C4D 9.5: Real-World 3D Animation Production

Doug Bassett Washington DC, USA ©2006 Doug Bassett and CreativeCOW.net. All rights reserved.

When Cinema 4D version 5 came out, I was hard pressed to find anything on the web or in the bookstore to aid in my learning the application in a practical way. In 2005-2006, there has been an abundance of training materials out in book form, web, and now video. With all of these materials, the competition will start getting tougher and the authors and trainers will need some solid goals as well as multiple means to communicate their ideas. Larry Mitchell is well on his way with the release of C4D 9.5: Real-World 3D Animation Production. He has established specific goals for this book and doesn't stray from his objective

You will get your hands on most of the major capabilities of C4D on a project basis. If I had to tell you about this book in one sentence it would be that this book is the extension of the C4D Quick Start manual. You will learn much more about the "how to" than the Quick Start and like the Quick Start, you will not get an explanation of the tools or why something works the way it does, but you will remain focused on the "how to" and the project goal.

Before I break the book down farther let me say for those of us who have become accustomed to video tutorials, we're in luck! The included DVD has flash tutorials of all chapters. There is more info in the book compared to the flash tutorials so you'll still want to crack the book. The compression of the files really makes Larry's voice sound funky and it's possible that it may irritate some people if the slow pace doesn't. For you, there is the book and you can be irritated by your own voice in your head. But, if you stick with the Flash tutorials you get used to them and eventually forget about the compression.

Ok, to the book. Without failure, every book I've been through has had at least one section not work out the way it was supposed to and this one is no exception. In fact the very first lesson (demoed in R9.1 as are many of the lessons) did not work in R9.5.2. For now, I'll just mention that the problem has to do with untriangulation. Rather than explain every difficulty here, just post at the COW and I'll help you out.

Something I really liked about the book was its layout. It flowed much like you would expect. I didn't have to jump around reading this sidebar note or figure out what some icon meant when there was additional material. The projects start with basic modeling and get more interesting and challenging as they progress through to Gaming Simulation. In between these chapters, Larry demonstrates Body Paint, Animation, Cloth Simulation, Dynamics Simulation, Character Animation and Broadcast Applications. He incorporates all the modules and expresso throughout these lessons.

Keep in mind that there are many ways of doing things in C4D and not all approaches are necessarily the best way. I must confess that there are some really round about approaches in the workflow of some of these projects. One, which I would try to limit, is modeling with Booleans. (Sorry all you Bryce users) Two, when making seamless textures, use the offset filter in Photoshop.

©Copyright 2006 Doug Bassett | Creative Cow
All Rights Reserved