Creating 3D Abstract Work

Last semester I based my work around creating real tangible objects in Cinema 4D. This meant that creatively, I had less freedom. Lava lamps look like lava lamps, cameras look like cameras, everything I created had an underlying design defined by real-world objects. This semester I am eager to create some more abstract and artistic pieces, less about modelling and more about expression.

I had seen this tutorial from EJ at Eyedesyn on YouTube previously, and was excited to have a go at it so I decided that I would try it to learn some more abstract workflows.

I found it really difficult at first coming back to the software. It wasn’t working how I remembered and after having a few weeks off I found troubleshooting to be much more difficult. For some reason my materials were not rendering properly- the reflections weren’t working. I couldn’t find any troubleshooting online either, so I suspected that maybe a setting was wrong. To fix it, I opened an old project from last semester, deleted the contents, and used this as my template because I knew everything worked there.

Once I got started properly, I remembered how much I love creating in Cinema 4D. The tutorial was really good at explaining the tools, and I now know how to use the tracer tool to create custom splines.

To create a custom spline using the tracer:

Create a node
Duplicate the node with a cloner
Use a tracer to connect the nodes (this creates the spline)
The tracer can create many splines, change the settings to change the type
Add a shader with noise to change the shape of the spline

To create the piece below, I further followed the tutorial, and cloned the one band to make the whole array of them. I then added a falloff to the shader, so that the noise effect could be constrained to a smaller area within the array. This could be keyframed to move around, or grow and shrink to create different effects.

As you can see in the video, there are a few issues with jittering. I’m not 100% sure why it’s jittering, and I couldn’t really tell until I exported it at this quality, however it is likely due to the tracer effect creating a jittery spline. To fix this, I could perhaps find out how to bake this movement so that it’s not being calculated each time. The reflective light effect also amplifies the look of the jittering, so maybe if I had it in a different environment, the jittering would be less noticeable.

This was my first close up render, I used very low settings to render it out fast so it’s very noisy, but other than that I really like the dark and moody look of it.

I absolutely love this render, I used a high number of samples so that the dark parts are not too noisy, and exported it in 1080p so that it could be viewed full screen and still look crisp. I actually prefer this compared to the video I exported, I think the piece looks much better close up, and this has much nicer composition.

Substance Painter

I recently got a free student copy of Substance Painter, and with wanting to create some more artistic pieces this semester I decided to give it a go and create my own material. I like the colours baby pink and gold together so I used Substance Painter and Photoshop to create a material with gold reflective spots. The software was quite hard to navigate at first, but I am excited to learn and be able to use it properly, because it will be really valuable to be able to create custom materials.

I also need to learn how to import materials into Cinema 4D. Substance Painter has default outputs for some 3D software, but it isn’t really compatible with Cinema 4D. To export a material for Cinema 4D the software just gives you png files that you then have to plug into a node system to reassemble the material. There are 2 problems with this; the different pngs don’t match up with the names of the nodes in C4D so it can be hard to figure out where they go, and secondly, I have almost no experience with nodal workflows and therefore don’t know where they should go either. This semester I think it will be vital that I learn the basics of nodal workflows, since they can be used in such a variety of 2D and 3D.

Bibliography

Hassenfratz, E., 2014. Cinema 4D Tutorial – Create A Wavy Band Surface. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://youtu.be/dQfzpXF-9Kg> [Accessed 30 April 2020].