All the best movies these days need CGI. From relatively simple green screen shoots to full on 3D modelling and animation, virtually nothing is impossible anymore.
But if you want to break into that side of film or TV making, where do you start? What tools do you need?
In this series, we’ll briefly look at different tools available for creating these visual wonders and how you can get them and learn them in order to move forward. Hopefully it might whet your appetite to look deeper into this area of visual creation.
The first we’ll look at Cinema 4D from Maxon.
I personally was introduced to Cinema 4D around 2003 off memory and was immediately captivated at its potential. Indeed, I even created a TV advert built solely in Cinema 4D and shown on Channel 10 in Sydney. It was all based around a bottle of a particular pool chemical that cleaned up contaminated swimming pools, and involved modelling the bottle, creating a label, some basic animation and sound effects and a voice over.
Cinema 4D allows you to build complex models out of basic building blocks. Think cubes, cylinders, spheres and so on. From these base blocks, tools are used to manipulate them at point and polygon level and turn them into skyscrapers, spaceships, dinosaurs or whatever you can imagine.
The image at top shows a model built in Cinema 4D before materials and lights are added and the final scene rendered.
Materials, textures and lighting are added for realism, and then they can be animated over time.
When you know how, a simple cube can be turned into the Millenium Falcon or a cylinder into a pod of dolphins!
Cinema 4D has some very good tutorials available online that take you step by step through the interface and working in 3D space, explaining the use of the tools available, how to build, manipulate, animate, light, add textures, use particles and export final scenes.
You can get a trial version of the program (Mac or Windows) at www.maxon.net and either subscribe to the program either monthly or annually from around AUD$95 / month.