Earlier this month I wrote a piece entitled Do You Imagine designing for Star Wars, Terminator or Blade Runner? Here’s a place to start.
In this story I gave a run down on the program I have used off and on for 15 years + called Cinema 4D from Maxon.
Recently, with a bit of spare time on my hands for various reasons, I decided to revisit Cinema 4D in depth as I really had done nothing serious in it for quite a few years.
And boy, has it changed! Stuff it could always do but required a LOT of modelling and tweaking is now possible in just a few mouse clicks. There’s lots more too, so the learning curve started all over again!
To get this epiphany, I looked again at Greyscale Gorilla, a training organisation specialising in graphics and 3D stuff. Originally I had done their initial tutorial for Cinema 4D where you followed along building a basic scene, adding some materials and textures and then, well, blowing it up.
This time, I had a look at their more in-depth tutorials that cover different aspects of Cinema 4D, covering major commands and features of the program. This is broken down into the major headings of Intro to Getting Started, Starting With the Basics, Dynamics, Deforming Objects, Basics of Lighting, Materials and Textures, Applying Materials, Modelling with Splines and NURBS, Mograph Cloners, More MoGraph, Modelling Basics and so on.
Each section is video based with trainer Chris Schmidt taking you through the training in frankly, a very easy and entertaining way, and each lasts between 15 minutes and 54 minutes.
Whilst it helps to go through the lessons one by one, I found I could skip to stuff I wanted to see and then backtrack without too much issue.
If you have an interest 3D modelling and animation, I strongly suggest you get a trial copy of Cinema 4D at www.maxon.net and then go to https://training.greyscalegorilla.com/courses/take/introduction-to-cinema-4d and follow along at your leisure.
And best of all, unless I have missed something, its all for free.