16.0

Table Of Contents

54 ProjectionMan

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 ProjectionMan (e.g. if you had ﬁve hundred buildings staring at you waiting to be textured). Our scene

contains two cameras. In order for ProjectionMan to be able to open Photoshop, the correct path to the

Photoshop executable ﬁle must be entered in CINEMA 4D. Open the CINEMA 4D ProjectionMan preferences

menu (main menu: Edit/Preferences/ProjectionMan). Enter (or navigate to) the location of the Photoshop.exe

ﬁle on your computer. Let’s take a closer look at our scene.

The ﬁrst camera (Camera projection) is the camera that ProjectionMan will use to project a painted image

onto the surfaces of the buildings.

The second camera (Camera animation) is the camera through which we just viewed the animated approach

to our buildings. We must now let ProjectionMan know which objects it should use for the projection. And this

is how it’s done:

Make sure you return your animation to frame 0. Select Window/ProjectionMan from the main CINEMA 4D

menu. In the window that opens, select all three cube objects and drag them onto the Camera projection

object above (same window). Select Coverage Render from the selection menu that opens.

Enter the location to which you want to render the .psd ﬁle and click on OK. Conﬁrm the prompt that follows

with Yes.