Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, I'm Eveling Salazar. I am a graphic designer from Lima Peru, and I love to have fun creating shapes in 3D. You will see that creating 3D pieces is not something difficult. I will easily teach you the basics and necessary tools and techniques so you can apply it to any projects you want. This class is ideal for anyone who wants to discover and experimenting with Cinema4D. You will learn to step by step how to start, and you don't need any past experience in 3D. You just have to be motivated to experiment with new design tools and start a journey to the third dimension. So in this class, we will work with our visual reference base and we will use a creative method looking inside yourselves and then projecting it in your design. The final project will be to free your creativity. We're talking about how to design a composition based on geometry elements import vector to 3d, materials, modeling shapes, lights, HDRI, render and more. Join me to discover new emotions through colors and geometry. If you want to start creating in 3D, this is the ideal class for you. Let's release your creativity. Let's get started.
2. Show Your Creativity: For the project, you will carry out the creation of your 3D composition in your own style. You will love this project because you will be inspired by several aspects and design references. You will create abstract geometry shapes in Illustrator and bring them to life in Cinema4D. Then you will create the composition with primitive shapes, apply textures, lights, and finally, learn to render, with a physical render the primitive engine of the program. You will reflect your style and imagination into your design, and I am sure you will create something that you will love. Complete your class project with these easy steps. In the Project and Resources section of the class, read some tips, download HGRI, and check the links for inspiration. Follow each lesson of the course parallel to the creation of the project. Wait patiently for the rendering of your composition and edit in Adobe Photoshop according to less on post-work. Post and change your final artwork to your class project, and be happy with the result of the design.
3. Explore C4D Tools: Hi. Welcome to the first lesson. In this lesson, we are going to talk about C4D Interface, tools, and navigation. Here we have the program section the controls 3d view, object manager here, animation manager, material manager, and attribute manager. Now, let us start with the bar menu. It is a menu that looks like other programs such as Adobe. Below that, are the control bar. They are options that we'll use frequently. Let's go to know each one of them. The first option on the bar is direct selection. With it, you can select your objects in your scene. The next tools are, move, scale, and rotate. Now, these three buttons are for select or deselect, the x, z, or y-axis for the objects. For example, if I select the x axis, this is first move only for the this axis, and if I select z, only move for z axis, and the same for the y axis. The next bottoms are for the option for Render settings. And if we talk about geometry shapes we talk about primitive shapes. Here, there is the primitive bar, all the basic shapes on Cinema4D, spheres, square, plane, and more. The next important thing is the camera, It helps you with the perspective or angle, and how do you want to capture the image of your project. Here is the light section with different kinds of lights that you can use for the scene. This is a pre-review of C4D, there are three buttons here, you can use to move the camera around. In the first button, if you click and drag, you can move your camera. With the second button, you can move your camera forward or backward in space. With the third button, you can rotate your camera around this scene. Finally, you can click on this fourth button over here, it will split the view into four parts. You can click here and you have all the perspective default, perspective top, front, and right. You can click here, and the view turns complete. Another way to access the move tool is to hold down the number one on your keyboard. For electric zoom, you can use a number two on your keyboard and click and drag. Now, you click number three for access to rotate. This is how you can use the navigation tool in C4D. Another important part is that object management, is like the layout in Adobe, but it's more than that. Here you have all the objects that are on the scene, it serves to organize and gives hierarchy to all the elements. Here we have a cube and a sphere, if you want to drag the sphere into the cube, we can create a hierarchy. In C4D this is called a parent-child relationship. The parent is the first object, and the child is in the button. Here is the sphere. If you move the parent you can see both of the objects moves. The sphere reacts as if it's part of the cube. Finally, let's talk about the materials. Here we have the material section. For new materials, double click, and have new material. Now, double-click. Here you can change the setting of the material like a color for example, and you can drag into a specific object of the scene. Now that you know about the tools, navigation, hierarchy, materials, and some shortcuts, let's start talking about your style in the next lesson.
4. Your Own Style: Hi, welcome back. We are going to talk about how to get your style and for this we are going to start talking about art. Art seeks to exalt the interpretation of the world. Many famous artists in our history have done it. and It's great to be able to connect with this artwork for inspiration. You can take as reference the artwork of artists. Maybe artists from Art history, may be contemporary artists or designers, for example. For this lesson, the key is to start to be aware of what do you like and what is the meaningful to you, be inspired by that and use it in your design. To create, we need to process our initial planning. We will work our creation process from subjectivity. The idea is to think and find what you really love and associate it with your design. Take time to consider these elements so that you can develop ideas and transfer them to 3D. For this, I will tell you six steps to focus in your style. Let's make a creative dynamic. You will work in: investigate, discover, decide, imagine, and elaborate. All these help you to know your own style. The first one is a Step 1, investigate. You can start thinking about a movement within the graphic design that you like to take as inspiration, and for your imagination begins to fly through that reference. For example, my project for this class was inspired by Memphis 80s movement. You can also get inspiration through that movement or choose the one you like best. Some graphic design movement that can help you get inspired are for example, Bauhaus, Art Deco, Art Novoue, Swiss Style, and Memphis. You can find a link for it in the project and resource section. The Step 2 is discover. You can create a folder or board inspiration of Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr or anywhere else and start compiling everything that catches your attention, like colors, styles, designs, trends, and more. Once you have a good number of material, use it to start building your own style and start representing the style options you like best. The Step 3 is decide. Asking yourself questions is an invaluable part of your artistic process. After research and visual inspiration, shift the inquiry to the first person. For example, ask yourself, what you like? What image did you enjoy seeing the most? Which one evokes and transmitted special emotion to you? Decide which one you have the greatest affinity for, and use it to inspire you to build your own style. Now, let's do a quickly test for your 3D composition style. Three basic things to keep in mind. The first is, think of your favorite color and use this color as the main color for your composition. Create a color palette and combination that you like the most and apply them to your project. The second thing to keep in mind is based on the design movement or another kind of inspiration that you like. A create a pattern in Illustrator, this will serve as a background in your composition and will give special twists and style to your design. The last one, third, it's about shapes. Shapes are an essential basis of your design. Choose geometry shapes that you like and use all ones you think are convenient and mixing in your composition. Those were three points that you should keep in mind for your project. Now, the Step 4 is imagine. The aesthetics, colors, pattern, and style already definite. You have everything ready to start in C4D. You can use sketches or be intuitive and work it directly in the program. And the last one, Step 5, is make. Now it's time to go to create your composition in C4D. I am excited that we'll start creating in 3D. See you in the next lesson, we'll talk about how transfer your vector shapes in Cinema4D.
5. 2D to 3D Shapes: Hi, after thinking about the reference and choose what you'd like, make a sketch of your composition, about the style, shapes, colors and the kind of pattern that you want. You will create the shapes in Illustrator to transfer them to C4D. Let's go to start with the patterns. Make a pattern in Illustrator based on the chosen style. In my case, as I was inspired by Memphis's design movement. My background texture will have a composition of thin lines with soft colors. According to the style in which you have chosen to be inspired, create a new pattern be guided by its lines, shapes, colors, for recreate your own pattern. Now, it's time to take a moment to stop the video and work to create your own pattern. Now, the second thing you have to do is about shapes. Also acording to your style, create new shapes and vectorize them in Illustrator. In my case, I use these staggered shapes that will give a special touch to the design. Now, let's go to Vector to Cinema 4D. Now the trick to be able to move the shapes is to know how to save them. Go to save files and choose the option illustrator eight here. Okay. It is the only thing you shall make to transfer it to C4D. Now with the program open, go to File, Merge and accept. Once the shape has been transferred to the scene, we have to give it volume. The tool that will always help us create the effect is extrude. Go to Panel and select "Extrude" here. As explained in the first lesson, the heirachy relationship will be right now. Extrude will be the parent The form will be the child. We are going to drag the shape towards extrude, to generate attributes. That shape is transformed into 3D. Now, depending on the shape, we can change its dimensions, select the parent and go to attribute controls to change as appropriate. You must go to movements section. In my case, I will change from 20 to 50 and you got it. Now, in the next lesson, we will work on the background for the composition.
6. Background Set: Now that we have everything ready, let's create the set. This set will serve as a background to create your composition and will be a great protagonist of your design. Before starting I recommend disabling the view of your shape for a moment to create the set for this go-hierarchy panel and double-click on the points. This will make you not to see it. Now, we are going to start from a primitive shapes which are found in this panel, sustained, click and choose the figure that will help us to model our background. In this case, it will be the cube. We will change its dimensions to adapt it, go to object, and change its dimensions to 600. Then, place the object on the floor, for this go-to position and change the y axis, 300. If you visualize the perspective views, you will see that in the right view, the object is on the floor. The blue line is your guide, it is okay. Return to the perspective view, the cube is not an editable object, for it to be you must go to click in the "editable menu", this will allow you to select their polygons and remove the parts that you don't need. To select a polygon, select the polygon's mode in mode panel. The sides are selected, Lets remove the sides and the front part, Click on the keyboard to delete. And that simple, you already have the basis to design. In the next lesson, you will learn two techniques for basic model for shapes.
7. 3D Geometric Shapes Modeling: In this section, we are going to give interesting designs to the shapes. We are going to see two techniques to modify objects. The first is Atom Array. It is a tool that I love because any object convertes it into lines. We go to the control manager and select Atom Array. Put this tool as a parent, and in this case, the child will be the cube. We'll drag it to Atom Array. And to modify the attributes, we select it and modify the radius of the cylinder to five. And that is all, you can try with any primitive figure that you want. The second technique to obtain the result is modeling the shape. You must consider three tools, the first is the type of shadows view. If you go to display the types of Shadows Display that you can apply to your object are shown. By default, it is Gouraud Shading. For what we need, it will be necessary for the shadows to have lines to help select certain parts of the object. Click for this, click in Quick Shading lines. The second thing to keep in mind is the Selection Option. You can found here. There is an option to select through points, edges, and polygons. The third thing that we must take into account are the Layout options. By default, C4D show as a Startup Layout. There are different options that according to our needs, will adapt the tools to be able to work. In our case, the model I use will be perfect. Now that we know these three concepts, we are going to start making basic modeling of an object, super-easy. First, we are going to insert the cube. o that it is on the floor, we are going to position on Y-axis and at 100. We change the shadow mode to lines. Now we're going to add Segment to the cube to be able to edit it as I need it. We select the cube and go to the option of the Attributes Manager. We will modify the segments in object, try 15. As you see the cube has the segment change. We choose the type of selection we need, for this case, we need the Polygons Option. We're going to modify the cube. To do this, we are going to click on the Edit Option. Now we are going to change the Startup Layer to Model Layer. The modeling tools are activated. Now go to Direct Selection, and we are ready to edit the segments. With the Shift Keyboard we select all the areas that we don't need on all sides. Once selected, we delete it with that Delete key. We do the same process on all the sides. Finally, here you have your Modeled Cube. You can apply these techniques to other shapes that you like. Now that we have modeled the shapes, we are going to create the composition. See you in the next lesson.
8. 3D Geometric Shapes Composition: Hi, welcome back. Now we're going to start shaping our composition in 3D. If you have a sketch, it's great, but also the composition can be intuitive and create it right here, in Cinema4d. To start the composition, and generate contrast in your design, you must keep in mind very basic and important points. Let's talk about this one fundamentals and keep the following in mind. The first is the shape. Let's think again about the things you like. Choose the shape that most attract your attention and using in your composition. There's a lot of power in the shapes. The combination of them will make a great composition. Hierarchy, within the visual field, it generates a visual contrasts. The hierarchy will help you create it. Set important to some object and give others less importance. Choose the separation and distance between them, and in this way, you will generate harmony between all the elements. The scale. Create contrasts, create attention to certain elements. Decide which object will be small and which one will be larger. Direction. How will you position each object? Vertical, horizontal, diagonal, will you rotate them? How that object will be positioned throughout the set. Rhythm. It is a repetition of the form created in a space. Think about how the shapes relate it self to others. Do you need to add more elements? Thinking about it, play with the position of each of them. Taking into account these five points of visual principles, apply them yourself, play with it and have fun. Now come with me to see how I solve the composition of my design.
9. Lights: Hi, welcome to this lesson. Let's talk about light in Cinema 4D. In this panel of light, we will find various options, an option that you will find easy to use is the first light. This light goes to one direction and do have the control to direct it. In the case of this composition, we will use a two points lighting scheme. For the first light, we are going to place the first main light to the right side. Place a second light source on top of your objects on the left side. Let's go to change the shadow attribute for the first light. We will add names to each light. For this, double click and write, first light and second light. By selecting the main light, we are going to modify it's attributes. In general, we can modify the color of the light, its intensity, and kind of shadow Now we're going to do something interesting to make it reflects softly in the design. Change the color of the main light. I will change it to pink. In intensity, you can lower it to soften the light. I will put it at 55 percent. That's okay. We're going to use the physical sky option. It's the light option that gives us all atmospheric conditions of the sun. and I chose it to give a warm style to the design. We're going to change its properties. Then, there is something super interesting here. In date and location, the lighting will change depending on the date we select and the location or country. For example, I am from South America, Perú and I can add lighting from where I live to the scene. You can play around with these options until you have your lighting ready. That's all for the light. Now that you have configured both kinds of lights. We are going to important part to continue creating contrast in your composition. Let's see that set of texture to use in the materials that you will apply in the 3D design.
10. Background Materials: Now we are going to add color and texture to the 3D. The first thing you should have ready is the texture of the background. Based on the style you've decided and create a pattern in Illustrator. Remember the lesson three? use this pattern here. In my case, I want to give the style a subtle detail of line, because the object will be the protagonist of color, without competing between the background design and the objects. They are thin golden lines on a base and soft pink. Now, we're going to create that texture in 3D. The first material, it's for the background. You have the texture saved in "PNG" or "JPG" ready. And let's go to C4D. To create materials, double click on Materials Panel, it's important to create names for each material to have everything organized, and easy to locate later. Let's put the name "Background". Now, double-click on the material. This options window will help you to create the texture and the finish you want. In this part, we have the list of materials edition. In color here we'll load the texture we create in Illustrator. Find the folder where you have saved it and close it. It is important to note selecting the background with the "Polygons" tool. There are two ways to apply materials. The first is to drag it directly to the object in the scene, and the second is to drag it to the object in the Hierarchy Panel. Apply it on the two polygons of the wall. The second material is for the floor. We create a new material. and change the name to floor. We have the "HVS" and "RGB" option. For me, it's okay to work it with "HVS", but you can use the "RGB" option if you want. The next thing to create your new material is to apply texture. Go to "Reflectance". The first property that we are going to work is a "Specular". It is about changing the properties of the brightness intensity. You can play around with this option and create the setting that's right for you. Five, two, zero, 20, and 100. To create a metallic texture, we will add a new layer, and we're going to change the roughness property. The roughness works in the surface of the objects and create a great texture. And the higher the number, the more roughness the surface will have. Change the roughness to seven. Open the "Color Picker" and change the color to your choice. And that's all. Now apply it to the floor. In the next lesson, we are going to create more materials to apply to objects.
11. Shapes Materials: In this lesson, we are going to create more material for all the objects. Keep in mind that you must create harmony in each of the texture according to the style you have chosen. The first texture that you are going to work on, is the one that you will use greater quantity in your composition. In my case, I thought to give it an Op-Art touch. I made horizontal and vertical linear patterns, as well as rectangles. The next thing is to create materials according to the number of patterns, you have created. Just like we made their background materials, we'll apply to this material, but with a little extra detail. Go to color, and load the texture. Then in reflectance, we'll change the color tone to a soft tone to give it a soft reflection according to your main design color. The same applies to other patterns. For this second texture, we'll apply the material only as of the base color. Chose one of the secondary colors from the color palette you are working with and apply them to the material. Apply it to the objects, and that is all. For the next material, we will give a little saturation and lightness to your object. We are going to create new material. and in brightness the intensity increases to 140. Then go to Fresnel option. For the next texture, go to luminance, we add an intensity of 90, and change the color you want. In reflectance, change that roughness to 60, and a specular to 30. We are going to give a little detail to the texture with the gradient, we are going to create a new material, change the name, and go to gradient. Just a couple of colors. That color is great for me. Next just do, luminance, we add a new Beckman layer. Go to layer color, texture, effect, spectral. That's already. Look at what nice gradients. For the next material, we are going to give a new approach to materials with the following texture, metal. We are going to create a new material here, and if we go to this window, you can choose the type of shape to which you will apply the material. In my case, I use toroid. We're going to change that reflectance, create a new reflection layer. Here, select metal and change the reflection parameters metal 6, 70, 20. Now, add color to these material, go to layer color, and add surface metal. Click and change the colors according to your color palette. The last one is glass material. Create new material and deselect the color and reflectance. Select only transparency at 1.6. That's all the materials. I forget this, for the cone. Okay. Already, we have created six different materials that you can apply to different shapes. Play with them, and take the time to create each material now and add it to your project.
12. Camara: The camera basically has the same feature as a real camera. Here we can change the parameters according to what we need. By default, the camera shows the property of the moment of the scene. For example, if I add a camera now, the perspective will be the same exactly. To activate it, click here. The blank sign means that the camera is positioned in the chosen perspective. The camera is used to show which perspective we want to configure for the render. To do this, we navigate around the objects and we chose the perspective that we like the most. If we dislike the camera and move away, we see the camera is located. To return to a view of camera, click again. Now let's see the camera in the project. This position right now is perfect for me, so I add the camera and activate it. This will be the perfect view to render.
13. High Dynamic Range Imaging: HDRI means High Dynamic Range Image, and is a panoramic photo that helps to have realistic lighting to the object in 3D. Always keep this tool in mind because it is important for the result of the lighting, color, contrast, and finish of the render. Everything change depending on what image that you're using for your HDRI. You can find high-quality HDRI's for free in this site, here are different options you can use. But for this project, I'll use this HDRI to download it from the Project and Resource section. To create the effect, you have to add a sky object. This creates sphere around the scene, to apply it we must use it as a material. For this, we add the sky to the object manager, add a material and load the HDRI luminance. Turn off the other channels, color, and reflectance. Only work with luminance, and apply it to the sky. For the HDRI to work well, we must activate global illumination in render. The global illumination calculates lights more realistically, and in the renders, generate more realistic feel for their final design. Go to activate it in render setting, effects and chose global illumination. Then activate ambient occlusion. These effects calculate shadows to make objects look more realistic. Go to Effect and add ambient occlusion. In the next lesson, let's talk about physical setting configuration.
14. Render: Render is the process of visualizing the 3D image. For the final result of the design, we're going to change the settings. Go to "Render Settings," and we're going to change the configuration. But before we are going to make a render or what it looks like now to compare it later with the new settings. Go to "Render View," click, and wait for the preview render, it's only a preview render. This is a result of the preview render. We will improve this render. For this, go to "Output," here, you can change the dimension of your 3D. If you want the 3D for Instagram post, you can use this square format, 1080 per 1080 will be okay. But for this project, I will use 1150 by 8000, and in resolution, 300, and save, file, and choose TIFF. TIFF, this is a good format, the file are very high-quality, much higher quality than most JPEG or PNG, and this is a good option for render. In depth, put 16 bit channel. In "Global Illumination," go to "Custom Sample Count" and change to 150. Now, this is an important part. change from a Standard to Physical render, uncheck "Depth of File." You don't need this option in this render. Here in sample is a sampling of the pixels. There are three options here, fixed, adaptive, and progressive. For fixed, C4D calculate the number of sample of every part of that objects, and in adaptive, a feature that this option has is that C4D calculates the object that need the larger sampling, and adaptive gives you a cleaner result of render. This is a good option for render. The last one, progressive, is used for an interactive render, this calculates the render at the same time that you make change. In this case, we're going to use the adaptive option. This section is about more solution of sampling, it's for the global sampling of everything in the scene. For example, the shadow, the ambient occlusion, materials, lights, and everything. For this change, custom, and in shading error, change to 15. This last section helps to have greater precision in a specific aspect. For example, in blurriness subdivision, It helps to clean the part of the render that have less information. Avoid having grain results on the render, change to 10. With shadow subdivision, we add a much cleaner render, change to five. With ambient occlusion subdivision, C4D soften the shadows. In this case change to five. The last one don't need calculation, change to zero and close. There are all the settings to render our design. The render time depends on the characteristics of your computer. Now, let's go to "Render," click here, and wait for the render to be ready.
15. Post Work Photoshop: We can use Camera Raw to enhance the render to file and apply sharpening, contrast, color, tonal range, and more. Open the Render in Photoshop. Make a copy and convert to smart object. Let's go to Filter and Camera raw filter. For renders, I usually use these options: General detail, HSL adjustments if necessary, a Split Toning option. Let's start with general, here you can change all the options. I will use a bit of saturation, clarity, and then texture. Then we can change the parameters a little bit for that sharpness and lower the noise. In this case it's not necessary to change this option. Let's change a split toning. Here you can change it according to how you prefer. Then you can save it in PNG or JPEG format. With just a small change we can improve the render. This is before and after and it's better, now.
16. Final Thoughts: You made it, congrats. I hope you had fun and enjoyed the course. We cover everything from the main tools that we had you empower to create 3D designs. To devise your project based on reference inspired by different movements of graphical designs. Also you have great 2D elements to incorporate them into Cinema4D, and you have created your composition. All this effort is worth sharing I will love to see your 3D design. Upload your 3D design to the project gallery on the class. So I can send you feedback about the project if you want. If you have any questions or comments, leave them in discussion class. Now, I'll get back to everyone. And remind, it's so important to experiment and explore a lot when you're trying to find your style. I hope you have learned something new and have enjoyed this 3D course with me. This is my first Skillshare course. If you like this class, please leave a review in section Projects and Resources. You can follow my Skillshare profile or my Instagram, feel free to send me any question. So thank you so much for following my class.
Eveling Salazar, Graphic Designer - 3D Designer
