The Magic of Cinema 4D with Photoshop

Posted on 25. Jan, 2012 by DAS Team in Articles, Inspirations, Typography

Hello,
I’m László Magyar, an artist/illustrator, 26 years old from Hungary.
I’ve been working with pictures for years, and during this time I’ve learnt this and that about graphics and digital art. By the end of summer 2010, I started learning 3D modelling, for which I needed almost half a year to discover how to create beautiful and precise renders. This involved learning RealFlow (liquid simulation), which can only be seen on just a few of my pictures so far. I love to work with this; there is no day when I wouldn’t try out something new. I had a few works with which I tried to promote myself, but in Hungary, this field is not covered pretty much. Plus, there are only a few people who really consider this kind of art a real art. That’s enough of me for now, I hope you’ll enjoy my article and hopefully it will inspire you greatly.

This article aims to introduce one of my older picture and its work phases. I must note that it’s not a tutorial, it’s just a simple introduction on how I use Cinema 4D and Photoshop together, and how I start and finish such works.
Have fun reading it!

Used programs:
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 – Layer Size: 2560×1440@400dpi
- Maxon Cinema4D v13 – Layer Size: 2560×1440@400dpi
- Adobe Illustrator CS3

I tend to start my works differently. There are times when I literally dream of the end result, and quickly try to sketch it up. There are other times when I see something inspiring, let it be a picture or someone’s work, and I try to slowly build it up from there.
In this article, I’ll introduce you to my picture called ‘Taboo’.

1: In Taboo, the first thing I created was the erotic symbol. But it was just not enough. Then I decided to draw a type treat in Illustrator, something that I can’t illustrate with pictures.

2: So I had the sybmol and the type. Then I played with positioning. At first, I planned the type to be in the center, but later I nudged it to the right, so it moved out of balance. However I corrigated it with Photoshop in a later phase.

3:Having the final position, theme, colours in mind, then came texturing the render. In this case I used one of Cinema4D 13’s special abilities, the psychical system; which is a faster process of creating a new texture mode called subsurface scattering. With this process we can make an object transparent, with which we can achieve some interesting results. You can see on the picture how it looks.

4 : For the studio setup, I’ll use the Grayscale Cinema4D’s “god-tools”, with which we can create some exceptionally nice renders with. In this render I used 3 light sources and another studio accessory, which produces the background and the floor. After placing everything, we have to play with the setups, where to put the light sources just to make it look how we want it. When it’s done, then comes rendering, which takes quite a time depending on our computer’s performance. With my setups on my computer, it took me about 30 minutes.

5: Now I have a basic render, which looks just great, but now comes the real magic.

6: I played with this a lot to make the color hues look good. You can see the before-after in the pictures. When I was creating this picture, I didn’t feel the lights good enough, so another day passed by with thinking.

7: And so I got to the solution of adding some texture to make the lights more interesting. So the picture got an old paper texture, which can be seen mainly in the top left corner. I didn’t want to mess up the beauty of the whole picture with it. I also calibrated the colors and saturation values a little.
And that’s it for the render. One last thing is some cosmetics, which consists of adding Lens Flare in Photoshop. For the lens flare, we can use a stock photo, or we can create them ourselves in Cinema4D. If we used a photo, we would had to set the lens flare’s layer style to Screen or Lighten, depending on the result we want to achieve.
After all these, I’ve also blurred the lens flare with Gaussian Blur, thus giving some light to the right side of the picture.

8:In my latest works, I tend to put my logo in the picture, aligning it according to its theme.
So this is how I create an artwork. There are much more complex ones, but I chose this one for this article, as it’s really simple to understand.