Cinema 4D & Design

My first taste of Cinema 4D this year was a really successful one. Last year, I struggled immensely to get to grips with C4D, the pace of the workshops was too quick and I gave up quite quickly, which lagged me behind even further. This year, Jay told us to place our phones away and pay attention, which helped immensely with how I got to learn the ropes of C4D (even so much that my next project would use Cine 4D)

The hardest thing was keeping up with Jay; after using illustrator for a little bit in the previous project it made it much easier to sketch out the shape I wanted. After playing around with the software for a while, the interface was quite easy to understand, morphing together all the Adobe Software tools (key frames, colours, textures) - one of my favourite parts of the software was creating the colours and textures you'd wanted for each shape; for example, if you wanted a textured look, then you could insert an image of your choosing to create something that wrapped around the shape.

When I'd first started creating my design, my peers told me it looked similar to the shape of a chicken - hence why the text I'd chosen was "cluck cluck", I liked the shape, but afterwards thought it looked slightly tacky, though it was a nice start to Cine 4D that I initially wasn't confident in.

My favourite session so far was definitely this one, the relaxed atmosphere behind the work and the pace was a comfortable position for me to keep up with (I'd managed to learn quite a bit of transferable skills that I could retain and use for future projects)

The hardest thing I'd learned about the session was creating separate layers fro each of the shapes if I wanted to alternate the colour, as originally the entire file was pulled together, so I had to separate it and change the "extrude" to apply it to all of the separate layers.

Overall, I'd loved this session - I was quite surprised at how much so, and my previous distaste for C4D had gone away, as I'd thought it was quite complicated, but, actually, it was quite an easy to get to know software, and involved a lot of experimentation. I even applied it to further tests for my next project, Hyperrealities, shown below:

(The canvas was 360 degrees, rotating around the center object, in this case, a figure)