Cinema 4D Beginner's Guide
Model, animate, and render like a Pro!
Jen Rizzo
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Cinema 4D Beginner's Guide
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
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First published: November 2012
Producon Reference: 1171112
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-84969-214-4
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Cover Image by William Kewley ()
Credits
Author
Jen Rizzo
Reviewers

She has worked with over thirty companies in the last four years, jumping in at every stage
of the design process. She is overly excited by almost everything.
In her personal life, she strives to become a stronger cyclist and hopes to someday beat
someone at a board game. She has a near-unhealthy obsession with cured meat, cheese,
chocolate and coee, and will wax poecally on the city of San Francisco unl someone
distracts her. She would like to thank malt, hops, and yeast for exisng in perfect
liquid triumvirance.
Acknowledgement
I am constantly amazed by the unshakeable support system I have developed over the last
decade of my life, and I am deeply grateful to the following people:
To my mother, without whom my enre career would not be possible. The path of my life
connues to surprise and delight me every day and no one has been more integral in that
than you. Thank you for never once making me wonder if you were proud of me.
To both my fathers, for loving and supporng me as strongly as they possibly could in their
very dierent ways.
To Susan, whose support and enthusiasm for this project from the very rst moment was
what got me excited about wring this year.
To Je, who is responsible for showing me how to fall in love with this city, and to Michelle
who connues to help me eat my way across it. If I could acknowledge you two with a corgi,
I promise I would.
To Patrick, whose constant support for me and whatever new scheme I've dreamed up that
day never fails. You kept me going this year when I wasn't sure how to and I'll never be able
to thank you properly. To Akima for your wisdom and insight - I am blown away by your
energy to help the people you love and grateful that I get to be a part of it. To Denman, the
undisputed king of puns - your thoughul approach to everything you do is overwhelming
and I love it.
To Jesse for somehow always knowing the right thing to share to inspire me and to Elianna
for far too many dinnerme giggles - the way you two have forged your own path blows me
away. To Jaleen for being my constant parallel - I'll never understand it, but I am so grateful
for it. To Jusn, whose love and support is always just a few feet away.

and a contributor in today's eld of graphics. Starng with my parents for
accepng my decision to pursue two art degrees, colleagues for providing
much needed perspecve when needed, and those close to me for being a
never-ending fountain of support.
Jonathan Richter lives in the USA and is the founder of Supermassive Studios, an
award-winning moon design/3D animaon, and video bouque. With an extensive and
varied background ranging from music composion to photography, Jonathan has created
a company that leverages technology to tell capvang stories. With Cinema 4D, he enjoys
pushing the boundaries of what it is capable of. His passion projects include short lms
and visual eects. In 2011, his short lm The Box went on to be accepted into several
major lm fesvals. The Supermassive Studios website can be found at the following URL:

Sean Siegler is a Moon Graphics Arst and live Visual Performer based out of
San Francisco.
Originally from the Midwest, he ventured to New York to pursue a degree in Film and
Video from Pra Instute.
Since then he has spent many years creang original content and performing live as a VJ
across the country. This lead to a discovery of the art of moon graphics and a love aair
with Adobe Aer Eects. 3D was added to his arsenal aer it became apparent that Cinema
4D was a dierent beast and made creaon, exploraon, and modeling in the 3D space a
much more intuive and creave process than other soware packages.
At present he lives in a warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, with his
cat Helmet and his darling ancée Carlyn.
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Time for acon – customizing the interface 22
Hidden menus – M and V 24
Pung it all together – our project 26
Summary 26
Chapter 2: Modeling Part 1: Edges, Faces, and Points 27
Before we begin 27
Beginning with primives 28
Time for acon – creang a desk 32
Time for acon – seng up an environment 34
Polygon-level control 36
Time for acon – extruding polygons 37
Summary 44
Chapter 3: Modeling Part 1: Splines, NURBS, Deformers, and Boole 45
Before we begin 46
Understanding NURBS objects 46
Exploring the Spline menu 50
Time for acon – creang and imporng a spline 51
Time for acon – creang a vase 55
Table of Contents
[ ii ]
Time for acon – creang a chair 60
HyperNURBS modeling 66
Time for acon – using HyperNURBS objects 66
Summary 73
Chapter 4: Materials and Shaders 75
Before we begin 75
Understanding materials 76
Understanding material channels 76
Time for acon – texturing our environment 91
Shaders 96

Time for acon – using Math in XPresso 172
Time for acon – making the gears turn 176
Time for acon – XPresso and MoGraph 184
Summary 189
Chapter 9: An Overview of Addional Tools 191
Time for acon – hair 191
Time for acon – hair materials without Hair objects 198
Sketch and Toon 201
Time for acon – placing accurate lighng 202
Time for acon – global sengs and materials 205
Cloth 210
Time for acon – creang a cloth object 211
Summary 218
Chapter 10: Opmizing Your Workow 219
Before we begin 219
XRefs 220
Time for acon – creang XRefs 220
Understanding the importance of composing 225
Time for acon – modeling for composing 226
Time for acon – composing tags 229
Render sengs for composing and mulpass 233
Time for acon – composing with Adobe Aer Eects 238
Summary 247
Appendix: Pop Quiz Answers 249
Index 251

Preface
With Cinema 4D, you can quickly and easily bring your visions to life. This beginner's guide
will walk you through creang and animang a 3D scene, with ps and techniques for
everything from photorealisc rendering to moon graphics.

we will also briey use Adobe Illustrator for drawing Bezier splines and Adobe
Aer Eects for post-producon composing.
Who this book is for
This book is for designers and arsts with a basic prociency in animaon or computer
graphics, as well as professionals with an understanding of 3D animaon in another
soware package.
Conventions
In this book, you will nd several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instrucons of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Time for action – heading
1. Acon 1
2. Acon 2
3. Acon 3
Instrucons oen need some extra explanaon so that they make sense, so they are
followed with:
What just happened?
This heading explains the working of tasks or instrucons that you have just completed.
Preface
[ 3 ]
You will also nd some other learning aids in the book, including:
Pop quiz – heading
These are short mulple-choice quesons intended to help you test your own understanding.
Have a go hero – heading
These are praccal challenges and give you ideas for experimenng with what you
have learned.
You will also nd a number of styles of text that disnguish between dierent kinds of
informaon. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanaon of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You may noce that we used the Unix command
rm to remove the Drush directory rather than the DOS del command."
A block of code is set as follows:

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can download this le from />downloads/2144OT_Cinema_4D_Beginners_Guide.pdf
Preface
[ 5 ]
Errata
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Geng to Know Cinema 4D
[ 8 ]
 1024 MB of free RAM
 DVD ROM drive
 Standard DVD installaon can take up to 7 GB of disk space
Addional informaon can be found on MAXON's website at the following link:
 />information/system-requirements.html
There are four dierent packages of Cinema available for purchase, as follows:
 Prime
 Broadcast
 Visualize
 Studio
Prime is MAXON's basic oering, which oers a toolset for anyone looking for basic
3D animaon funconality. This version should be sucient for students and will contain
most of the features menoned in this book (MoGraph, which will be discussed in
Chapter 7, MoGraph, is available in Broadcast and Studio only). Broadcast targets
moon graphics professionals, while Visualize is directed at architects and designers.
Studio contains all of the features from the other three versions. The dierent versions
are designed to oer necessary funconality at a lower cost for specic industries.
A full product comparison can be found on MAXON's website (
on.
net/products/general-information/general-information/product-
comparison.html
).
MAXON has always done an excellent job of ensuring that its soware supports a wide
range of computers dang back mulple years. R12 was the rst version that did not
support PPC Macintosh computers, almost ve years aer Intel-based Macs became
standard and well aer most major animaon and design soware applicaons had
disconnued support. While Cinema can be installed on many older machines, 3D
soware is notorious for being a processor hog. A mulprocessor machine with

sit down with a pencil and paper, or open Photoshop to try and create a rendering of what we
see, we have to gure out how to visually force that perspecve in our composion as well.
Geng to Know Cinema 4D
[ 10 ]
In 3D soware, you're creang the object in the same way you'd create it in real life.
A cube is made up of six perfectly equal squares that come together at 90 degree angles.
The perspecve you see in 3D renderings is enrely dependent on the camera angle, which
means once we've created an object, we can create a rendering from innite angles with
lile addional eort, as shown in the following screenshot:
As we move on to exploring Cinema's interface, it's important to establish our coordinate
system – how 3D space and direcon are represented on our 2D screen. When we modify an
object, we'll oen have to specify if we're modifying it in one, two, or three dimensions, as
well as which dimensions we're choosing to modify. When you open Cinema 4D, you'll see
a perspecve grid. The center point represents (0,0,0). The red arrow represents the X axis,
the blue arrow represents the Z axis, and the upward dimension (which will be colored green
when we begin creang objects) is the Y axis.