September2005

ISSUE - SEPTEMBER 2005

SIGGRAPH 2005 Interview with Paul Baab - MAXON USA CEO on page 5.

Follow this tutorial and learn the techniques used to model a car for beginners on page 18.

On Page 23 learn how to create displacement maps with ZBrush in this introductory tutorial.

Page 5

Interview with Paul Baab by Sebstien Florand “Fluffy”

Page 11

WIN ZBrush 2 !

Page 12-17

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw by Jamie Hamel - Smith

Page 18-20

Car Modeling for Beginners by Daubermman

PAGE 21-22 Review - Character Development with Jannis Labelle by Gary

PAGE 23-26 Introduction to ZBrush Part 1 by Mark Gmehling

PAGE 27-29 Making Lava with CINEMA 4D by Rui Batista

PAGE 30-32 Review - Fusion Thing by Gary Zullo

PAGE 33-34 Shader Building 2 - Abstract Materials by Bram van Gerwen

PAGE 35-41 Buildings, Origami and C4D by Luistappa

PAGE 42-43 Spotlight on Daniel Mueri

PAGE 44-48 Best of CINEMA 4D Gallery

PAGE 49

PAGE 50

Editors Notes

3D Attack Team

Interview

zBlur: zBlur is a post effect for Cinema 4D which can be used as an alternative to C4D's own DOF. zBlur does not cancel out other post effects, it does not require the Advanced Render module, and it supports reflections and bleed control. zBlur also has a preview window and a reference object that can make changes right in the editor.

LUMEN: LUMEN is a plug-in for Cinema 4D which provides a fast and efficient global illumination and special effects solution.

LUMEN creates an array of lights using a source object's points or polygons. LUMEN source objects can be any polygon object, spline, primitive, or primitive spline, and several light parameters can be controlled with information derived from bitmaps or procedural textures.

OLX: OLX is a Cinema 4D plug-in that replaces and extends Cinema's built in Object Library functionality. Not only does OLX support submenus, it also supports separate libraries for documents, scenes, objects, materials, render settings and layouts.

LSD: LSD is a post effect plug-in for CINEMA 4D that can be used to create stunning color/special effects. LSD gives you the ability to use a new created zBuffer or CINEMA 4D’s own zBuffer to colorize, desaturate, and/or add grain and noise to your pictures or animations.

For a complete list of 3D Attack Plug-in features, prices, videos, tutorials and screenshots visit our shop at www.3dattack.net/shop/

SIGGRAPH - Inter vie w with P aul Ba b b

By Se bastien F lor and aka F luf fy the production bundle is pretty cool.

Fluffy: The new production bundle is aimed at bigger studios, does that mean that MAXON has a shift in its strategy?

Paul Babb - CEO MAXON USA

Interview

Fluffy: Hello Paul, thank you very much for this interview. Can you introduce yourself for people who don’t know you?

Paul: You are welcome. My name is Paul Babb, and I am president of MAXON USA. Fluffy: For those who don’t know, in detail, the company MAXON, what is the structure of the company?

How many people work for it overall, and in which countries does it have a offices?

Paul: MAXON Germany is the parent company and I believe they have about 25 employees roughly.

Then there is MAXON USA with about 18 employees and Maxon UK with 8 to 10 people working there.

Finally we have an office in Japan, but with only 2 or 3 guys that do marketing, translation and support for that country. Added to that, we have a network of distributors all over the world.

Fluffy: CINEMA 4D 9.5 has just been announced at Siggraph, do you have a favorite new feature?

Paul: HDRI and Open EXR rendering with 16 and 32bits support with

Paul: Absolutely not. In the US, particularly in North and South America, we have a very strong presence in the motion graphics industry, broadcast graphics, video graphics – those types of things – so we are really dedicated in keeping these people happy. You can see also that CINEMA 4D 9.5 has an After Effects, Shake, Motion, Combustion and Alienbrain output. That talks about the commitment we have toward the people working in the motion graphics industry, so that they can work faster and easier. The production bundle is more geared toward the tools that we are providing for bigger studios, and that are very specialized in the digital environment and matte painting, which started with the customized tools that we did for Sony, which are now the same tools that we bring to a larger audience.

The production bundle came out because we started thinking about the need for a Linux version, so big studios can access more memory, work on bigger projects faster.

Then the Renderman connection came out and we realized that it could be part of something bigger, along with the Linux connection, new matte painting tools, new 16 and 32bits output as a whole.

Also, we decided to push the Linux connection into a production environment, because we see that as an opportunity to provide a service contract for studios who just want to get

5

the new versions each time they come out without worrying about the cost, as opposed at paying an undefined upgrade cost all the time.

We did get a lot of requests from large studios to be able to budget their software expenditure on a yearly basis, and because sometimes we don’t know what the upgrade will cost until it comes out.

The production bundle enables us to have a service contract with a regular upgrade price, no matter what comes out, and to add some more advanced technical support as well.

Fluffy: Will the individual users be able to buy the Production bundle?

Paul: Yes. It is going be priced a bit higher, mainly because of the additional service contract and because we want to be able to continue providing the high quality of technical support that we provide right now.

Unfortunately Linux is not easy to implement and we anticipate a lot of technical support for individuals.

On the side, though, some of the features like the Renderman plugin will be made available separately.

Fluffy: Talking about Linux, which version will you support?

Paul: I believe all the major ones, CentOS, Redhat, to name a few.

Fluffy: We have seen that new render engines are in development for CINEMA 4D, Final Render Stage-2 and Maxwell, and now the connection to Prman and AIR. What is MAXON’s position regarding that?

Do you see this as competition or healthy for MAXON since these companies are starting to have an interest in developing more for that software?

SIGGRAPH - Inter vie w with P aul Ba b b

Interview

By Se bastien F lor and aka F luf fy Paul: For me it’s all about facilitating the artist. Every render has its particular strengths and qualities. If you are limited to just our render engine because you think your ego is bruised, or because somebody else’s renderer is better, it’s foolish because it’s all about the images that come out. I love seeing what an artist can do with it, no matter what is “it”. Frankly, if somebody uses BodyPaint along with Maya and produce these crazy, amazing images, I’m just as proud our tools are part of the process. It would be foolish to think that it has to be done entirely with CINEMA 4D. You know, you use Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, even pencil and paper… as long as we are part of that mix, part of that production, that’s great. Also, Renderman for example, is an industry standard in the film industry, and if you’re not supporting it, you’re gonna be shut out. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to produce cool Art. I’m a fan, as anybody else, so the more the merrier.

Fluffy: So that means that Advanced Render will continue to be developed?

Paul: Oh, of course. While I say that other render engines available is good for creativity, we still have to have a good rendering engine so that our users that are buying the core package, or can’t spend a fortune on software and still have to do good work and produce good quality images can benefit from it. So we will always have to try to improve our renderer so that it stands up to the quality of what’s available at that time in the industry.

Fluffy: BodyPaint 3D is actually your best argument to reach out to

why we would have to, you can render a single frame if you want. For animation there is a lot of material if you want to see what the software can do. The proof of content is there if you look at what Sony did with the Polar Express movie and a lot of broadcast material, as well, done by our customers. I guess in some instances there maybe be a need for it here and there.

Harald Egel - CEO MAXON Germany

big Studios and other 3D packages users, do you plan on developing more bridges to more applications?

Paul: You know, the only other application that I’ve heard of there being some interest in is Houdini.

There are some studios who use Houdini for different effects like particles, volumetric smoke and such, and we are just starting to hear people asking about a connection with BodyPaint 3D. The thing is you can actually use BodyPaint with any 3D package you want because of the OBJ format. I guess if people ask for it, we can always work on a specific connection, since it’s not tremendously difficult to write a plugin to have the object to import in BodyPaint and back, so it’s more about people requesting it. But for now Maya, 3DS Max, XSI and Lightwave are the major ones, most requested ones, and we cover it all already.

Fluffy: Basically, that’s not a demo they are asking for, they are asking for a way to learn CINEMA 4D. They already like it but want an easier way to learn it before doing the commitment of a purchase.

Paul: That’s right. When you are doing a tutorial you have to start over each time you close the software. I see your point, but that’s definitely up to MAXON Germany to see if they are willing to involve some efforts in this. There can also be a backlash with these types of things. If you look at Maya’s personal learning edition, people were complaining about the watermarks and limitations, but you have to put something in there to protect your

Fluffy: Do you have any plan on releasing a demo version of CINEMA 4D that would allow users to save their files?

Bjoern Marl (Srek) - MAXON’s QA Man

Paul: That would be definitely up to the Germany team and the programmers as to how implement something like that. Personally, I don’t think there are a lot of reasons

6

efforts. I know people compare with Maya’s learning edition, but if you are a student in school, an animation school for example, you can

SIGGRAPH - Inter vie w with P aul Ba b b

By Se bastien F lor and aka F luf fy tutorials on their website and others followed us later on.

Fluffy: What was the company you were working for?

Interview

Kai Pedersen

purchase the CINEMA 4D Studio bundle without limitations or watermarks for $295. You can’t do that with Maya. We are talking about a $2000 product without limitations on rendering. Another big advantage to this is that the student can use this version and produce some work that they can enter to a festival because there is no watermark or rendering limitations. If you are going along the personal learning edition way, you can learn how to use the product, but not produce anything from it.

Paul: I was the product marketing manager for Electric Image. We recognize that there is a huge need for training material, we try to utilize third party’s books and people who produce DVD’s and such, but there is a lack of cohesion in that so we are currently in the development stage of putting together an educational website that will be video based. We are going to try to keep the videos somewhat short, between 3 to 5 minutes. We’ll try to have a lot

Fluffy: The new users are usually complaining about the lack of tutorials coming from MAXON. Will you take steps to remedy this in the near future?

Paul: Great question. I came from another 3D package years ago, and one of the first things I did, and this was 10 years ago, when I had interns come in the requirements were to write a tutorial every two weeks or once a month, and these tutorials were based on the technical support that we were getting in.

These tutorials were text based 10 years ago, because that was the best way to get information out to the users, and we were one of the pioneers in the 3D packages to offer

MAXON AT SIGGRAPH

of beginners material and also focus on some of the more advanced things. It will never replace hands on training, but hopefully it will close the gap and give people the knowledge needed. We are also trying to keep the cost of subscription very low. The basic tutorials will be available for free, and then we’ll have some more advanced things that will be done by professionals, with people like Alex Lindsay from Pixel

7

Tilo Kuhn and Raffi

Corps who is very well known for training and who is going produce some tutorials for us on visual effects, and also some professionals from the motion graphics industry, explaining how they work with our tools in the broadcast industry, for example.

The system we are building will enable people to request a tutorial, so we can start polling and see what areas need to be covered. Each tutorial will have its own mini-forum where you will be able to actually add comments for that tutorial which will appear below the tutorial, and the instructor will be able to see it and respond and even upload additional files or images if he needs to provide some more help.

We are going have a small subscription cost, mainly to pay the professionals for their time and to pay for the service and server bandwidth, because we are looking at transferring terabytes of information. We really are not looking at making money out of it, we are looking after creating a common place for educational material.

SIGGRAPH - Inter vie w with P aul Ba b b

By Se bastien F lor and aka F luf fy We actually have been approached by people who have done tutorials in the past and who are hosting them on their website and looking for a place where their tutorials won’t be hit by the traffic, so we are trying to create a place where we can bring that all together.

We will try to put those into specific industry tracks, opposed at focusing on just 3D in general, were are going to try to have specific content for motion graphics, visual effects, digital matte painting, character animation, and so on…

Interview

We can’t possibly have an expert on everything there is to cover, so we are going to try to utilize you guys, who know what the heck they are doing!

Fluffy: Along the same lines, do you plan on producing a DVD tutorial specifically from MAXON, then?

Paul: No, we are focusing on the online training because we are going to be able to provide more material faster and on a regular basis.

Fluffy: Not all people have a fast internet connection, or some might like to have something when they are on the road or out of connection.

Will we be able to save the tutorials from the online website, then?

Paul: No. We may, down the road, look at a way that we could regroup maybe all or part of these tutorials onto a DVD, perhaps. That’s something we talked about, but we haven’t figured out yet how that would work best or how we would do it at this point, but I can see how we could burn that website on a DVD later on, that’s a possibility.

Kai Pedersen demoing 9.5

Fluffy: The plugin developers are an important part of CINEMA 4D because they fill up the gap between what the users ask and what the development team has the time to do. Do you plan on extending your support to them and open even more of the core application to them so they have more control over it and help the end users even more?

Paul: Yes, that’s something that the development team takes care of in Germany. We don’t give them much direction in that regard. If they weren’t leaning in that direction, we would encourage them in that way.

With CINEMA 4D 9.5 you can see that there is better access to C.O.F.F.E.E. It’s a little bit easier to use the language, and in each version the programmer can open more and more the application. I don’t think it’s so much of a philosophy that they are working from or the amount of request for this, but it’s a natural progression for any application. When you start with companies like Sony, they are gonna start asking for features or access to

8

Philip Losch creator of Advanced Render

parts of the application that most people aren’t asking for, and as time goes on that evolves naturally, so it’s kind of happening on its own.

I think the only limitation we have right now is to provide the resources to a wider audience to make them understand how to program plugins for CINEMA4D, even though it doesn’t seem to be a problem since people are knowledgeable and it’s pretty self-explanatory.

SIGGRAPH - Inter vie w with P aul Ba b b

By Se bastien F lor and aka F luf fy

Interview

3D ATTACK Prize Fight Winner “The darn snail and the ant” ride to Siggraph

Fluffy: What is the kind of work that you would like to see more often coming out of CINEMA 4D? Paul: Of course, we want to see our tools coming out from the top movies and such, but I’m a great audience, I like almost anything. I have a vision, one day somebody is going to realize that what we are doing in the industry right now is a new form of Art. These guys that are creating this work are not just creating some pretty images. They are creating a moving, living world, and I envision, one day, somebody will have an Art gallery or an Art show and it’s going to be digital displays showing stills and animations, or even maybe interactive Art. I have never seen anybody do that yet. I’ve been looking for a while now. In the long run, I love shorts.

I would love to see more the type of things that you see coming out of Pixar, little 2 to 3 minutes shorts that have a lot of punch. A little bit of humor. I enjoy that. I would love to

have never been very good because they weren’t defined and managed well enough. People were just looking for an easy way to get a free software. There wasn’t much care into what was being done with the work. We had contests where it wasn’t “the best of the best”, it was “best of the worst”, where the goal was to give away a piece of software, because that was what you came into for.

see more of these. Unfortunately it’s a tremendous amount of work, so that explains why there is only 3 or 4 of those that really excel in the life of CINEMA 4D, like Pump Action from a long time ago.

Talk about blood, sweat and tears!

What he accomplished with version 6 is absolutely amazing.

Comparable to it is Jona/Tomberry that is shown at Siggraph, which is disturbing and weird, but sublime.

And of course I would put your piece on that list too. I would love to see how you can turn that into a short when you have ten months available.

Fluffy: The 3D Attack “Prize Fight” contest was a big success. do you plan on having some more contests in the future? Not necessarily with 3Dattack.

Paul: Absolutely. I’ll tell how the evolution of that came about. For years we have been supporting contests and unfortunately the results

9

When 3D Attack contacted us for a contest, we said that it was great, but we wanted to make sure that we were not going to give away just for a pretty picture without creating much more interest. So, we kind of brainstormed to think about ways of making it interesting, and we came up with the idea of layers. We made them drag it out a long way, more than 6 months. We started out with the drawings since it’s the basics of all 3D work, and since 3D Attack already had users that were CINEMA 4D users, let’s get aboard some artists who can draw, because when you put the 3D tools in the hands of somebody who is already an artist who can draw and understand Art, they turn out amazing things.

There are a lot of people who pick up a 3D package who do not have an Art background, and they tend to be very good technicians and still produce good work, but the artist who understand Art and have worked on a different medium just see 3D as a different tool, but still an artistic tool, turns out great things.

So the idea was to entice some artists who had not gotten into 3D yet, or not much, and when the drawings came through, we were blown away and there were so

SIGGRAPH - Inter vie w with P aul Ba b b

Interview

By Se bastien F lor and aka F luf fy many good entries that we far extended the contest. Since we extended from the 3 best projects to keeping ten of them, and since a lot of guys already had CINEMA 4D, it made it easy for us too, of course.

Then when the modeling round came around, we were blown away, once again, by the fact that people could actually also model well. We thought half of them would drop out because they wouldn’t be able to model the object they wanted to.

90% of them were finally good enough to pass to the third level, so we decided to extend even more and let everybody through. We decided to reward everybody who turned out an animation with a jacket, which are actually at the manufacturer right now. Then the idea for the Siggraph trip reward came out at that moment, and… here you are!

Anyway, it was a great contest that happily surprised us, and I have to add it to 3D Attack too, because we handed them a pretty good idea and they helped develop it too, managed it well, made sure that they saw work in progress, that somebody wasn’t shuffling into something they did two years ago or did it with another package. They really put their time and energy into this contest and made it valuable.

We will definitely do another one.

Fluffy: Well, we are almost finished.

Do you have a final word?

Paul: Final word? We are short on resources guys. Get your work out for the users and audience. If you are working on something cool, just pick up the phone or drop us an email and let us know that you are doing it. We find out in trade show, a lot of cool things that have been done with our software that we had never seen before. We also love

Fluffy’s hotel. MAXON sure knows how to treat people right!

user stories. Product reviews can be great, but on the whole they are not that interesting because people stay cautious and don’t want to review poorly because they are afraid they’re going lose you as an advertiser, so they are not always as objective as they could be. To that end, I told my PR person that I want user stories. I don’t care if it’s BodyPaint 3D with Maya or CINEMA 4D or any other tool used with our tools. It’s not about only the product, but more about the artwork that people are producing. I love the different stories. I love to see our tools as part of a different pipeline.

It’s more about giving the artist some promotion, because if we are going to give you promotion, then you are going to promote us.

Naturally, some might ask , “What are you using?”. You’re going to say, “Oh I use that!”. So, if you are doing great artwork out there in the dark,

10

let us know, we want to see what you are doing and share it with our users or the communities.

Fluffy: So, “CINEMA 4D users, come out!”. Thank you very much for your time Paul, and your kind words.

Sebastien Florand “Fluffy”, won the final round of the “Prize Fight” with his animation “The Equestrian Jump”. MAXON awarded Fluffy with a trip to Siggraph 2005 where he did a presentation in the MAXON booth on “The Equestrian Jump”. While at Siggraph, he was kind enough to interview Paul for the 3D Attack readers. Thanks Fluffy! If you have not seen Fluffy’s winning animation, now is the time. You can find it here: http://www.3dattack.net/forum/showt hread.php?t=1443&page=2&pp=15

Artwork created by Aaron Sims

WIN ZBrush 2 This month Pixologic, www.pixologic.com www.pixologic.com , are sponsoring our prize giveaway. giveaway.

By answering the simple question below, below, you could win the following: ZBrush 2 download for Macintosh or Windows Windows ZBrush 2.5 FREE Upgrade (in development) 3 New Plug – ins: Zapp Link - A plug-in that connects ZBrush with any graphics editing software packages that accepts .PSD files.

Displacement Exporter - A plug-in that automates certain alpha exporting tasks, including vertically flipping your alpha. It also includes the ability to export out three channel RGB displacements.

ZMapper – A Normal Map generation plug-in that enhances ZBrush current normal map generation abilities.

It includes extensive configurability so you can generate a normal map for any game engine or 3D renderer. renderer.

It also ships with several popular presets to get artists working as fast as possible.

WOW! Now that’s that’s the ZBrush ultimate package! How do you win it? Simple! All you have to do is answer the simple question below and e-mail your answer to 3dattack@3dattack.net with ZBrush as your subject line. Be sure to include your real name, telephone number, number, platform (Mac or Windows) Windows) and your answer to our question in the e-mail body. body. We We will then pool all of our entrants together and randomly pick one lucky winner on October 1, 2005. We We will announce our winner on our forum at www.3dattack.net www.3dattack.net and notify them via email.

QUESTION:

Where is Pixologic headquarters located?

Hint – you can find the answer to this question at www.pixologic.com www.pixologic.com

*3D Attack staff staff and their immediate families are not eligible to enter and or win the ZBrush 2 prize giveaway. giveaway.

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw Part1

By Jamie Hamel - Smith

Tutorial

Modeling – Part 1 This month I will be taking you from underlay to finished model as we model a Chainsaw. I will be using CINEMA 4D R9. While some of the tools and techniques I will be using will not apply to previous versions of CINEMA 4D, if you have Version 6, 7 or 8 you will still be able to follow along. You may just have to improvise to get the same results. I like to work at a medium level of detail usually. This means that the model will have enough detail so that it doesn’t look like a low poly model, but not so much detail that it becomes an overhead. An item such as this chainsaw will most likely fit as a background prop, or a character may be holding it. Even when a character is holding it, it still doesn’t have to have the world of detail, but at the same time, it shouldn’t look like a low poly model.

The Setup…

When setting up the file to model in, it’s important to have an idea of the physical size of your model. Also, do you use a scale factor when modeling? Do you model in Metric or Imperial units? I like to model in Inches with a scale factor of 10. This means that if my chainsaw is 3 feet long, it will be 36” or 360 units in CINEMA 4D. I didn’t have a measuring tape on me when I was shooting the saw, but I made an estimate of roughly 3 feet as the overall length.

The next step is to organize your Underlays (background pictures). I will be using 3 images. Left and right sides, and the top of the engine area. One of the best ways to prep the images for use as underlays is to open them in your favorite image editing program and scale them so that they all line up, also make them all the same pixel

dimensions. That way when we import them into CINEMA 4D, they will all be the correct size relative to each other. The underlays I have provided have already been scaled to fit and that should make it a lot easier for us. Now, when we create a new file in CINEMA 4D, the default setup is a 4 pane view; Perspective, Top, Right and Front.

The thing is that we don’t have any ‘Front’ photography, but we do have ‘Left’ photography, so we will choose the drop down menu in the front viewport that says Cameras and select Left.

We can now place our underlay images. Click in the Top viewport and press Shift-V, this will make the Attributes Manager show the settings for that viewport. Select the Tab that says Back and point it to our Underlay for that viewport.

Repeat the same process for the other view ports and we will move on to the next step. Notice that the left and right underlays imported with an X size of 800… so did the top underlay, but the top underlay is a different rotation, so its width is 800 instead of its length. It’s really easy to fix, just make the Y size of the top underlay 800 instead.

(Image-01)

Image 01

The Scaling It’s best to use a scale of some sort when doing a model from a real life item, or even when making up your own item. It helps to know little dimensions of general things. For

12

this chainsaw, 36” seems like our number (that’s 914mm for the metric folk) so we are going to resize the length of each underlay to be 360.

Just use the Shift-V shortcut in each viewport to access the ‘Back’ Tab and make the length of each underlay 360. Because the images were all the same size to start with, there is no guessing here, just make all 3 underlays 360. So, that concludes the scaling. We are now ready to model! (And I have turned off the grid for clarity) (Image-02)

Image 02

Modeling the Blade The Blade seems like the most logical starting point to me, so let’s get to it. Create an empty Polygon Object; Objects > Polygon Object, name it ‘Blade’. Now let’s choose the Create Polygon tool and start drawing! (You need to be in Point, Edge or Polygon mode to use this tool. You can use a Spline and ExtrudeNURBS if you prefer, but as I mentioned earlier, I will be using the level of detail that I am accustomed to. Set up the Create Polygon tool to create N-Gons and start to trace the underlay. (Image-03) Once this is done, switch to the Model Tool and select your ‘Blade’ polygon object and move it to the correct position in the top view.

Switch to the Polygons Tool and select the Extrude tool. Check the Create Caps option and extrude the

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw Part1

By Jamie Hamel - Smith

Image 03

Tutorial

blade just a bit. That’s it, we will now move on to the vicious looking teeth that stick out on either side of the blade. I am no expert when it comes to chainsaws, so I’ll be calling lots of the parts ‘thingies’.

Modeling the Protruding Teeth These teeth thingies or whatever, seem really mean! And it seems that we get a much better view of them in the Right viewport. Just use the same technique that we used to model the blade. There are 2 holes in the plate that could easily be cut using the Knife tool in Hole mode.

Once the teeth object is extruded (with create caps enabled), select all the polygons (Ctrl-A) or by selecting one polygon on the object and pressing the shortcut (‘U~W’, select connected). Next you want to choose the Mirror tool and mirror the selected polygons using Screen mode. Just click and drag from the right side of the viewport to define the mirror line. (In the top view) Now

you can position them. It’s sort of difficult to see exactly where they are, but you can check the Reference photos that are included to give yourself a better idea of where they go. (Image-04) I have just realized that the 2 Polygon objects that we created have no Phong Tags on them. We need to smooth out those facets by adding a phong tag to each object.

Select the 2 objects, and right click them. Choose; CINEMA 4D Tags > Phong. Now select the phong tags and use an Angle Limit of 45°.

Name the object something meaningful. I called mine Claws!

The Forward Handle This handle wraps up and over the entire Chainsaw engine, I think a SweepNURBS will do the job just fine. We are going to start with a Linear Spline, while looking at the Left view port we will start the spline. Click a point for each time the handle bends. It’s a good idea to start with a rough shape, you can tweak this shape as much as you like afterwards (Ctrl-Click to create a new point on the Spline) (Image-05) Once you are done with the spline, there is still one more point to add.

Near the first point where the handle

Image 06

that it is the same size as the handle in the underlay. Drop the Circle and Handle Spline into the SweepNURBS Object with the Circle being above the Handle Spline in the hierarchy. The first thing that I notice is that the Circle Spline has way too many intermediate points. Select the Circle Spline and in the Attributes Manager, change the intermediate points to Uniform and Set the Number to 1.

The default values here were way too much for me! The next thing we are going to do is chamfer certain points on the Handle Spline. Select the SweepNURBS Object and in the Basic tab, enable the ‘X-Ray’ option.

The X-Ray mode will allow us to see the points of the Handle Spline while viewing the object in shaded mode.

Select the Points Tool and the Handle Spline. Right click and choose the Chamfer tool.

Image 05

Image 04

that initial bend. (Image-06) Now Create a SweepNURBS Object and a Circle Spline Primitive. The Circle’s default radius of 200 is way too big! Scale the circle down so

attaches to the engine, the handle has an initial bend. Use the knife tool to cut the spline just above the first point. Now you can move the first point into the engine to make

13

Select a point and drag in the view port to adjust the size of the chamfer. Keep an eye on the supplied reference photography to get an idea of how much to chamfer the points.

(Image-07) When you are done, you can disable the X-Ray effect and save the file.

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw Part1

By Jam Hamel - Smith

Tutorial

Image 07

The Rear Handle After taking a quick look at the reference photography, it seems like the rear handle is our next object. Take a look at the images; DSC08696.JPG and DSC08697.JPG in the reference photography folder. I want to start with a 3x3 plane, so… let’s go!

Create a Plane Primitive and give it 3 width and height segments. Then scale it down until it’s a more manageable size. Switch to the Right viewport and position the Plane Object that we have created near the rear handle. Let’s make it editable (C) and start to move some points. We want to create an extrusion from this plane for the part of the handle that curves with the Oil Tank. Switch to the points tool, choose the Rectangle Selection tool with the Visible Only option unchecked and reposition the points as follows; (Image-08) Now we are going to choose the Model Tool, switch to the Top view-

Image 08

port and position the Plane so that it is in the center of and the correct width of the handle. Move and scale the Plane along the X-Axis so it lines up with the handle’s width.

Now we are going to extrude the Plane, but first, name it ‘Rear Handle’. Switch to the polygon tool, and the right viewport.

Choose the extrude command and extrude the polygons of the handle just a bit. If you peep at the reference photography, you can get a good idea of how thick it has to be.

In the right viewport, it needs to be extruded about as far as the little switch. Make sure to check the create caps option. (Image-09) 1; Extrude all of the polygons with the create caps option checked. 2; select the top center polygon and scale it on the X-Axis just a bit (1.2

click and choose the Normal Move tool. Click and drag in the right viewport until it lines up with the chainsaw handle. 6; now we will select the 3 lowest polygons, and the topmost center polygon, then extrude again. Keep extruding and moving points in the right viewport until you have something looking like what I have in the last pane of Image-09.

The Next step is to create a HyperNURBS Object and a Null Object. Make the Null Object a child of the HyperNURBS Object and then make the Rear Handle polygon object a child of the Null Object. The Polygonal mesh should now be very smooth. It sort of resembles the handle area, but before we start to tweak it, we have to finish the rear part of the handle. Continue extruding along the top of the handle and make a cut using the knife tool’s Loop Mode as shown. (Image-10) Now we are going to examine the use of the Bridge tool. In polygon mode, it creates surfaces between 2 selected polygons (or 2 groups of

Image 09

is good). 3; Add the 3 lowest polygons to the selection and extrude them just a bit. (Make sure that the CREATE CAPS option is OFF). And the Preserve Groups option should be checked. 4; in the right viewport, switch to the Points Tool and using the rectangular selection tool, try to position the points so they fit around the shape of the handle. 5; Now, we want to select the center polygon and move it along its normal until it lines up with the edge of the handle in the right viewport. So, we need to switch to the Polygons Tool and select the center polygon, then right

14

Image 10

polygons). That’s exactly how we are going to use it. Select the 2 polygons shown; (Image-11) With the Bridge tool selected, click and drag from one corner of the polygon to the corresponding corner on the opposite polygon. The original polygons are deleted and 4 sur-

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw Part1

By Jamie Hamel - Smith

Image 12

The Oil Bottle I am going to use the Oil Bottle (seen from the right view port) as a demonstration of how I model more complex HyperNURBS shapes. I like to work backwards when modeling a form such as this one. This object will start as 7 Cubes. (Image14) Once all the cubes are placed make them all editable and connect them. Select all the cubes and right

Image 11

Tutorial

faces are created where the gap used to be.

Tip: you may want to press the ‘Q’ key before using the bridge tool.

The ‘Q’ key toggles weather or not the parent generator is enabled.

This will effectively allow you to switch from smoothed mesh to polygon cage very quickly as you work!

Now that it’s bridged, it looks pretty good to me. Let’s switch to the right viewport and make some strategic cuts to harden the appearance of the mesh. Even though the mesh currently looks very smooth and clean, it’s a bit too soft and squishy looking. To remedy this, we need to add some loops of edges near the areas we want to harden. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use the Knife tool in Loop mode. Make cuts in your object where the images show them. You can always experiment with the position of the cuts, but make sure they are clean loops. (Image-12) After making these cuts, the shape of the object will change a bit.

Return to the right view port and tweak the points until the shape matches again. Now, we need to insert a few more cuts on the handle. (Image-13) 1; the area we will be focusing on now is the notch that receives the forward handle. 2;

like. If you weight the edges of the last part we extruded, it will harden them up so that it looks more like the real thing (holding the period key and dragging in the view port) We could have added much more detail to this area, but we don’t want to get into too much detail in this tutorial. I have turned the editor and renderer subdivision to ‘1’ that is all the detail I need for now.

Image 13

there is already a cut on one side of the handle; we will add another on the opposite side. 3; insert a 3rd cut along the center of the place where the handle rests. 4; then we insert a horizontal loop cut where the handle changes to black, this cut will be used to create the black area on the handle as well as for this notch we are currently working on. 5; we pull the outlined points down to create a curvature and select the polygons shown. Thereafter, the polygons are extruded. You will need a very high Maximum Angle so adjust this setting in the extrude options. 6; on the other side (left) of the chainsaw handle, select the polygons shown and extrude them a bit. The next step will be to return to the right view port and reposition the points to your liking. Try to make the dip we have created cradle the handle.

Afterwards you can weight it as you

15

Image 14

click one of them and choose ‘Connect’. This will connect them all together and create a new polygon object. You can then delete the 7 cubes you started with. This new object is a sort of framework for us to start creating the surface. Instead of us creating the surface and then trying to add details, we have created the details and now we are going to add the surfaces in-between.

Before we can add surfaces in between, we have to delete some of the polygons from this object. For the recessed holes for the screws, we will delete the 2 polygons that face outward (Image-15) For the other cubes, we will delete the top and bottom polygons. This

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw Part1

Tutorial

By Jamie Hamel Smith

Image 15

Image 17

leaves us with a rather confusing structure. But fear not, it will all start making sense very soon. We are now going to bridge the edges of the recessed screw holes to create surfaces in-between them. Using the Bridge tool and the Edges tool, click and drag from edge to edge to create surfaces in-between the recessed holes. (Image-16)

5 points in this area. It seems like a good spot to draw a polygon, but if we cut the area marked with the smaller circle, we will turn a potential 5 sided N-Gon into 2 quadrangles. This is a very simple demo of how you can make simple cuts here and there to allow your mesh to have as many quadrangles as possible. I am going to go ahead and make that cut. Using the Bridge tool with the Points Tool and the Edges Tool, I go about bridging the areas that can easily be bridged. We can now see the shape of the oil bottle forming. (Image-18) 1; Bridge the first areas. 2; continue with the easy areas. 3; You may

Image 16

If we return to the right viewport, we can see that some of these newly created surfaces need to be cut with our trusty knife tool so we can get the shape to look better. Go ahead and use the Line model with the visible only and restrict to selection options unchecked. I made 4 cuts, 2 at the lower left corner, one at the upper right hand corner and one at the lower right hand corner. (Image17) We need to start creating more surfaces on this oil bottle. I have circled a large area on Image-17. This area shows where we will start, but there is a small problem. There are

Image 18

bump into some triangles, 4; Turn them into quadrangles with a simple

16

cut. 5; You may have to create more cuts on the other side of the polygon object to be able to bridge the tight areas. 6; work your way around the mesh until everywhere is bridged.

You can create points when in the points tool by Ctrl-Clicking the area and then moving it into position. You can also clone points using the Clone function in the menu that pops up when you right click in the viewport. Continue bridging points and adding cuts where necessary.

At any time, you can place this object in the existing HyperNURBS Object to see the effects of it.

Continue until you have something looking like this; (Image-19)

Image 19

We are almost done with this part, just a couple more finishing touches.

We have to use the clone function I mentioned earlier. We want to focus on the rear side of the bottle now.

Our goal here is to create a flat even surface at the rear of the bottle. We will select all the edges around the rear side of the bottle and then we will use the Edges Tool and the Extrude tool so that we get another loop of polygons going around this edge. (Image-20) When extruding, we will first try to click and drag, I’m sure that if we try to extrude the edges of such a complex object, the edges will fly all around as the tool has trouble deciding which way to extrude towards‌ *drags mouse in viewport* yep, I was right, the edges go everywhere ;-) Lets undo that last extrude and now we will extrude

Modeling and Texturing a Chainsaw Part1

By Jamie Hamel Smith

Make sure that the Maximum Angle is greater than 90°. I have done this additional tweak. I really like how it looks! The final tweak I can suggest is to select the polygon that we created to close the oil level viewing window hole and extrude it a bit.

This will make a bubble like shape that fits perfectly! (Image-22)

Tutorial

Image 20

with a value of Zero. Simply enter 0 in the offset field and click Apply.

Nothing should change in the viewport, but a new loop of polygons and edges have just been created. Move the edges along the X-Axis (towards the center of the chainsaw) and you will reveal these new edges. With the new edges still selected, switch to the top viewport and you will notice that the edges are not straight at all. We want them to be straight so they can line up with the body of the chainsaw and be flush.

To make the edges straight, simply enter 0 as the X-Size in the Coordinates Manager. The edges will all line up and you will be left with a nice flush surface that you can move along the X-Axis until it is positioned correctly. Now we are going to use the Close Polygon Hole tool to do precisely that! Right click the viewport and choose the Close Polygon Tool. Float the cursor over the edge of the huge void that we have on the rear side of the Oil Bottle and a large yellow highlight will appear showing the polygon that will be created. Click once to create this large N-Gon that will close the rear side of our Oil Bottle. (Image21) While we are using this tool, we can use it to seal 2 other holes in our mesh; The Oil Level Window,

Image 21

and the smaller hole that the metal pin extends from. The oil cap can stay as a hole for now. You can now use the Knife tool in Loop mode and harden certain areas. When you seal the large void at the rear of the bottle, the shape will squish into a big mess in that area. This is easily remedied by selecting the N-Gon and using the Polygons Tool and the Extrude Inner tool, click and drag with the extrude inner tool just a bit and a new loop of edges will be created. It should restore the bottle to its previous shape. Alternatively, you could select the N-Gon, convert the polygon selection to edges by CtrlClicking the Edges Tool and bevel the edges very slightly. Either method will work, it’s up to you.

Using the Polygons Tool, select all of the polygons and check to see that all the normals are pointing in the same direction, after such an organic modeling process, this is very unlikely. With all of the polygons selected, right click and choose the Align Normals command. There are 1 or 2 more tweaks that will add more polygons but will also add more detail; by selecting the polygons on the inside of the recessed screw holes, and using the Extrude Inner tool, we can harden the appearance of these holes.

17

Image 22

The next step is the Fuel Tank (which lives on the other side of the engine and is visible from the left viewport) I will leave this to you; It is a simpler version of the Oil Tank and should give you no problems.

Remember; use the underlays to help you model at the correct size and just to make your modeling process easier. If in doubt, check the reference photography and it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be correct to the eyes. This is what I came up with after a short while; (Image-23)

Look out for Part 2 of the modeling of the chainsaw in the coming issues! Jamie Hamel-Smith

Car Modeling f or Be ginner s

By Dauber mman

Tutorial

Hi everyone. A lot of people want to do 3D cars. I say : why not ? After all, it’s a very good modeling exercise. I learned 3D on my own by modeling a car, but it’s even better with a tutorial. You won’t create a complete car here, but the front of a Ferrari Modena. No Spline Cage, no hard things, just the modeling basics, with a car. This is a beginners tutorial.

Let’s get started. First thing when you want to model a car is the Blueprint. What is that ? It’s the name for the references (Side, Top, Front & Back views), here the back won’t be used of course. The three Blueprint images are located in the Goodies. But now we have to place it in C4d, and as I said this is a simple tutorial. We will place them directly in the views (so we won’t use textured planes, but you can).

You have to repeat this operation for the three viewports (Right, Top and Front): click on the Edit button, then Configure. In the new window, click on Back and on the button at the right of the Image box. So in Top view, put Top.jpg, but in Front view put Side.jpg and in Right view put Front.jpg (Picture 001) Then choose the right image. Don’t forget to change the Size X and Size Y parameter, here are the values : Right (X:1093, Y:298), Front (X:535, Y:299), Top (X:1091, Y:536).

As you see, values are not the same between images, but you won’t find a Blueprint that is 100% accurate on length. This does not create a problem on the modeling.

You can do some tests to see if it’s pretty accurate (use cubes and see if it’s corresponding) and adjust if not.

Image 001

some fun. We will use Nurbs and symmetry to create just one side. So create a simple plane object, with 1 Width Segment and 1 Height Segment. Why a simple plane ?

Because we have to create a very basic shape.

If you have too many points at the start you will have some trouble in the shape, so begin simple. Make it editable, name it Hood and move the points to do a basic shape. Get those points to match all your views.

Sometimes it won’t because of the blueprints, so don’t be afraid.

Choose a reference view (I always choose the top one).

(Image 002) Of course, it’s a very basic start, so take your Knife and let’s go. At this stage we have to add some points to detail the shape, so do some cuts vertically in the top view. Just cut 3-4 lines because, as I said, we don’t need too many points. Nurbs will smooth it. Then we have to move the points. Select

Image 002

Okay, so now it’s the time to take the CINEMA 4D tools and have

the whole line in point mode and move it upward in the side view. The

18

side points have to match the hood line on the blueprint. For the others try to place them to have a good curves without bumps. There is no secret here, it’s just tweaking. Then repeat this with some horizontal cuts. And that’s it. The hood is done.

Pretty fast and easy no ? (Image 003) Here we go for the front wing, but we will not use a new object right now. We will continue on the Hood object then split it in order to have two different objects. So we begin with a 0.1 meters Extrude on the front edges on the hood. We use

Image 003

this tool with a small offset to create new edges without changing lengths. We can’t use a 0 m offset because you’ll maybe have an axis error and you won’t be able to move those new edges. Now place the points on the corresponding line in the front view then continue with some others polygons under the light to the wheel. You can begin with just one Extrude (with any offset value) and move the 2 new points on the same lines close to the wheel. Then cut some lines on these new polygons and move the points in the top view. Take a mark in order to place the points exactly (for examples the corners of the light) and match it in all the views (Image 004) You need to analyze the structure a

Car Modeling f or Be ginner s

By Dauber mman little to begin to have a good mesh: This is important if you want a clean smoothed model (with HyperNurbs).

So, now we will do the same things we did previously with the three first

Tutorial

Image 004

side edges of the hood from the windshield. Extrude them and move the new one close to the wheel. Put the points on the arch line too. Cut some horizontal lines in the top view and move the points upward to tweak the shape. Create, with an Extrude, the polygons to the door line (in the right). Then you can complete the shape by the creation of some points around the Light (Ctrl + Left Click in point mode) then the creation of the last polygons with the Bridge Tool or the Create Polygon Tool. (Image 005) Okay, this time we will add points to detail the wheel arch, so make two cuts between the two points which are on the arch’s border and move the points to detail this round shape.

When those points are moved, you’ll maybe have to move them in the front view to avoid a bad curve or bumps. Now that we did a big part of this job you can put the object in a Nurb to see if all is good and smoothed. But don’t try to sharpen edges now.

So, now let’s go into a deep modeling session for the bumper. We won’t create a new object, but like the wing, we’ll continue on the previous one. We begin with a 0.1 meters Extrude downward on the three firsts edges near the bumper from the symmetry. Move the points to follow the line below the plate then cut those new polygons to have the line above the plate this time (don’t forget to match the points on the lines in the three views). (Image 006) Now cut a new line in the middle of the plate, so you have an edge between the vent and the bottom of the car. Like under the light, do a first Extrude, move the points on the end of the two bottom lines close to the wheel, then cut the new polygon

There are different steps to do it, the first one is to finish the upper part of this bumper (between the hood and the bumper) and the down part so just put some points (Ctrl + Left Click in point mode) and bridge them (1). Then the second is to complete the bumper. You can begin with a little Bridge operation to create the basic polygons (2) and cut some lines to detail the shape (of course you have to move them in the Right viewport) (3). Place a new point and create the last polygons.

And in the end, select the edges around the vent, do a 0.1 meters Extrude and move it to put some depth. (Image 007) Okay, so now our basic modeling session is finished and we’ll move on the next part, the Nurbs modeling. We will sharpen our shape because I don’t think that a gel-o car is alright.

Image 007

Image 006

to detail the curve (don’t to take some marks). Now let’s go above the vent, put some points (Ctrl + Left Click in point mode) on the top line of it and make some polygons (Bridge or Create polygons) Image 005

19

So, here is what will be done. We will first sharpen to get it right in a Nurb, then we’ll split all the parts and fix the corners.

We begin with the first sharpening.

This is the two line just above the vent. We have two choices here : 1.The bevel, it’s the easiest way to do it and you can use it, but I think (and it’s just my point of view) that it’s not really accurate and well sharpened.

Car Modeling f or Be ginner s

By Dauber mman 2.The cuts : it consists of 2 cuts on each side of an edge. You have better control on the angle, and again, I think that it’s better in the rendering.

Here we go on the second. First, locate the lines, as I said it’s the two above the vent. We’ll use the knife :

As you can see corners are too round, we’ll fix this later, now it’s time to add some thickness to the vent and the light.

Method is simple, select the edges all around one of these two holes.

-R9.X : Just use the knife tool (K) in Loop mode. It will cut all along the line (a yellow line will appear to see what will be cut)

Tutorial

-R8.X and above : You don’t have Loop mode so you will have to cut polygon after polygon to create those new lines. As you don’t have N-Gons too, you may have triangles, don’t panic, just finish the cuts and after you’ll just have to Untriangulate all.

Just cut 2 new lines on each side of the one we want to sharpen.

Okay, now we have done the fist sharpening (I love this word) angle, so if we want to continue we’ll have to split some parts. 3 parts exactly : the Hood, the Wing and the Bumper.

We begin with the hood, select all your polygons for this piece (see the blueprint to see which ones to pick).

Right Click -> Split, a new object is created under the Hood. It contains all the polygons of our selection.

Rename it Hood, and don’t forget to delete the same polygons on the original hood object. When you do a Split, the selection is just copied into a new object so you’ll always have to delete it after. Do the same for the wing (selection stop at the line above the sharpened one) then rename the first object to Bumper.

Now that we have more than one object, select them and group them.

If you don’t do it, the Nurbs and/or the symmetry won’t work. Here is a picture of the three objects (Image 008)

Image 008

Do a 0.1 m Extrude (like previous ones) move the X axis (or the Z it depends) in the interior side at 0.x meter ( just a little), then redo an Extrude and move it back far this time. Do the same for the light (or the vent) and the holes will be okay.

And to finish the Nurb adjustments, let’s fix the corners. We’ll just use the Hypernurbs Weight Tools, so

20

select all the points to adjust object by object (1 on the hood, 5 on the wing and 2 on the bumper). In the attribute manager you should have a HyperNurbs tab if you are always with the selection tool. Click it and put Set to the Mode option to 100 Strength, then click Set. Your point should be quite straight now, so repeat it for all the other points on the two other objects.

And here is the end result ! The front is done, now you just have to continue the car with the same method. Don’t hesitate to create other cars with this method. Please post your WIPs on 3D Attack, I’ll be there for help Keep on Attacking !

Alexandre Lerouge aka Daubermman

Character Development with Jannis Labelle

By Gary Zullo aka MrPixar

CD Review

Hey there fellow attackers! This time I am going to talk about Jannis LaBelle’s latest Training CD set “Character Development with Jannis Labelle”. This is a two CD set geared toward CINEMA4D R9+ and MOCCA 2. This is the 4th training CD in Jannis’ growing library, and seems to fill a much needed void in the area of rigging and animation for CINEMA4D. I’ve found that most online material on the subject to either be lacking in detail or so completely bogged down in detail as to make me feel sleepy; and not really learn much in a single go. Have you been there?

I’m sure you have ? That’s why I really liked Jannis’ approach to the topic. He lends a bit of humor (albeit dry at times *cough cough*, but still amusing) to an enormous topic.

CD #1: In the first CD Jannis will take you through every detail of creating a high-quality rig suitable for any type of animation. In addition you’ll learn all about how to apply Expresso to the rig as well as make several custom controls for the animation of your rig, create and use nested pose mixer sets, how to build a reverse foot slider system and even

build independent finger/hand controllers. Keeping in mind that this CD set focuses on rigging and animation there is no modeling to speak of. In fact, following the introduction we dive right into rigging the legs. Basically, we learn how to rig each and every area of our supplied character “Mustachio”.

him back to his “zero pose” then this little gem will make it all better ? I had no idea..hehe

From head to toe (actually that would be from toe to head?) we create the rig, handle any IK/FK concerns, create controllers, weight map the mesh (with both vertex and Claude Bonnet methods) and further prep the model for animation.

Also covered is the topic of pose mixers. Until viewing this CD set I was not very familiar with how those worked (to be honest), but now I can use them with confidence and often. They really do simplify facial animation immensely. In this tutorial we will learn about how to pose mix the face, teeth and mustache of our character.

CD #2: The second CD is all about using the rig created in CD #1 to create an animation; from start to finish. We go through the process of layer motions, adding steps and refinement. Jannis also goes into quite deep detail on the advantages and disadvantages of both IK and FK and when each can best be applied.

Due attention is paid to the timeline and f-curves as well to round out the instruction. We even learn about the exciting new Clothilde features of MOCCA2!

As a last little bonus of this CD Jannis lets us in on some of his own secrets.

For example, the usage of zero sliders. If you’ve ever been afraid to move your character around because you wouldn’t be able to get

21

Now that we have a fully functional rig for “Mustachio” we need to make that poor guy move, eh? Jannis has you covered. This whole second CD

Character Development with Jannis Labelle

By Gary Zullo aka MrPixar

is dedicated to doing just that…animating! Ever wonder how to create a perfect walk cycle? Yep, that’s in there (2 chapters worth). Want to learn how the animators set up their scenes and time everything? Yep, you’re covered ? Position constraints, IK/FK switching, Cameras, Cloth, F-Curve manager are all covered in amazingly deep detail.

heard of or used any of them.

What I thought? Well, to be honest I was very happy to review this train-

CD Review

ing because at the time I was very badly in need of learning how to animate reasonably well – quickly. I sat down and viewed these CDs just as if any one of you would – critically! ? What I found was an amazingly deep and broad series of lectures geared directly at what I needed; rigging and animation! Even though there was a lot to be learned I think that the logical break up of the chapters is very wise because it allowed me to easily find/review chapters at a later date.

I was quite happy that Jannis was able to get some of that “stuff” to stick because after viewing these CDs (a couple of times), I was able to model, rig and animate my first ever animation. The only reason I even mention that is because I had 20 people “counting” on me and couldn’t disappoint now could I? LOL Everything covered here will get you well on your way to creating the next big blockbuster! Ok, maybe I’ve exaggerated a tiny bit, but still … It’ll get you seriously moving in the right direction. Not to be outdone Jannis even shows you how to use Cactus Dan’s CD IK Tools, Paul Everett’s Visual Selector, and MotionBuilder.

All very useful even if you’ve never

I found myself saying (out loud) several times, “Ah! Thaaaat’s how they do that!” I’ve even been so bold as to help others recently to demystify rigging. Now if that’s not a night and day switch I don’t know what is... ?

Summary 2 CDs and over 6 hours of every detail (split into 35 chapters) needed

22

to both rig and animate a character.

To date this is probably the most comprehensive collection of lectures on the subject geared directly for CINEMA4D that I can think of. Very clear instruction coupled with a clear understanding of the material on Jannis’ part made it very easy for me to jump right into the “animation world” without guessing.

• In depth hard IK rigging • Advanced expresso controls • Clothhilde • Hand sliders • Switching from FK to IK • Creating custom constraints with expresso • And much more The price? Well, yeah the price may be kind of high – but think of it this way … You’re buying a single resource that can teach you how to do something that is typically thought of as hard and tedious. To that end it’s completely worth it to me. If you want to learn how to rig and/or animate then this is the CD set you should be getting immediately!! Until next time my fellow C4Ders Price: £79.95 (inc VAT) Author URL: http://labelleart.com/ Store URL: http://www.maxonshop.com/cgibin/uk/gp?pg=products/training.jlb-char

Platform: PC/MAC Compatible Rating: 4/5

Introduction to ZBrush - Part 1

By Mark Gmehling

Creating tileable textures within seconds

Tutorial

Most people have heard about ZBrush, an application that blurs the Line between the oldschool digital 3Dartist- dreaming nightmares of polygonal issues- and the realtime Modeler- with hands sticky by supersculpy.

In this tutorial series I’d like to introduce the, not already convinced, C4D User to ZBrush’s capabilities as an powerful – in my opinion must-have – Add on to C4D in cases of building highres-displacement maps and many, many other, not only, texturing issues. Since CINEMA 4D Version 9 supports SPD (Sub-Poly-Displacement) the C4D community is capable rendering ZBrush’s high resolution displacement maps.

But before we go into detail, let’s start with some interesting theoretical things: ZBrush’s main advantage is its intuitive approach that pushes technical thoughts away, and makes you able to push and pull the surface like you would do with supersculpy.

This is possible inside ZBrush because of Pixologics “pixol” technology- Pixols, in contrast to common pixels, are basically 3D pixels that can hold 3D depth, orientation and material information. This technology makes ZBrush able to handle millionpolymeshes while maintaining a stable performance.

The workflow to generate a displacement map for a C4D mesh for example, would be subdividing your imported C4D basemeshes inside ZBrush many, many times to be able to sculpt highly detailed mesh-

es with wrinkles and pores or whatever comes to your mind- these million-poly meshes will be used to generate highres (32bit) maps inside ZBrush, that will be mapped onto the -quite lowres- base geometry back in CINEMA 4D. This is only one example that makes ZBrush a must-have-addon to your workflow in times where CINEMA 4D’s Texturing solution, BodyPaint, lacks in Points of realtime Displacement painting.

If you’re interested in the displacement map generating inside ZBrush, have a look at 3D Attack’s July ezine where I did a tutorial about preparing geometry in C4D- exporting it to ZBrush- generating a displacement map, and rendering a scene back in C4D. In this series I want to get started on the basics and show you some useful things where ZBrush can speed up your workflow. I’m using ZBrush 2 and all tutorial steps are documented in .swf files additionally found in the goodies folder of this ezines-issue.

Before I begin to explain ZBrush’s interface, let’s have fun by exploring things while doing something.

As this is the first part of this series, I want to start at the basics and focus on how fast you can create tileable textures by using ZBrush’s powerful 2D tools. This will bring you in touch with ZBrush’s different brush- and stroke-types, and some other stuff to customize theseYou’ll need that to use ZBrushs full power when you’re going to sculpt and detail your imported C4D meshes.

23

1. Painting a Seamless AlphaTexture: First of all, go to ZBrush’s Document window in the vertical row on the top of ZBrush,s interface. Choose the proportions of your texture by filling the width and height pro-fields. You can de/activate the PRO to maintain proportions, or you can de/activate the PRO to maintain proportions or to customize them. I chose proportions of 512x512 pixels in this case, and push the resize button (answering the up popping ensurance window with a yes). In the color picker choose black and in the layers menu press the FILL button (Ctrl F)btw.: you can drag all ZBrush buttons, ctrl-holding ,to any place to customize the interface to your liking.

Then pick a white color and choose the Line Stroke in the Stroke palette- The line stroke with its default settings is a good choice at this point to explain the seamless texture topic and to maintain fun while painting with a mouse.

Furthermore, I chose Brush 49 Alpha to get a nice rounding on my stroke. You can see the names of the different alphas, tools, strokes materials in mouseover mode above the different thumbnails.

Next, enable rgb -ignoring the depth information :zadd or zsub and the material information m and mrgb. To change the draw size I use the + and ü key on my german keyboard.

Just draw some strokes, but pay attention not to touch the document borders. In the layers menu you can offset the painted strokes which will be continued seamlessly. Just drag the displace H and V sliders to be able to paint the empty areas. In the

Introduction to ZBrush - Part 1

By Mark Gmehling

further development of this texture I use the shortcut for this layer displacing which is the tilde key (~)…Well, I’m using a German keyboard and ZBrush is supporting the US keyboard layout- so you may have problems locating the button on your keyboards.

Picture 01

Tutorial

The solution is adding the US language and keyboard theme to your workstation, and switch to US mode when working in ZBrush. You may need to search for the tilde key additionally if you use a special maybe smaller sized keyboard or laptop- Just open a text editor and press all buttons till the tilde type appears.

There may be much expense to locate this shortcut, but I’m sure I’m sure you will soon tire from going through the layer menu every time you want to offset your layer.

When you are satisfied with the resulting map, go to the Light menu and drag the dot in the sphere to check different lighting conditions.

You can add lights, change their color and intensity etc. Then grab the document in order to use the painting as texture.

Go to the Texture menu and use the Grab doc button to copy the state of your current document that is stored in your texture menu for further use.

Export the texture and save it as tif file for later use in C4D- in this case I want to use it as an alpha mapmapped on a torus (see pic01).

Watch z_1.swf found in this issues goodies folder.

When you’re using the brushes, a tablet is the way to go to be able to use its sensitivity. If you don’t own a

ZBrush license already, make sure to get a license with a Wacom tablet included. Lots of ZBrush resellers are offering bundles with a Wacom included at very fair prices. OK, let,s try something more colored that uses a bit more strength of ZBrush tools:

affects your painting. Open up the Stroke palette and play with the different sliders.

2. Painting colormaps with different alphas and brushes:

By the way: Hold the ctrl-key and mouse over position above the different buttons, and an explanation of the button will pop up, giving you a short description of what this button is responsible for- a very comfortable service,huh?

This time resize the canvas to 1024x1024pixels, use the zoom document button to adjust the canvas in the viewport, then choose a brownish color and fill the document (CtrlF). Choose the simple brush/ the spray stroke and alphabrush25 from the alpha menu. Adjust the draw size to your liking and paint some strokes, but take time to decide what information you want ZBrush to paint on your canvas. At the moment, rgb/color is enough, so disable mrg and the zadd/sub options. Play with the focal shift to slightly adjust how the chosen alpha

Of course, you should pay attention that you don’t touch the borders while painting if you’re after a seamless texture. Use the tilde command to displace the layer. Use the fill command to clean/fill the canvas again when you’re satisfied with the brush settings. Now let’s explore the zadd/sub option: Change your stroke to the dragrec(tangle) stroke the alpha to brush07 and enable zadd. Play with the z-intensity slider to affect the amount of depth that is added and switch to zsub to push the alpha in the surface. Use the altkey to switch between zadd and

24

Introduction to ZBrush - Part 1

By Mark Gmehling

zsub mode. And again play with the focal shift setting to vary the sharpness of your manipulations.

Notice how powerful the light adjustment option is when generating textures and how different the bump looks like. Add some deeper cuts with a sharper alpha and the freehand stroke.

Picture 02

Tutorial

Time to explore the material painting option: Choose the sphere brush tool, the freehand stroke and the toyplastic material. Only enable mrgb and zadd and pick a light color.

Decrease your draw size and paint the gaps- ZBrush sphere brush fills the depth of the painted gaps with color and all material attributes that can be fine tuned in the material tab.

Again, go to the texture tab and use the grab doc button to store the canvas in the textures menu when you’re satisfied. From there, export it for usage in C4D. You may say: Well, a nice colortexture, but where do I get a grayscale bump depth map to use it in C4D? The answer is simple: Just go to the texture menu- select the texture you want to grab depth info from and use the make alpha button- the grayscale depth info map is stored in your alpha palettefrom here just export it. Back in C4D I use to add a filter in the bump channel to fine tune the bump (See picture 02) I added the C4d file in the goodies folder- look for ZBrush_map.C4d in the C4Dexample folder.

Watch the z_2.swf in this issues goodies folder to resume the steps above.

3. Using customized alphas and textures within zBrushs 2D tools: For the usage with ZBrush’s different 2D tools, it makes sense to create maps that are tileable in only one direction. Import the first map you painted during this tutorial by going to the alpha menu- import.

Choose the deco Brush, select the imported alpha file, turn off texture usage and fill your document black.

Choose a light color and paint. As you see the deco brush aligns textures or alphas along paths. Go to the tool tab- modifiers- and turn on tile texture. This comes along nicer, but you see the hard edges on the strokes borders. So lets paint another example which tiles vertically only: Resize the document to 512x512 pixels, choose the simple brush, only enable RGB and zadd and fill your canvas black. Then choose a grey color to paint a vertical pattern

25

with z- intensity set to 100%- offsetting the layer vertically holding the tilde(~) key. Play with zadd/sub by using the alt key. Then try the smudge brush and smear some pixel in direction of the outer vertical borders. When you like your painted pattern go to texture- grab doc. In the texture thumbnails menu go to make alpha and the pattern is stored in your alpha palette.

Choose the decobrush again and select the new alpha go to the tool attributes and under modifiers enable- tile texture- paint and check out some of the preset materials(Picture 03) Watch z_3.swf found in this issues goodies folder.

It’s a good thing to have lots of these customized alphas stored on your machine, especially when you’re going to use brushes with your alphas to detail your imported C4D-meshes. OK- that was it for today- I hope I was able to give you

Introduction to ZBrush - Part 1

By Mark Gmehling

Tutorial

Picture 03

an impression of the amount of 2D painting possibililties, ZBrush’s 2D tools are supporting, when you play with the endless combinations of brush/stroke/alpha/texture/different channels etc.

dle with a Wacom Tablet at a very fair price.

Stay tuned for the next issues ZBrush Spotlight and CU on board, not only in the ZBrush Corner of 3dattack.net

Its definitely a powerful addon to C4D next to its famous realtime displacement painting and other features.

If you have questions , don’t hesitate to post a thread with your question regarding this tutorial on our forum.

To fully blow your mind away visit www.pixolator.com -the ZBrush Forum where nearly every question about ZBrush was asked and answered. When you surf through the featured gallery you’ll see what ZBrush is capable of and you’ll be surely convinced that it is a must have tool, not even for detailed Character needs.

Mark Gmehling aka Macling

Don’t miss the info about the upcoming version 2.5 available at the developers site: www.pixologic.com . Most ZBrushresellers are offering ZBrush as bun-

26

Making Lava with CINEMA 4D

By Rui Batista

One of the latest speed modeling challenges at 3d Attack, was to model lava. It could be any type of lava, but I decided to create flowing, molten lava. And that is exactly what I will teach you how to do in this tutorial.

Start by creating a terrain with a "river bed" for the lava. You can do it any way you prefer. You can modeling it by hand, using the Magnet or the Brush tool. You can also use the Relief object or use any plug-in, like LandScapist or Mount Monkey, from DPInstantTree 3 (www.dpit.de). You can even model it in any external application and import it into CINEMA 4D. The important thing is that you end up with a polygonal object

Tutorial

Picture 01

tool and set the parameters like this: See picture [02_2] From one of the lateral views slice the terrain at the height you want

Picture 04

Picture 02-2

Picture 05

the lava to flow. Now change to Edge mode. Since we had the Select Cuts option turned on, the new edges created from the cut are now selected. Neat!! [Picture 03] Now we need to change them to splines. Luckily, MAXON already Picture 03

similar to this one [Picture 01].

Now select the "river bed" adding some generous selection, including the margins, just to be on the safe Picture 02

side. [Picture 02] In Polygonal mode, select the Knife

thought about that and, hidden in the Structure menu, there is a command that does exactly that. Go to the Structure menu and, from the Edit Spline submenu, select Edge to Spline [Picture 04]. You will end up with something similar to this (turn the visibility of the terrain off to clean the display): [Picture 05] Actually, some gaps may appear in the splines (this one was already cleaned up). This is due to some original edges being too small

27

(length equal to zero) and for those, the Edge to Spline command, slips those points. Just select the two consecutive points that are not connected and, from the Structure->Edit Spline menu, choose Join Segment.

When you have two continuous segments in the same spline object, duplicate the spline object and name them both to something more meaningful of that they are, like Spline1 and Spline2.

Now, from Spline1, delete one of the segments and, from Spline2, delete the other segment. Make sure they are both "flowing" in the same direction. Usually, they aren't, because they were derived from a single spline. To do so, select each one in Point mode and check the coloring of the spline. The starting point is yellow and the ending point is red [Picture 05]. They should both start

Making Lava with CINEMA 4D

By Rui Batista

as yellow pointing the same direction and end up with red pointing the opposite direction. To do that, just select one of the splines and from the Structure->Edit Spline menu, choose Reverse Sequence.

Now that we have two splines pointing in the correct direction, we must create a surface between them. To do that, we add a new Loft NURBS object to the scene and place both splines inside it. [Picture 06] What we have now is a "river" surface.

You can edit the subdivisions and/or

Picture 10 Picture 07

Picture 06

Tutorial

Picture 08

add points to any of the splines to make sure the surface "flows" as smoothly as possible, but abrupt turning at accentuated curves are also graphically pleasant. This surface (and all surfaces created with NURBS objects, except HyperNURBS) already has coherent UV coordinates and this will be very useful when texturing this surface, as we will see.

Turn the visibility of the terrain back on. You now have a "river" flowing along your terrain [Picture 07].

Enough modeling. The texturing will do the rest. Create a new material and, in the Color channel, add a Gradient shader. Set its colors and Turbulence option to values similar to these: [Picture 08] We want the lava to be in motion so we need to "tilt" it, somehow, in the direction it is traveling. So, in the main Color channel, add a Distorter

shader. The gradient we just created will be automatically placed inside the Distorter shader. Now we must define how the gradient will be distorted. In the Distorter slot, add a gradient shader and set it to a vertical ramp that goes from black to white and to black again. Set the Type of distortion to Directional and the amount of X displacement to 50%. [Picture 09] Of course, if you prefer, you can adjust this value to your own taste. Lava glows!! So, in the Luminance channel, add a gradient shader and set its values to

Picture 09

something similar to these: [Picture 10]. Do the same to the Luminance channel that we did to the Color channel (the Distorter

28

Picture 11

treatment) [Picture 11].

Lava is not smooth. In fact, it is very rough. So, in the Bump channel add a Noise shader and set its parameters to something similar to these: [Picture 12] Of course, you can set the bump Picture 12

any way you prefer but these settings seem to work fine. Once again, give the Bump channel, the Distorter treatment. [Picture 13] Finally, set the Specular channel to something that will allow us to see the bumps. A Width of 50% and a Height of 20% should be enough [Picture 14].

If you now drag the material to the Loft NURBS, since the UV coordinates are already created, every-

Making Lava with CINEMA 4D

By Rui Batista

Picture 15 Picture 13

Luckily, the editor display is accurate enough for you to experiment. It wasn't very hard, was it? Now that you know the basic way to create a lava flow, add some more details and you can create your own Krakatoa reconstitution, or your own Dante's Peak blockbuster!

The sample animation file already has a few details added. I leave as an exercise for you to find out how I did it ;-) As usual, if you have any doubts, feel free to contact me at rui_mac@ruimac.com

Picture 16

Tutorial

Picture 14

thing should map correctly, automatically. The lava is too stretched however. So, tile it a few times in the X direction. A value of 10 in the Tiles X should be more than enough.

To create interactive light (the glow of the lava in the rock walls), create a new area light. Set its color to orange and adjust its size so that its big enough to cross the rocky walls, once centered in the lava "river".

Create Instances of that light and place them along the lava "river".

[Picture 15-16]

We are almost finished! The only thing missing is the animation of the lava. Select the lava material tag and set keys for the Offset X parameter, in the Attribute Manager. You must experiment with the values.

Depending on the direction of the initial splines that define the "river" banks, the Offset X parameter may have to increase or decrease to make the lava flow to the correct direction.

29

Plugin: FusionThing

By Gary Zullo

Plugin Review

Hey there fellow attackers! This time I am going to talk about a new plugin called “fusionThing”. fusionThing is the latest plugin by Steve Baines (aka astrofish) of lotsofpixels.com. It is said that some things are revolutionary whilst others are evolutionary. Things that are evolutionary change or improve that which exists, while those that are revolutionary completely change the way things are done or thought about.

I am happy to report that fT falls into the revolutionary category. Once you get past the initial complexity of the myriad of options (100+) it is going to change the way you approach a modeling task; you can bet on that! From here on out let’s refer to fusionThing as “fT”.

What is fT and what can it do for me? Well, that’s not as straight-forward a question to answer, but here is a stab at it…fT is a major procedural modeling and animation plugin designed for use with CINEMA4D 8.5+ (this includes the justannounced R9.5).

For those of you that are familiar with Jenna and the power it gave then you’ll understand why this plugin has been described as “the Jenna of procedural modeling”. IN the right hands fT can do some truly amazing things.

When first opening the various tags, menus and objects that belong to fT you may become overwhelmed, but do not despair. Steve is well-known for his attention to detail and customer service. His included manual is roughly 60 pages that explain in great detail what we all need to know to get the most out of fT. fT allows you to procedurally com-

bine separate mesh objects (from an object library for example) into highly complicated objects surprisingly easily. fT follows the following paradigm: providing a large number of parameters and modes allows for the highest degree of control. fT exposes over 100 parameters to help you get exactly what you need done quickly. Period. Even in its simplest modes fT will allow you to translate, rotate, scale the “children” meshes to the “parent”. You can even allow fT to intelligently weld the meshes together to ensure clean edges of joining objects.

If specified, fT will also clean up the resulting geometry into a clean mesh assured to get along with HyperNURBS ?. fT can even determine the curvature of you base mesh (the parent) when applying potentially high-polygon details (the children) and apply that curvature during assembly so that you end up with a smooth curvature of the resulting geometry rather than something jaggy, and faceted (think phong shading here, but on the geometry not the shading). This alone makes the price of admission well worth it. This means that you can spend some time and build up a library of simple objects (think nurnies and greebles) that can be applied to any future mesh you may create and know that any curves etc will be accounted for when you

30

apply the library objects. Amazing stuff here folks! The one feature that

totally blows me away is the multiple levels of recursion on objects support. This means that with one object you can apply detail upon detail upon detail … until you are satisfied. fT makes it as simple as drag and drop to a child object. fT will handle all the tagging and default values automatically. That’s all it takes. All this occurs in such ways that you still have the ability to modify the top-level object and it will carry through all the children. The modes I worked with most are the “Immediate” mode and the “Object” mode. The Immediate mode allows

Plugin: FusionThing

Plugin Review

By Gary Zullo

you to work very quickly and assemble your objects. You work with a live preview and changes are immediately applied to the base mesh. In Object mode is the “procedural” mode. It allows you to make changes to the models after-the-fact and provides a lot of procedural animation controls. Warp and Aim modes are also provided to allow you to try am make parts of your mesh aim or warp toward a target object (or simply a target direction) all while still cleanly connected to the parent object. This can be especially useful when generating complex organic motion without the need for point level animation (PLA), or for faking the effects of wind and gravity on delicate structures. The options are limitless.

Most of the parameters in fT support

are used the seed (random number value) can also be keyframed (!!).

This means that the resulting random sequences will blend smoothly.

An excellent usage of this power would be with something organic for example.

high-detail modeling fT can make a seemingly complex task fun in a more automated way by allowing you to focus on the construction of the mesh rather than being bogged down in the details (not seeing the forest for the trees as it where).

Going back to Steve’s attention to detail and customer care… fT includes a built-in context-sensitive checker. What is this? Well, simply put if the results you are getting aren’t “quite right” are aren’t what is expected you only need to click a button that will output a report to the console on any settings etc, that are inconsistent or unusual with what was attempted. This will generally be all you need to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Now, if that doesn’t motivate you to experiment then I don’t know what will. I wish more software would tell me what I did wrong AND tell me how to fix it don’t you?

• Do “variation on a theme” type modeling. When creating a large number of meshes which are made from the same (or similar) basic elements and you want to experiment with the variations fT can make this experimentation not only easy but truly exciting as well. The power is there for you to do whatever your imagination calls for.

An important note to point out is the

fT is an excellent tool to add to your toolbox if you:

keyframe animation and some can even be controlled by a material channel. Point level animation (PLA) is also supported. An interesting note is the fact that while point level animation (PLA) is supported fT makes previous tasks where point level animation (PLA) might be used simpler and more flexible such that point level animation (PLA) may not even be needed; but its support there ? Where random parameters

• Like to model things that have repeating elements. fT can add these elements procedurally but with variation because of its ability to select probabilistically between a set of sub children meshes (which is completely controllable) and specify the variation parameters in several different ways to suit your needs.

• Do architectural work. fT is superb for applying objects to low polygon reference models (basically, construction of high resolution objects from low detail elements) • Do rapid prototyping work, pre-viz, etc. If you do anything such as prototyping, pre-viz, architectural, organics, abstracts and any type of

31

fact that fT was developed with R8.5 compatibility in mind and as such doesn’t have N-GON support as of the writing of this review. However, don’t let that dissuade you from purchasing fT for the following reasons: • N-gon support is coming in an upcoming fT release • Even if your mesh has n-gons this doesn't mean you can't use them.

They’ll effectively be converted to quads and tris internally by fT as it processes the final mesh. This process should not be that big a deal in most cases. A note from Steve himself, “Nothing stops you

Plugin: FusionThing

By Gary Zullo

of power fT affords you with its 100+ control parameters and modes make it a revolutionary approach to the way you think about your modeling workflow. It did for me ? fT is extremely well-priced given how much time Steve put into its rock-solid development and all the features packed into it. If you value your time and long to get back to creating (rather than dealing with detail after detail) then the $195 price-tag is a no-brainer.

Plugin Review

If you think back to the way that MeshSurgery changed the modeling toolset we used in R8 then fT will change the way you model in R8.5+. As far as I am concerned fT is a homerun!

While there is no demo for fT, there is one in the works; rest assured. In the meantime if you are wavering please do check out all the samples, tutorials, scenes, documents available for you at http://www.lotsofpixels.com.

Price: $195 URL: http://www.lotsofpixels.com Platform: PC/MAC Compatible Rating: 5/5

using ngons in meshes that fT is going to build with, but the final built mesh will be entirely Tris and Quads. The sub-meshes that you put in the object hierarchy won't be modified, only the virtual built object, so if they have ngons, fT can still use them and won't remove or modify them.�

Summary: fT was both a pleasure to review and a serious eye-opener in the way of modeling workflow. The idea that I can simply model some basic elements and then allow fT to intelligently assemble those elements onto a base mesh is undeniably cool and a huge time saver. The amount

32

Shader Building 2 - Abstr act Ma terials

By Br am In this tutorial we are going to learn how to create a couple of abstract shaders using some of the standard shaders available in CINEMA. It is not necessary to have done the part 1 introduction, but would be helpful to understand some of the techniques.

Tutorial

Open the scene file 'abstractshaders.c4d'. This file contains a couple of plain objects to which we will apply some simple shaders, note that only the Sky has a white texture applied to it.

First, let's texture the middle object.

Create a Material and name it 'Luminous Voronoi', disable the specular channel. Load a Noise shader into the Color Channel and set its type to Voronoi 3. Make 'Color 1' dark blue, 'Color 2' red and set the High Clip to 70 to make the red more obvious. Drop the material onto the middle object and set its projection to 'Spatial'. This will give the best result on this object as it has several extrusions and we don't want to fool around with UV's. (See page 874 of the manual on Types of mapping for more info on projections).

If we hit the render button now, the texture will look dull. We want to liven it up and make it look kinda special. We want the voronoi to react to the light. Enable the Environment channel and load a Layer shader into it. Make the first layer a Noise shader and give it the same type as in the color channel: voronoi 3. The environment channel will lighten up the white parts of the noise, which is exactly the same as in the color channel, except for the colors there. That means that the red parts will get lightened and turn to pink now and will look luminous

regardless of the shadows. Now to make this fake pink luminosity look as if it is reacting to our lighting, we can add a fresnel to make it react to the direction of the normals.

Make the second layer a Fresnel Shader and make the Blend mode of this layer Difference. Now when you render, the color on top remains red and on the sides it is turned to pink due to the fresnel. To get a better understanding of what we did with the environment channel here, try turning off all lights in the scene.

Now you'll notice the colors being drained because there is no light to supplement it, but the voronoi in the environment channel remains.

Meaning, the light doesn't actually affect it. See Picture 1 for that effect.

Let's leave this shader as it is and move on to the next; a strange abstract grass using the Fusion shader.

Create a new material and name it 'Abstract Grass', disable the specular channel. Load a Layer shader into the color channel and make the first layer a Fusion Shader. Fusion is handy to blend two images or shaders together by using a mask (or alpha channel if you will). We will not use textures but simply three types of noise to create our grass material. Click on the Fusion shader, set the Mode to subtract so the color values of the blend channel

33

will be subtracted from the base channel. Let's make our grass color in the base channel. Load a Noise shader into the base channel, set it to Naki, make 'Color 1' green and 'Color 2' yellow, simulating sort of grass and dry grass. Then go to the blend channel and load a Noise shader into it. Set this one to Zada, 'Color 1' pink/purple', 'Color 2' light blue and the low clip to 17 to make the purple a bit more obvious. Now when you go back to the fusion layout you can see these colors being subtracted from the base channel creating a sort of red/brownish variety which will simulate some autumn leaves on our grass.

Of course the combination looks kinda ugly now as we have lost our yellow/orange tints. That’s where the mask comes in. We are going to use it to exclude some areas from the blend. Tick the 'Use Mask' box and the Mask Channel will become active, load a Noise shader into it.

Make the mask interesting by using 'Voronoi 2' Noise with a low clip of 22. There's nothing more to it. When you go back to the fusion now you'll see we have some of our yellow back, basically finishing our grass.

Now drop the Abstract Grass material onto the Ground object, we don't have to change the projection as the extrude spline UV's are correct and the shader will be nicely laid out accordingly. When you render now the texture looks a bit swirly still.

We can easily remedy that by adding a bit of distortion to our fusion shader. Go back to the layers where the fusion shaders resides and add a new layer, this time a distortion Effect. Set the distortion Noise to Poxo and the strength to

Shader Building 2 - Abstr act Ma terials

By Br am

Tutorial

30 to make it more obvious.

The distortion will make break up the swirly look and make our material look more like natural ground, very convincing from a distance. But close up it looks more like a bad paint job that is running down the wall, which of course opens up new possibilities for other paint-like shaders. See picture 2 for the end-

result of the grass. Lastly, we're going to texture that donut around the middle object. Maybe something resembling snakeskin.

ness. Go back to the color channel and copy the entire layer shader.

Then enable the bump channel and paste it into the texture field.

Create a new material and name it 'Abstract Snakeskin', drop it onto the donut for easier reference to what you are doing inside the shader.

Load a Layer Shader into the color channel and make the first layer a Tiles shader. Set the tiles Pattern to Hexagons, make the colors variations of beige and brown, set the Grout Width to 10, set the Bevel to 60, Enable Randomize Color, set the Global Scale to 50 and also the U scale to 50.

All that's left to do now is enable the specular channel and increase the Height. When you render now you'll see the specular highlights follow the bump of the distorted tiles nicely.

See Picture 3 for result.

Now to break up the mathematical look of the tiles we will add distortion to this layer just as we did with the grass. So create a distortion layer above the tiles layer and set its noise to Electric, the strength to 10 and the octaves to 3 to make it less forceful. The main skin is complete. Now we just need some shini-

Well that's it for this tutorial. Nice and easy. Hopefully it will give you some cool ideas for your own projects. I promise next time will be more difficult. Any questions regarding this tutorial please ask on the 3D Attack forum. You can also check the 'abstractfinished.c4d' file for reference on this tutorial.

Bram

34

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa The idea: After Pascal, Bubbles4D member, started a WIP on "how to animate" a small plastic advertising suitcase (made of a bent single plastic sheet), it came to us that we should apply this technique to a building.

If we take each face of a building, and place it at the end of the next one, we get a long flat strip that we would only need to bend to the right angle to get a 3D building.

Pic1

Now, let's go to work.

Lets start by the orange left wall, and turn around the building to the right. [PIC4]

Modeling the flat walls.

Modeling this front strip is quite simple, since it only requires to work on a 2D ZY plan, simply referring to the plan ratings. Then we had to find an easy bending process.

Pic3

We're using the architect plans.

We'll require the fronts plan view, with the measurements, of course.

Tutorial

Easy modeling, tough texturing.

First technique that comes to our mind is to build a plan for each wall, to place them at the end of one another, being child of each other, and then assign them a rotation around the local axis, at the beginning of each plan. To texture this polygon strip, you'll need to cut the map in as many parts as the fronts, and create as much seams. And if a modification is required, we would have to take everything back, and cut again.

One plane, some bones.

So we follow Pascal's idea, using only one plane whose rotation angles are given through bones and influences. We'll only have one plane for all the walls, i.e. one map, and one material. If this influenced bones technique can be quite hard on a complete character setting, it is quite easy on a building, as we'll see with JC, modeling and texturing this building.

Pic4

Pic2

You will always find blue measurements on architect drawings or you will have to define them; if you are the architect.

More over, if the walls of buildings are not orthogonal, you will find the angles mentioned in yellow between the walls but it is not always mentioned, you will have in that case to calculate them.

Remember that angle between two sides is equal to : ATAN( opposite side / adjacent side ).

Let us verify the "Wall3" angle : ATAN(0.47/1.34)=19.32, it's ok!

35

We create a plane object whose width equals our first wall, 580 and height is 765, place the plane perpendicular to the X axis. We'll use 1 for width subdivisions (we'll take care of the windows later), and 5 for the height, so the different floor and roof levels are marked, which will help us later. And let's take good habits : name it " wall1 " [PIC5]

Pic5

Our first plane is centered on the world's origin, which makes it unpractical to work with the meas-

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa urements. Let’s make it editable (C key), work in axis mode, and move its axis so it's standing at the lower left corner. [PIC6]

Pic6

next one. You can either use Ctrl/Command C, Ctrl/Command V or Ctrl/Command drag and drop in the hierarchy.

Let's name it "wall2" and place it as a child of "wall1". This little manipulation will allow us to work in object coordinates, ie in relative measurements, as on our plans, and not on cumulative measurements from the world's origin (absolute coordinates).

Let's place our wall at the end of "wall1" by moving it -580 on the Z axis. [PIC9]

Pic12

Then, we come back to the object mode, and move our plan to 0, 0, 0.

It will now be much better to work with as a starting point. [PIC7]

Tutorial

Now, we've got a plane object for each face, but what we wish is to have only one for all the walls. In "object manager", we select "wall1", right click (ctrl-click) and "select children", then Function / connect, to have only one object we'll name "Fronts"

Pic9 Pic7

Let's now move to point mode to place our subdivisions at the floor level. [PIC8]

Now let's copy "wall2" to create the beginning of our "wall3", on which we'll do the same manipulations that we did lately, and so on, for all the other walls. Well, I let you do, by the end, you should obtain this:[PIC12]

Use Points mode, and select the right points to move them to the good length of this face : -250. Now let's adjust the height of the roof's point, 730 and 710. [Pic10-11]

You'll notice that the old objects are still there, that could be a good habit to keep them, as a track of the intermediate modeling steps, just in case. So we select "wall1" in the object manager, and there we create a group we'll name "old objects".

Then you only have to tick the boxes « visible in the view » port and « visible in render », turn them red, and hide the old walls.

Before going to the next step, we'll simplify our "Fronts" object, using structure / optimize, tick the "points" box and set the tolerance to 0. This will weld some duplicate points left after the connection.

Pic8

Setting up the bones for the bending

As we don't want to do all these axis modification for each wall, we'll copy this wall and use it as a base for the

Pic10

36

We'll place the bones following the Z axis, we need one per face. Let's

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa create the first bone, Objects / Deformation / Bone or click the Deformation icon, and choose bone, rotate the bone to orient it correctly (Y axis), [Pic 13]

bones as children of one another, which is exactly what we're looking for. And the beginning of the following bones is perfectly placed at the end of the latest.

Now we've got bones for the walls, we're gonna organize our hierarchy.

We create a "Null object" in which we place our "Fronts" (face) object and our bones. This is required for the rest to work fine. [PIC15]

means their weight is 0. Then, use the "point tool". To create the "vertex painting", we just need to drag the cursor, left button down, on the points composing the first wall.It becomes yellow, which means has a 100% influence. The "vertex painting" now shows the weight map we're gonna assign to our first bone.

You now see in the "Object Manager" that our "Fronts" object has a new tag : the vertex painting tag. [Pic17]

Pic13

Tutorial

Pic16

Set its length as long as the first fa?ade, 580, here. To create the following bones, in the Move mode, , simply click the orange dot at the end of the bone, with ctrl/Command key pressed, we pull it till the end of "wall2". In order to manage this, it's better to restrict the moves only toward the Z axis. Now let's set the exact length of our bone, same as the wall's length : 250. [PIC14] Pic15

Faces/Bones Hierarchy Setting up the influences

Pic14

We'll now create a vertex weight map we'll assign to our bones. We use the "live selection" tool, in "active tools manager", we go to "vertex painting" and check "enabled", the mode is "set" and the "strength" is 100%. [Pic16]

Bone copy You'll notice that with this manipulation, c4d automatically creates the

We select our object "Fronts", set the display to "quick shading", you'll notice the polygons are red, which

37

Pic17

Let's assign this vertex map to our first bone. We name this weight map "wall1" by selecting its tag. Naming is quite essential, since it's the exact spelling we'll assign to the bones.

We select the first bone, and put "wall1" in the first line of the restriction tag weight map list naming the vertex maps and assigning to bones. [Pic18] Even if we don't need this here, you'll notice you can assign several

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa

Pic17

Tutorial

vertex maps to a single bone, and each with a different percentage.

Here we'll leave it to 100%.

Last tip, before painting any vertex map, take care that no other vertex map is already selected but the polygon object "Fronts". Else, you'd replace the existing weight map by the ones you're painting. Same procedure and warning when you create selection tags.

Now we do the same thing for the last 11 walls. By the end of the assigning, we should have as many vertex map tags as walls, and bones, ie 12. [Pic19]

Pic19

Walls bending To bend our walls and give its definitive shape to the house, we just need to rotate our bones.

Before this, we have to activate the bones. We select "bone1" in the "objects manager" and under "objects" we choose "fix bones", and answer yes to the prompt dialog, cause we want the sub-objects to be included.

Now we only have to rotate our bones, following the measured angles on the architect plan. our first wall ("wall1") being on the reference coordinates, it doesn't need a rotation, let's start with "bone2".

This wall has no X rating, and no other angle indicated, so he is 90¡ in H to "wall1". We select "bone2" and in the coordinates, enter 90¡ in P, and take care to be in "object coordinate system", cause we only give the angles between each wall.

to write a small Xpresso to realize those bone rotations, since it allows with one single User Data to fold or unfold our building, to modify the basic wireframe.[pic20] [pic 21]

For the others walls the settings are: -

wall3 = 19.32-90 = -70.68° wall4 = -90° wall5 = 90° wall6 = 90° wall7 = 0° wall8 = -19.32° wall9 = 90° wall10 = 43.97° wall11 = 90-43.97 = 46.03° wall12 = 0°

Just a simple reminder of the coordinates system in c4d. You can either work in a "World coordinate system" or in "Object coordinate system".

"WorldCS" is obvious, the XYZ are relative to c4d's XYZ referential.

These are the axes you can always see, whatever object you selected, even none.

The "ObjectCS" is a bit more subtle: the coordinates depend on the parent object's coordinates. The parent is the one over in the hierarchy, the child is the one under. If you have more than 2 objects, some will be parents for some, and children for others. The object on top of a hierarchy, being child of no other will always have 0,0,0 for coordinates, whatever its position in the world is.

As you may find it in the files included with the tutorial, it can be useful

38

Pic20

Pic21

Making the roof.

We'll start a part that can be quite tough, depending on the roof's shape, which happens with the example we choose. But if we manage this with a "strange" roof, it will only be easier for most of the common buildings.

We'll build our roof flat, in the same object as our walls, we'll need to put our "Fronts" object flat, if you set up the xpresso, you'll do this in one click. If not, set every bone rotation to 0, in object coordinate system.

When it's done it's important to reset the bones because we are going

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa to modify the 'Front' object mesh.

Select 'Bone1' by right clicking it and choose 'reset the bones' and, as previously, include sub-objects.

The roof is made of sloping polygons (oblique) and we don't have these measurements on the blueprint (only horizontal and vertical measures). Now you can feel that trigonometry is going to be useful, but we'll try our best to avoid it as far as you can.

Pic25 Pic23

Tutorial

The first stage will be to model the roof flat along the walls. The first row of polygons is going to take place from the top of the wall. So the roof is projected in the vertical dimension, we are going to model flat in the ZY plane instead of ZX. Follow the roof slope in order to find which part of the roof will be aligned with the wall. Let's start with the roof located in the alignment of 'wall1'. We can see by following the slope that we have 3 parts with a slope in the X axis. [PIC 22]

Pic22

In this image we can see a 4th part following the same slope and getting to the part 3. [PIC 23] Now we have all the necessary measures to apply the H coordinates of our first roof. We only need to transfer those X coordinates to Y. [PIC 24]

if we decided to model flat, the roof must get his right length. So we must consider the slope. The angle between the roof and the Horizontal plane will be useful for the bending.

The nice dimension for our roof is matching a triangle and can be find with this formula :

Pic24

To build our first roof polygon, the easier way is to create a plane with no subdivision (as we made for the walls). After the editing and positioning of the axis (as we made for 'Wall1'), let's place this polygon (called 'polygons Roofs) in the 'House' null (where the walls polygons are already). This will allow our new poly to get object coordinates where Y=0 placed at the beginning of the roof. We will be able to enter directly the 4 roofs coordinates.

By working in world coordinates we would have been compelled to add 765 to each Y coordinates of the roofs. Here you can see the interest of a smartly placed null and the 'object coordinates'. [PIC 25] Now let's talk about geometry.

You probably did a 230x580 plane... sorry but this is wrong ! Indeed the architect blueprint gave us only the horizontal measurements, and even

39

True size = square root ( X dimension x X dimension + Height x Height ) It's the Pythagore Theorem, so the dimension name is the hypotenuse.

In the Roof1 case (230 x 230 + 35 x 35) = 223, 35 coming from the altimetries difference between the top and the bottom of 'Roof1' 765-730=35 Now we have our Y coordinate for the polygon 2 upper points. Y =2.33 (object coord.) You can type it directly in the coord. manager (in Y) : SQRT(SQR(230)+SQR(35)) since C4D allows math in his fields. Little reminder of english math terminology : SQRT is for 'Square root' and SQR is for 'square'. Keep on doing math and see how we could find out the roof angle that we will apply to the bones. A little of trigonometry should help: Angle = ASIN(Heigh / Hypotenuse ) In our case : Angle= ASIN( 35/233 ) = 8.6째

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa Now I let you model the other 4 roofs, you should get the image 24 result. As for the walls, work with the object coordinates. [PIC 26]

promise ! After entering those values you should get something like this. [PIC29]

Pic27 Pic26

Tutorial

To avoid a bad surprise after the bending, here are the values you must get : Roof2 : Lenth=770 Heigh=180 Hypotenuse=791 Angle=13.2° Roof3: Lenth=600 Heigh=200 Hypotenuse=632 Angle=18.4° Roof4: Lenth=770-47=723 Heigh=180 Hypotenuse=745 Angle=14° And for the little part in the back : Roof5: Lenth=0 Heigh=20 Hypotenuse=20 Angle=90°

print, and here I explain how to find them out. Let's have a look at this last roof. Even a complex building like this has got some straight angles sometimes, we must track them. Here, the right side of 'Roof8' is perpendicular to 'Wall3', this side creates the roof slope and we are looking for his length. Its dimension on the X axis is 770-47=723 Its dimension on the Z axis is 580460=254 So Length = SQRT(SQR(423)+SQR(254)) = 766 [Pic28]

Pic29

As for the walls, we have to connect all polygons together but to the wall's too, so we select "Walls" and "Roofs" objects. We now have a single object made up of polygons forming walls and roofs.

This part could seem a bit long but roofings are the most delicate parts to model in a house because of their slopes.

Roof bones.

Concerning the roofs 6 and 7 above the 'Wall5' you will have to proceed the same way, with those values : Roof6: Lenth=215 Heigh=35 Hypotenuse=218 Angle=9.2° Roof7: Lenth=598 Heigh=180 Hypotenuse=625 Angle=16.7° [PIC 27] Concerning the 'Roof8' above 'Wall3', I choose to deal with it at the end of the process because this is a specific case that you should encounter sometimes in roof parts that connect 2 parallel roofs. In those cases, the necessary measures are often missing on the blue-

Pic28

For this roof we have : Roof8: Lenth=766 Heigh=180 Hypotenuse=787 Angle=13.2° We won't use maths anymore I

40

Let’s take care of the roof bones, which, as we will see, shouldn’t be positioned anywhere. For the folding to work properly, we need the roof bones to move with the wall bones, because our roof extend farther than our walls. If it isn’t, I wouldn’t live in your house!

The roof bones must be placed as child of the first bone of the wall they extend from. As first bone, I mean the first parent bone on top of the hierarchy. Another difference with the position of the bones for the walls: this time we will place a Null bone before placing our actual first

Buildings , Orig ami and C4D!

By Luista ppa bone. It is necessary because all the bones of the roof will need to be rotated later on. [Pic 30]

Tutorial

Pic30

Just repeat the same steps as for the walls, just don’t forget to paint some weights and link them to the mesh too. Make sure you assign an empty restriction for the Null bone, since we don’t want it to influence anything. [Pic 31]

give them the necessary rotations to make up the roof. Don’t forget that we flattened the roof vertically, so we could work on a plane, so the polygons should then be rotated to 90 degrees, to which we will add our rotation angles from the different parts of the roof itself. So, for Roof bone1 : angle to come back horizontally + Roof1 angle is equivalent to –90° +(-8.6) = -98.6° Since our bones are children of each other, we need to work in object mode as coordinates, so we need to think relative to the angle between two roofs. So for Roof bone2 : Angle roof2 – angle roof1 is equivalent to 13.2 – (-8.6) = -4.6°.

I leave you figure out the other parts of the roof, to shorten this tutorial, but the principle is the same.

Here is the result of each angle for each bone : Roof bone1 : -90–8.6 = -98.6° Roof bone2 : -13.2+8.6 = -4.6° Roof bone3 : -18.4+13.2 = -5.2° Roof bone4 : -14+18.4 = -4.4° Roof bone5 : -90+18.4 = -71.6° Roof bone6 : -90-9.2 = -99.2° Roof bone7 : -9.2+16.7 = -7.5° Roof bone8 : -90-13.2 = -103.2° When every bone is rotated properly, we end up with this: [Pic32] We are nearing the end of the modeling part, we just have to see how to integrate in our method some detail objects like railings and balconies for example. We will see how to model them separately and place them in the hierarchy so that they follow our bone angles.

Pic32

into a main Null object, so the balconies parts can be moved easily.

Name them “balcony1, 2 and 3”.

Since these objects don’t need to be deformed, no need to link them to bones with weights, it is much simpler to drop them as childs of the bones in the hierarchy and make them follow their rotation that way.

Let’s make the group “balcony1” child of the bone1, “balcony2” as child of bone5 and “balcony3” as child of bone9. [Pic33] Now we just

Pic33

have fold back the house model once again, and only the texture are missing. That’s it for this month.

Next month, JC will explain how to make a texture for that house and make use of the unfolding technique we just explained.

Modeling accessories.

Luistappa, Bubbles4D member.

Pic31

The real roof angles.

Initialize your bones, we will then

Put back the construction flat and model our balconies as simple primitives. 3 rectangles and 2 cylinders for each balcony. Place everything

41

Translation : Fluffy, Munchou, Pasto, FR32c and Vmontel.

Artist Spotlight...

Daniel Mueri aka Roadrunner

Name: Daniel Mueri Age: 18 Occupation: Student Country: Switzerland

Spotlight

Software: CINEMA 4D, Photoshop Website: http://www.daniel.mueri.net Favorite resources on the web: 3d-worxx.com

I'm Daniel Mueri known as Roadrunner on every board where I'm active. I live in the northern part of Switzerland, where I also went to school for 12 years, and I hope this ends in two years. I don't know yet what I will do then.

I started working with 3D-Tools some years ago, I think in the year 2002. I started with a program called Monzoom, but not really serious about it. It was more like playing for me, and I didn't get any good results. So , for about a half a year, didn't use any 3D-software . And in the Winter 2004 I "met" CINEMA 4D R 8.5, which I loved from the start . I started with little battles on some little boards, and so I learned CINEMA 4D with the help of other users and the rest by myself "try and error". And it worked.

Today I work as a hobbiest and I have many little projects which

should be finished soon... (WIP's on my Page) I’ve now had two little freelance works, and I hope I have some in the future too. But I haven't any plans for my future after school.

My newest project is a little star wars scene... you can take a look at it here (in German, but a picture

3 42

speaks more than 1000 words)! http://www.daniel.mueri.net/projekt1.html

Artist Spotlight...

Spotlight

Daniel Mueri aka Roadrunner

3 43

Best of CINEMA 4D Some of the best artists around the world using CINEMA 4D

The "Spyker" character for Poser is the latest Darkwhisper's newsletter freebie. http://www.3duniverse.co.za/ Wanted to have some fun with this cool little guy :)

Image: Battle Field Artist: Thierry Perrain Country: France Date Created: August / 01 / 2005 Website: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/perrain3dportfolio/ Software: Poser, CINEMA 4D XL 7, Photoshop

44

Image: Concrete Cafe Artist: Rudolf Herczog Country: Sweden Website: www.rochr.com Date created: 07-31-05 Software: CINEMA 4D And Photoshop

Artist Comments: A play with architectural styles, mixing the old with futuristic. Models/lighting/render in Cinema4D, clouds/towers/traffic in Photoshop.

45

Image: Interior with Stairs Artist: Richard Watkins Country: United Kingdom Website: http://members.aol.com/rikwatkins/ricweb/portfolio_product.htm Date created: August 6th 2005 Software: CINEMA 4d 9, Maxwell Beta v1.2.2a

Artist Comments: Just a simple interior, Modeled in CINEMA 4D, rendered via Cinemaxwell plugin. Physical Sky for illumination.

46

Image: These Dreams Artist: Raymond O'Doul Country: USA Website: www.3dexplorer.net Date created: 8-2-05 Software: CINEMA 4D R9

Artist Comments: The child is modeled after Jack Jack from The Incredibles. The rest of the image is based on some of my childhood memories of scary dreams.

47

Image: Restaurant Artist: Daniel M端ri / Roadrunner Country: Switzerland Website: www.patrix3d.de Date created: 3-29-05 Software: CINEMA 4D R9 and Photoshop

Artist Comments: This is my first indoor room I've created.

And it was also the moment I learned to handle with multipasses. It took me about 50 hours for the whole picture over a time range of 6 weeks. Here you can see many Work-In-Progress pictures: http://daniel.mueri.net/gallery/Restaurant/ .

48

Editor’s Notes Hello Readers and Attackers!

WOW! Can you believe autumn is upon us? That’s right, summer is nearly gone! The time sure does fly, but it was a GREAT summer for 3D Attack. We had some great issues and released our new line of plugins for CINEMA 4D. Our latest plugin is zBlur. zBlur is a post effect for Cinema 4D which can be used as an alternative to C4D's own DOF. zBlur does not cancel out other post effects, it does not require the Advanced Render module, and it supports reflections and bleed control. zBlur also has a preview window and a reference object that can make changes right in the editor.

For a complete feature list, video demonstrations, tutorials and screen shots regarding our plugins visit: http://www.3dattack.net/plugins/inde x.php?pluginid=0 KEEP ON ATTACKING! The 3D Attack Team GOODIES FOLDER http://www.3dattack.net/goodies/ As most of our readers know, your goodies folder usually comes zipped with you magazine. We have decided to do the Goodies a bit different.

You will now find your Goodies folder at http://www.3dattack.net/goodies/ for download. This will allow us to make changes to the Goodies folder easily, (if needed) and provide you with the access to the Goodies whenever you may need to redownload them. Remember, the Goodies are copyrighted as is the magazine. These Goodies are for paying readers only. DO NOT redistribute your download link or your Goodies folder.

VITAL DISCLOSURE Vital Disclosure have released there Insider Secrets Volume I BodyPaint 3D training DVD. We are currently in the process of evaluating and reviewing this DVD for our readers.

We wanted to bring you the review this month, but ran in to some scheduling difficulties. We will bring you the full review next month. In the mean time let me say that I have watched the DVD in its entirety, and its FANTASTIC! This is a must have DVD for anyone who doesn’t know it all when it comes to BodyPaint.

Check it out at: www.vitaldistraction.com I would also like to mention that the Vital Team are great with their customer service. If you have a question or concern, they are right there offering their skill, talent and services. EXCELLENT SERVICE! Tutorial and Article Submissions If you would like to submit a tutorial or article, or have your software or plug-in reviewed by 3D Attack, please click on the following link for instructions: http://3d attack.net/3d Attack/viewtopic.php?t=1405 All submissions must be e-mailed to Attention: Tank at 3dattack@3dattack.net Advertising with 3D Attack If you would like to advertise with 3D Attack send us an e-mail requesting our media kit and rate card. 3dattack@3dattack.net

Friends of 3D Attack™ www.maxon.net www.doschdesign.com www.tools4d.com www.3duser.com.tw www.3dcommune.com www.c4dcafe.com www.biomekk.com www.dylancolestudio.com www.3dexplorer.net www.c4ditalia.com www.adimex.com.au www.cgtalk.com www.jeso-art.de www.cinema4duser.com www.cactus3d.com www.base80.com www.3dfluff.com www.3darena.de www.frenchcinema4d.com www.sadbatu.de www.C4dHotline.it www.peXel.de www.c4dmodelshop.com www.black-graphics.de www.tarabella.it/C4d/ www.planit3d.com www.cartesiuscreations.com www.cgtalk.ru www.renderosity.com www.designerinaction.de www.scifi-meshes.com www.bubbles4d.com www.mediaworks.fr www.3dlinks.com www.c4dzone.com www.c4d-pl.org *3D Attack the CINEMA4D Magazine and all material contained therein are copyright protected. You may not disassemble or distribute any part of this publication without prior written con-

Tutorials If you have questions concerning a specific tutorial or want to show us a tutorial you have completed, feel free to post your questions and work on our C4D discussion forums at www.3dattack.net.

sent from 3D Attack directly. Any attempts to do so will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law as it applies in Michigan, USA. This applies for both 3D Attack material as well as any named artist contained in its publications.

Although we read through all the tutorials and proof-read them for errors we cannot guarantee that they are 100% error-free and therefore cannot issue refunds based on those errors.

49

© 2004-2005 3D ATTACK TM