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
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:
– extruding text in Cinema 4d
– using displacement maps in Cinema 4d
– using the explosion deformer in Cinema 4d
– exporting to photoshop from Cinema 4d
– unique color enhancing techniques in Photoshop
– various layer modes applied in Photoshop for great light effects
(A basic knowledge of Cinema 4d and Photoshop is required)
STEP 1: Creating 3d text
I created a new document in C4d and added some text with the built in text tool.
I typed the word COLLIDE in the Attributes manager.
I applied Extrude Nurbs by making it a parent of my text.
Parent/child relationship shown above in my Objects Manager.
There’s a small problem at this point: The word “collide” is treated as one object and I want to manipulate the individual letters. In order to do that I need to Explode Segments from the Function menu.
Now each part of each letter is broken into individual splines and I can extrude them separately as well as manipulate them.
On a couple of the letters I need to Connect the inside spline and outside spline together. The “O” and the “D” need to be connected because they are 2 individual splines as a result of the Explode Segments function I applied. I selected the 2 splines and right clicked to pull up a menu. I chose Connect. Once I’ve connected them I am ready to extrude each individual letter and place them where I want in my composition.
I have applied an Extrude nurbs to each letter now. See my object window for clarity.
And now I’ve named each nurb so that I know what letter it is.
Next I will click on each letter’s Extrude Nurbs and adjust the cap to be a Fillet Cap. I chose 3 Steps with a Radius of 3. This gives a nice looking edge to each letter.
Next I selected each letter and changed it’s position and rotation into a random spot that I felt would work for this composition.
STEP TWO: Creating reflective material for my 3d text
I created a new material that I will plan to tweak a bit later to get better results. But for now I know I will want to add reflection, environment, and a color.
My reflection is set to 35% and I did the same for environment as well. These are just settings I am randomly choosing and require some tweaking as the project progresses.
I added a light and and a sky to my scene.
I created a material to apply to my sky. I used a picture of a sky. There is definitely a lot of experimenting that can be done with what you can place in the sky and how it will look in the reflections of the material on the text.
I applied the new material to my sky and experimented with the Projection method. Cubic ended up being what I chose based on the way it looked as it reacted with my text.
Here is the result of my sky being reflected on my text. You can load the same image of a sky into your reflection and environment materials but the results will look different than using a sky in c4d to be reflected. I’ve found that I have more control over the reflections this way. I can rotate the sky. I can change the projection method of the material on my sky. Ultimately, it allowed me to get the results I wanted with ease.
My text material wasn’t quite colorful enough so I added a tint of blue to the original material.
Here is the result of adding the tint of blue. Much better for what I am looking to accomplish.
STEP THREE: Using a displacement map to create my collision effect
I copied several of my letter from the word “collide” and will apply a displacement map to those to create the collision.
I copied my reflective material that I created for the word “collide” and then I checked the “displacement” box and loaded a texture. Cinema 4d has built in textures you can experiment with for the displacement. Usually something black and white will work best but it is not completely necessary. I chose “brick” from the preset surfaces. I’ve also used black and white jpegs of stripes or other patterns that I’ve created in Illustrator.
Here you can see I set the Height to 500m and kept the strength at 100%. This is definitely a step that I could get lost in time experimenting with different heights, textures, and even projection methods for this material. Each tweak will give you amazing new results to choose from.
Here is the result of my current settings on the displacement material.
STEP FOUR: Adding exploding bits and pieces to my collision
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