Category: How-to

Applying a Material Over a Textured Hierarchy in Cinema 4D

This tip is a perfect example of a technique that is so strange that you may never use it. However, if you do run into this issue, you might save a few precious minutes of your time with the technique below.

Cinema 4D (like many other 3D packages) applies materials hierarchically—if you apply a material to an object that has many children, all of the untextured children get that material applied too. There might be a situation (testing lighting for example) where you want to take an already textured hierarchy and apply a new material to all of the objects. Watch the short video below to see what that means.
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The Razorback – Part 49: Posing the Machine and Setting Up a Camera

In this part of the Razorback screencast, we start off my looking at the rear tire and tweaking it a bit for accuracy. Once that’s complete, we move on to the concept of layout and posing. It’s a nice mixture of techniques, and I hope you enjoy it.
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Customizing the Layout and Palettes in Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D has always had one of the most customizable and intuitive layout systems. The ability to create and reorder palettes is just amazingly powerful. I’ve had a few viewers ask about my layout, and I thought I’d give a bit of insight into why and how I setup my workspace the way I do.

Color picker palette

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Using Nulls with the Array Object in Cinema 4D

The Array Object in Cinema 4D is a convenient building block. Although some of its functionality comes with the MoGraph Cloner, it is still my favorite modeling aid when I need a few of the same object precisely laid out in a circle.

One of the challenges the Array object poses, is the lack of coordinates for position and rotation as you are working with the objects. This can easily be remedied by using a Null Object as the parent that the Array is replicating. Check out the short video below for an explanation.
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Stitching Murals in Hugin and Removing Obstructions

Before diving into this tutorial, I’d like to thank the following posts and their authors:

The above posts armed me with the knowledge and techniques needed to go out there and shoot some really cool looking murals, while teaching me what I needed to create the below video. Read More

The Razorback – Part 48: Mirroring the Right Arm and Texturing the Rotor

In part 48, we take a look at mirroring our UV map work, and duplicating one of the texture maps for the arms. We then move on to a more procedural method of texturing the front brake rotors.

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Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D (like many other modern 3D packages) has the ability to assign custom keyboard shortcuts. I typically assign a few groups of custom keyboard shortcuts for things like selection tools and painting tools.

In the video below, we take a look at how you can assign your own shortcuts.

The Razorback – Part 47: Painting the Mapped Arm

This part of the Razorback series focuses on painting the fully UV mapped arm. It’s a simple video, but hopefully, there will be more interesting parts in the near future.

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An Introduction to Hugin – My Favorite Photo Stitching Tool

Desert Bar

Here’s a post that is a bit different for this blog. I don’t typically post about photography, but in this case it’s more about image manipulation. Photography is one of my hobbies, and especially panoramic photography. Some of the image straightening techniques explored here can also be used to prepare textures for use in 3D, so it’s still relatively relevant to this blog. Read More

Light Clipping in Cinema 4D

The Near Clip and Far Clip features in Cinema 4D are pretty useful, but they can be slightly tricky to understand. In the images below, you can see an example of how near clipping will influence a light’s illumination, but in the video we take a look at how it can also influence its shadow. Read More

The Razorback – Part 46: Combining The UV Maps Into One Texture Space

This episode takes a quick look at the concepts involved in joining geometry for the simplification of UV texture files.
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Create a UV Mesh Layer in Cinema 4D

This tip takes a quick look at one of my favorite Cinema 4D texturing features; the Create UV Mesh command. Creating a UV mesh layer is primarily useful for taking your UV mapped object into another painting package for additional texturing work. BodyPaint 3D provides a comprehensive toolset for painting and editing textures, but Photoshop is the standard, and a lot of texture artists prefer it. Read More

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