Book Image

Cinema 4D R14 Cookbook, Second Edition

By : Simon Russell, Michael Szabo
Book Image

Cinema 4D R14 Cookbook, Second Edition

By: Simon Russell, Michael Szabo

Overview of this book

<p>Cinema 4D is a 3D modeling, animation, and rendering application developed by MAXON. It is becoming the most popular 3D design program in the world and learning it now will only help you become a better and more valuable designer in the 3D design industry. It is capable of procedural and polygonal sub modeling, animating, lighting, texturing, rendering, and common features found in 3D modeling applications.</p> <p>This book provides all the Cinema 4D knowledge you need to become well-versed with the software in the form of short recipes, which get straight to the point about what you need to know to start designing great 3D projects.</p> <p>Cinema 4D R14 Cookbook, Second Edition will guide you towards becoming an adept 3D designer, giving you all the tools to succeed in the field of 3D graphics. The book is set up to gradually introduce more sophisticated topics the deeper you go, and by the end of it you'll have a great working knowledge of the program. Early on you'll learn the basics of the program, and then jump right into how to start creating your own 3D objects to use in your designs.</p> <p>Along the way you'll learn how to set up lights, cameras, and materials to turn your work into something that feels more like art and design. Towards the end of the book you will be introduced to powerful tools like Xpresso, Mograph, Particles, Sculpting, and Dynamics to take your work to the next level. You'll be impressed by how easy it is to design top quality work once you lay the foundation for the entire program through this book. By the end of this book, you'll have opened new creative doors and given yourself the opportunity to be a more successful and versatile designer.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Cinema 4D R14 Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using video as materials


You're not just limited to still photos as textures in your materials; you can easily implement video as a material and apply it to a 3D object. There are a couple of details to take note of that are unique to video, but this recipe shows how to apply a video file as the main source of your material.

Getting ready

Locate the Screen_Saver.mov file in the C4D Content Pack for this scene, and open the Computer_Monitor.c4d file for us to use as our starting point for this recipe.

How to do it...

  1. So let's say we have a computer monitor that has been inactive for a while; we need to activate the screen saver. We've got a separate screen saver clip that we want to be applied as footage inside our 3D scene; all we need to do is get it inside our monitor.

  2. Let's start by adding a Plane primitive to our scene and rename it as Screen. It's important to pay attention to the Height and Width of our plane, as it needs to have the proper aspect ratio of our video file, otherwise it will...