Any Cinema 4D users?

[Pamela Galli]

I am trying out a demo for Mac.  Anyone have any experience with it?

[theGenius Indigo]

*Raises hand*

What would you like to know?

Incidentally, I started this thread in regard to rigging meshes for Second Life in Cinema 4D.

[Pamela Galli]

Can you bake textures with it?

[theGenius Indigo]

Absolutely; use the Cinema 4D texture baking "tag" as it's called on the object with the material of your choice (you must use a material for the object).

[Pamela Galli]

In Blender I often add a circle and then extrude.  In C4D I can find a disk but not a circle-- is there one?

[theGenius Indigo]

There is a spline primitive circle / ellipse / ring and an extrusion object, also called sweep NURBS which uses a profile and a path.

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Pamela Galli wrote:

In Blender I often add a circle and then extrude.  In C4D I can find a disk but not a circle-- is there one?

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[Pamela Galli]

Ah, well I will keep watching tutorials then.  Totally baffled so far. :-)

[Madeliefste Oh]

/me waves at Pamela.

C4D user as well. Excellent choice, Pam

Sure you can bake. (Use the baking tag). One of the things I like best is that you can bake to psd files (high quality). You have the possibility to bake all options into one texture, or to bake all options on several layers in psd. So for example you can bake ambient occlussion (this is selfshadowing of an object, same what you know as shadowmaps from sculpties) into a layer, the used material into another layer, light in a layer, shadows in a layer, and so on. Then later in Photoshop you can still edit each layer and finetune the intensity of each layer.

Tons of interesting tutorials and excellent explination about UVmapping can be found here: www.c4dcafe.com
It is worth to become a member there so you can download the video tutorials.

[Pamela Galli]

Thank you so much Madeliefste! I have been having a bit of trouble finding tutorials.

I have heard good things about C4D -- it's really a matter of do I have any brain cells left after learning (a little bit of) Blender. :matte-motes-silly:

 

One thing that is not clear -- do you use the whole suite of programs including Bodypaint?  Or just the C4D Prime? (Which is what I am looking at.)

 

 

 

 

[blakopal Galicia]

bodypaint is excellent for working with UVs on your mesh objects. which translates into PSD files for your textures.

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks blackopal -- what I wonder is what the advantage of Bodypaint is over the basic Cinema4D, assuming you can texture with both.  Or can you texture with both?

[Madeliefste Oh]

You can texture with both, but Bodypaint is more powerful. You can look to Bodypaint is your 3D Photoshop. It gives you the possibility to use techniques you know from Photoshop, like clone, sponge, smear. You can use tools like magic wand and lasso, you can make masks. You can use as many texturelayers as you like. And there is a real powerfull tool not known from Photoshop, which is projection painting. You can more or less project you texture on the object, like it was a slide. You can move, shift, scale etc direct in 3D with this.

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks  Maddie -- Just this summer I bought CS5 Extended so I could use the 3D capabilities (not that I actually use it; I still rely on GIMP) so I probably will not be buying Bodypaint any time soon -- but am very seriously considering buying C4D so wanted to make sure I can texture with it.

[Madeliefste Oh]

I'm a longtime Photoshopper, and when I first started to work with 3d in Blender I experimented a bit with texturing in 3D, but I did not like the results at all. I experimented also a bit with the 3D painting in PS, but I never could get a grip on it.

So for some time I did al my texture work just in 2d in PS, the upload to Blender, check, work further in PS, upload to Blender, check, back to PS, etc. It takes a lot of time, but I was at least satisfied with the results.

When I started to use C4D I could get a student license for the Studio version, which includes Bodypaint. For about a year or so I didn't even touch it, I was too busy to learn about other options of the program. For texturing I made uv maps and textured the maps in PS. Since a few months I'm more interested in texturing directly on the object, and Bodypaint is a big help.

See for yourself, what you can do with it