Cinema 4D: As a Design Tool

My last session for C4D with Jay this year - I have to say I was surprised at how much I loved this session. It had to be one of my favourites simply because of how much I learned. The thing with 4D is that the more you put into it the more rewards you get out of it, it's so easy to use. The most surprising thing for this session was how easy the bottle cap was to create. I thought with the unique shape of it it would be difficult, but it was one of the easiest ones to create. Based off the shape of it it was just piling together different circles and spreading them out, then creating a shape over the top. 

One of the things I liked about this sessions was the availability to use what we'd created as templates, and could take them home and edit the maps that Jay gave us. This is what I did shown below, inspired by my love for Once Upon a Time and Foxes. I created something that was unique and individual so instead of using a glass bottle I wanted to create something "frosted" or matte, which gave the design a bit more of an professional and expensive finish. 

My favourite part of the process this year was 4D. I was surprised at how I found this, because normally I would shy away from software that involves 3D process because of how complex I initially thought it would be. This session proved me completely wrong, as if I followed it slowly then it would actually be quite easy to do. I was really impressed with how far my skills went this year.

Cinema 4D: Textures

One of the final process and production sessions with Jay covered the use of Cinema 4D and textures. Like all the sessions, I found this to be one of the most helpful ones - it proved informative and I learned so much that previously I hadn't known. One of the things that I'd like to have done differently in this sessions is to not storm ahead and think that I can learn things on my own, as Jay had to come over and revert my work that I'd done. Although I thought at this point I was quite comfortable with Cinema 4D, I did create a lot of errors in my work that had to be reverted. This made me feel a bit unconfident in the software that I was using, although the outcome of the work I was actually immensely happy with. The software is so experimental, so that means the majority of the work can be made flexible and personal to you, so no two work is the same.

One of the things I love about Jay's sessions is how much I learn. Although it feels like a lot to take in at first, the restriction of phones means that we can "wire ourselves" in and learn everything without any distractions. This was always a good thing for me as C4D was a software that I was least confident in this year - so it was nice to finally sit down and learn it without feeling too nervous. 

I really enjoyed the experimental stage of learning this software, as it means there's nothing that can really go wrong in terms of changing the shape - just because yours doesn't look like someone elses doesn't mean it's wrong, and although we were semi-restricted based on colour and pattern, we could still stylise it personally. One of my favourite outcomes was the final one we did, as it looked so realistic - one of the things about C4D was that it didn't really look digitally created sometimes.

 The other thing about the software was how different you can make the outcomes based off what you change - lighting, colour, tone, illumination etc.

Cinema 4D was quickly becoming one of my favourite software to use, based off how easy it was to create something, and the fact there were so many tutorials online meant that it was quite easy to create something that I liked.

In general, I loved these sessions as I learned so much and could apply it to other projects, and I could also go out of my own time and personalise it to what I wanted to do, which I did in the latest session with Jay.

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)