MAXON CINEMA 4D
Easy to Use, Professional 3D Animation Software

The next generation, representing two decades of excellence.

The eleventh generation of CINEMA 4D is another milestone in the development of professional 3D software and a testament to two decades of excellence by MAXON’s programming team. Professional 3D animation tools have never been easier to use.

The basics: #1 The Cinema 4D Interface

Welcome to the first tutorial in our “the basics” series. This series of tutorials is designed to teach you the extreme basics of Cinema 4D and is a great way to learn Cinema 4D for everyone that has never used Cinema 4D before.

In this tutorial we will cover the Cinema 4D interface, we will go through all basic menu’s and button explaining what they are and how to use them.

Cinema 4D Interface – Basic Walkthrough

Making of Super Snail

This work is fully modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D. I have used BodyPaint and Photoshop for the textures. I start modeling the snail shell, to do this I use a spiral spline and a circular shape inside a sweep NURBS, I activate it and adjust the spiral parameters to get both the necessary turns and the thickness at the beginning and at the end.

Create Explosive Typographic Effects

In this tutorial I will walk through the steps I used to create this illustration to bring alive the word “collide.” While you may not find yourself needing to recreate the word “collide,” I hope you will find useful the techniques I will cover…

3D Text Tutorial

Some people have been asking me how I created the sleek 3D text for the header of Celoxdesign (if you can’t see it in the header your probably viewing a newer version of Celoxdesign Happy ). This 3D text tutorial includes everything, so with proper materials and lightning.

Glass In Cinema4D

Glass can be a difficult material to capture correctly in a 3D program. Ordinary glass presents us with extremes in nearly every surface attribute. Hard specularity, transparency, reflection, refraction – glass has it all. The transparency and reflective values of glass change with our angle of observation. Glass seems completely transparent to us, yet it casts a shadow. Thus, it is a unique challenge to embody all of these aspects of glass in a material setup.

Creature Head Tutorial

3D Objects from Vectors

This is a video tutorial on taking vector art and importing it into Cinema 4D to create a 3D object that can be animated, textured, and manipulated in 3D space. In this tutorial, written by David from filmmakingcentral.com he shows you exactly how to do this. David was nice enough to allow us to repost this on our blog. He is using artwork from the free Vector Sample Pack from our Arsenal.

Giving Depths to Your Renders

Materials in Cinema4D

Ball Bearing Gear Tutorial

3D Toys Animation

Learn the animation basics and looping in Cinema 4D.

Although this won’t teach you on the artwork part, you will learn how to animate it and there’s a demo video attached. If you have any question, please leave a comment. I will additionally write more tutorials on this if needed.

Abstract Render

Well, I decided to make a tutorial out of my two “Crystalize” abstracts since people like them so much. Making those effects is not very hard. Its only playing around until u get what you want. But once u get the effect you feel like using it over and over combining with other things. I bet after this tutorial ends you will probably think this was so easy i could have done it without a tutorial. But enough with the talking, lets start making something.

Simple UFO Tutorial

Frozen Cells Tutorial

Modeling a car using blueprints

In this massive tutorial you will learn how to model a car using blueprints, points and the bridge tool.

Basic Cinema 4D knowledge is required for this tutorial!
Please note I will be working in Cinema 4D Release 10. If you wish to use this method please just try and adapt it for your package, be it in a previous version of C4D or an alternate package.
This tutorial does assume you have some basic 3D modeling knowledge as well as some basic knowledge of C4D.

CREATING SKIES WITH SHADERS

This tutorial explains how to create a large sky-plane, create a sky-like material using the bhodinut 2d noise shaders and explains how to create your own variations etc. I was going through the “nebula” tutorial on the maxon site and I noticed that similar techniques could be used to create normal clouds, so I simplified it all a bit and decided to write a tutorial on it, hope you find it useful!!

Array Lighting in Cinema4D

Hourglass Tutorial

This tutorial will teach you to make a great sandglass, which you can use for plenty of purposes. You can find the finished model and other stuff here Glass.zip

Armor Plates in Cinema4D

Golf Ball Tutorial

Fuel Cap Tutorial

Tech Interface

C4D Plug Tutorial and Full Guide

Switch Tutorial

Boolean Objects in Cinema4D

Glass Balls in Cinema4D

Red Plasticy Material in CINEMA 4D

Zebra in Cinema4D

Here’s the Zebra 3D modeling tutorial by Pupi for Cinema 4D. And the Great thing is, you can download his 3D model for FREE ! Requirements: Cinema 4D.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Hair Geometrics in Cinema4D

MAXON’S CINEMA 4D allows users to add a module called HAIR, integrating custom hair control to 3D projects.  However, sometimes users may want to export the HAIR geometry to non-HAIR users.  The process, although easy, isn’t necessarily obvious.  Here’s how you can do it, or at least one way to do it.

Cinema4D Poser Tutorial

UV Mapping in Cinema 4D

3D Grass in Cinema 4D

This is a Cinema 4D Tutorial I’ve created which will introduce you to object manipulation, textures, fur and also general familiarity with the program itself. I’m using Cinema 4D 10 and you can download the demo directly from Maxon.

Car Tire Tutorial

You will need the MAKETHICKER plugin, download and drop it into program files/maxon/cinema 4d/plugins, you can find the plugin at the following page…

Make a Picture 3D

Creating a Line Object Render

Today you will learn how to create great looking Line Renders using extruding and deformers.
Line renders are amazing looking renders that are often used on wallpapers or photo manipulations.
Lets get started by opening Cinema 4D, I’m using C4D R10 for this tutorial, but it should also work for older versions.

Wedding Rings in Cinema 4D

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate you 5 great behavior to really make your pixels explode in layout and interface design using Photoshop. These necessary techniques will really give your designs a more 3D, substantial feel to them!
I refer to these techniques as “Pixel-Exploded” because they tend to use very few extra pixels (than you would ordinarily use in a design) to make your graphics explode out a bit more. As cliche as it may sound, these diverse effects really do work, and many modern websites and designs use them regularly.

Let’s take a look at a few:

• The 2 Pixel Divide
• The Pixel Shadow
• The Pixel Bevel
• The Shadow Highlight
• The Vista Effect

The 2 Pixel Divide

The two pixel divide is a widely used effect on interface design, and layout design. Some quick examples would be Windows Media Player (Version 11), Pixel2Life.com, and 2Advanced.net. It’s a very subtle effect (as most effects should be), so you might not knowingly take note of it. However, the results from it are usually great when used responsibly.

It’s very easy to accomplish, and only takes Two Pixels to really make it.

Start out with a simple design, such as a header for a website, with a navigation bar underneath:

Now, Zoom In (Ctrl + “+”) to a close level where you can really start to work with single pixels. Select your Pencil Tool from the tool bar, and select a Foreground Color of White. In a New Layer, draw a horizontal line dividing the banner from the menu (Hold Shift to draw perfect lines).

Create another new layer, and using a Foreground Color of Black, repeat this process directly above the white divider.

That’s it! After this, I usually lower the opacity on both of these new layers until I find desirable results that don’t conflict with the surrounding elements too much.

The Pixel Shadow

I like to use this effect when I’m working with text or simple designs on top of soft backgrounds. Again, it’s nothing extravagant, but it gives me that extra flare I’m looking for sometimes.

Let’s say I’m working with the document shown below. Adding an ordinary Drop Shadow is going to give the shape and text a very soft shadow, which is not what I’m looking for. However, I do want it to pop out a bit more.

What I do instead is add a Very Hard Drop Shadow.

I’m going to go into the layers blending options (Right click the layer, “Blending Options”). From here I’m going to Add a Drop Shadow, and then set it up so that the Size is set to “0″, and the Distance is set to”1px”. Click Ok to apply blending options.

Much Better!

The Pixel Bevel

It’s usually safe to stray away from using the Bevel Blending option in modern layout design, but if used carefully, it can actually be used for good. Take the document below for example.

The orange box has a soft gradient, and even a drop shadow applied to it to give it a little more “Pop”, but it still seems a bit bland.

To fix this, I’m going to go into the Blending Options for the Orange Box Layer, and Add a slight “Bevel and Emboss”.

As you can see in the options, I’ve set the size to “0px”, and have adjusted the angle to 90* (to give the effect of a light source from above).

The Result is a box with a lot more depth in it’s appearance!

The Shadow Highlight

Here is another technique that might slip past you on first glance, but makes all the difference in a good design. It’s similar to the 2px divide in that it’s a very subtle, but also effective technique.

Not to mention it’s just as simple.

Take this document for example:

As you can see directly underneath the “Box Header” Black box, I have a slight Drop Shadow. It doesn’t give us a whole lot of “Pop”, but it’s a start.

We’re going to do the same thing that we did for the 2 Pixel Divide essentially.

Zoom In to about 400%-800%, and using the Pencil Tool (White Foreground) on a New Layer, draw a horizontal line at the very top of the Drop Shadow.

Now just adjust the opacity of this line to blend nicely with the rest of the design. You should end up with a nice separator between the header and the content area (where the shadow begins).

The Vista Effect

I’ve gone into great detail for this effect in my “Vista Window Effect Tutorial“, but I thought that it was nice enough of an effect to at least mention here.

The effect used in Windows Vista’s Aero Theme (for their “Windows” more specifically), uses a combination of different blending options, including “Bevel and Emboss“, “Outer Glow“, “Drop Shadow”, “Inner Glow“, and even “Color Overlay“.

Furthermore, the effect is really set up into 3 parts. You have the Main Window, the Inner Window, and the Extra Parts (The Exit symbol and Window Title).

You’re welcome to explore this effect using this PSD (Vista Example) if you’d like (We’ve got an even better PSD example on our Vista Window Effect Tutorial page).