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53ProjectionMan
5. ProjectionMan
Once you have completed this tutorial you will be able to save a great amount of working time and maybe even
create scenes you never would have been able to without this tool. This tutorial is primarily geared towards
matte painters but can also be used by any 3D artist to keep from having to texture a great number of objects.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term matte painting, here is a brief description of what this is: Matte
painters mostly work in the movie industry and create (paint) background imagery for movie scenes. These
backgrounds are for the most part so realistic that the viewer assumes they are real-world backgrounds. An
example of matte painting is a scene in which a king on his horse rides across a virtual landscape that, on the
one hand, does not exist in the real world and on the other hand does not have to be built in 3D. The matte
painter paints the desired background and the king and his horse are simply composited into the scene.
Advancing technology has also made it possible to create matte paintings in 3D using a computer, which
makes it possible to animate a camera and maintain a correct angle of view of the background. This would
not be possible using traditional 2D techniques. The disadvantage (if you can call it that) to using 3D matte
painting is that a single image cannot be used – the scene must be modeled and all objects must be textured.
And this is exactly where ProjectionMan comes in.
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 ProjectionMan that in turn calculates the location of
the geometry and starts Photoshop. In the image that opens in Photoshop or image application you can now
paint from the angle of view of that CINEMA 4D camera. When you have finished painting, save the image in
Photoshop and reload it in the corresponding material channel in CINEMA 4D.
Done! ProjectionMan 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