menu/tab bar: Object->Modeling->Boole or the tool bar.

I think the number of steps one could take before making use of this function drastically increases when you have to make things editable (and sometimes grouped, then connected) before making your complex object and I personally feel it makes the process bloated. 3Ds Max executes this much better but perhaps this is all beginners’ stress.

Talking about beginner’s stress, I retrieved my long and forgotten Wacom tablet, which hasnt been used for a long time now and have decided to start incorporating it into my cinema4D workflow. It is quite the challenge because my mouse, which I am very much use too (especially after configuring all the buttons to C4D shortcuts) is having to take a back seat as I adapt to this peripheral. I hope I can stick with it fully this time so here is hoping to greater efficiency. Well looking forward to next week.