19.0

53Projection Man
5. Projection Man
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
Projection Man 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 Projection Man 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! 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