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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation
Let’s say you have a scene with a city containing hundreds of buildings. Instead of having to texture each one
of these buildings all you have to do is create one or maybe two matte paintings and project it correctly onto
the scene. You define the camera’s position and start Projection Man that in turn calculates the location of the
geometry and starts Photoshop. In the image that opens in Photoshop you can now paint from the angle of
view of that C4D camera. When you have finished painting, save the image in Photoshop and reload it in the
corresponding material channel in CINEMA 4D.
Done! Projection Man will now project your painted image onto the geometry of that object (or even several
objects) in real-time. Sound complicated? Then let’s work through the following tutorial together and you will
see how this tool can free up valuable time for many artists around the world!
Open the file, “QS_PMan_Start.c4d”
This is a very simplified version of a city scene in which a camera is animated to move in slightly to the
buildings. Play the animation once (small green arrow below the Viewport). You can see how the angle of view
changes. In traditional matte painting we would have a simple zoom in which the angle of the front building
would not change in relation to the others. Our buildings, however, still need to be textured. Each building
could be textured individually (which would normally not be much work for just three objects) or you can use
Projection Man (e.g. if you had five hundred buildings staring at you waiting to be textured). Our scene contains
two cameras. In order for Projection Man to be able to open Photoshop, the correct path to the Photoshop
executable file must be entered in CINEMA 4D. Open the C4D Projection Man preferences menu (main menu:
Edit / Preferences / Projection Man). Enter (or navigate to) the location of the Photoshop.exe file on your
computer. Let’s take a closer look at our scene.