Cinema 4D Beginner’s Guide

Book Preface

With Cinema 4D, you can quickly and easily bring your visions to life. This beginner’s guide will walk you through creating and animating a 3D scene, with tips and techniques for everything from photorealistic rendering to motion graphics.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting to Know Cinema 4D, provides an introduction to 3D space and how to navigate the Cinema 4D interface.
Chapter 2, Modeling Part 1: Edges, Faces, and Points, provides a foundation in polygonal modeling.
Chapter 3, Modeling Part 2: Splines, NURBS, Deformers, and Boole, takes modeling to a new direction by using parametric objects.
Chapter 4, Materials and Shaders, will bring character to your models by adding surface properties.
Chapter 5, Lighting and Rendering, will introduce lighting to add additional realism and dimension to your objects, as well as explore global visual settings.
Chapter 6, Animation, provides an overview of the linear animation process as we animate a camera and lighting in our 3D environment.
Chapter 7, MoGraph, provides a brief overview of many common MoGraph objects such as cloner and tracer, as well as how to work with Cinema 4D’s built-in Dynamics system.
Chapter 8, XPresso, provides an introduction to node-based programming showing the usage of Math to connect properties of objects to one another.
Chapter 9, An Overview of Additional Tools, shows how to use Hair, Sketch and Toon, and Cloth.

Chapter 10, Optimizing Your Workflow, brings everything we’ve learned together through exporting multipass renders and spatial data as we composite our final animation in Adobe After Effects. Appendix: Pop Quiz Answers, contains answers to the Pop Quiz sections at the end of
Chapter 2 and Chapter 5.

What you need for this book

A basic understanding of computer graphics and linear animation will be helpful, but not necessary. The book provides a step-by-step introduction to working in 3D space as well as working on a timeline. Cinema 4D is our primary tool, but we will also briefly use Adobe Illustrator for drawing Bezier splines and Adobe After Effects for post-production compositing.