Cinema 4-D - Digital Prototypes

This give you the opportunity to create packaging, such as a bottle design without building the physical piece. This saves on printing, giving you a way to visualise your idea to the client without printing. In this workshop we created can and bottle using the example packaging artwork provided by our tutor. We were then asked to create our own packaging artwork to cover the prototypes.

As part of the workshop we looked at creating an environment again. Although we have done this before what’s different here is that its targeted towards packaging and prototypes.

Process

Start with Illustrator

Extract the files

Open shapes-can shape

Lathing:- 

Carving out a shape by shaving along an axis – rotating it around the centre.

• In order to accurately produce our can shape we need to set the axis to the centre of the can, this ensures that when we import the file and form the shape in cinema 4-D it produces the shape correctly. We need to export this file as Ai 8, this is a legacy format of Illustrator as Cinema 4-D requires this for its compatibility.

• “Merge” – This is the button in Cinema 4-D which is usually known as import, use this to import the can shape from your artwork folder into Cinema 4D. 

• Lathes Cont:- Using the Lathes tool combined with the cube you can expand the artwork template and wrap it around as a cylindrical shape. This gives you the base for your bottle prototype. Setting the subdivisions to a higher setting within the lathe properties allows the shape to become smoother, as the computer needs to do less guesswork the more divisions there is.

• Now set up your environment as we have in previous workshops.

Reflection:-

• Create material, under the reflectance tab select default specular and choose to delete this.
• Next select add and choose “reflection(legacy)”
• Open up the layer Fresnel option.

Dialectic Fresnal

Fresnal is basically a term meaning falloff – so falloff of light:_

Dialectic is for plastic and conductor is for metal. 

• Change preset from custom to PET. PET is a kind of plastic.
• Go to color and under texture select load and choose file.

How to wrap it the right way:-

• Select the texture tag and show “tag” tab.
• UVW mapping – uv means x and y. UVW usually used for humans as we are odd shapes – much more detailed and complex then standard geometry. we are needing the simple version using standard primatives. There are tutorials on other/more detailed ways.
• Change mapping to cylindrical mapping
• Right-click on the material within the “layers” window and select fit to object.
• This will come up with a prompt dialog, select yes.

Fit Map To Object

Top Texture:-

• As before with reflection setting except:-
• Select type to GGX and change roughness to 20%
• At the top of the reflectance setting, on global set it to 60% and 50%
• Go to colour and change the v setting to 36% this will darken it now.

GGX Texture

Lights:-

This just sets up the lighting of the set as to enable a well-lit backdrop.

Select light option and set coordinates –this will be over ur left hand shoulder – if not then move camera round till it is. Under general tab on your light, go to shadow>shadow maps(soft) you will now see a shadow in the preview render. To allow shadows to appear in viewport without render, select off any layers and go “view> scroll down to bottom of panel and tick “Shadows”. 

• Create duplicate of light and change X co-ord as required.
• Change the shadow density for the Fill(2^nd) light to 50%.

Shadow Settings

Area Light:-

Works like card used to bounce light off surfaces in photography studios.

With Area Light & Coloured Background

Render Settings:-

Set to Print-Portrait at A4 or A5. Turn Anti-Aliasing onto best, this smooth’s out those jagged edges. Next go to effect and select “Ambient Occlusion” and turn ray length and dispersion to 50%. Output at jpeg 100% quality.

Artwork:

To know how large to make image - Pie r squared. Get piece of string-wrap round can and work out how long it is. Needs to be mathematically correct to ensure no stretching.

Open bottle and set up and save as before. This has two lines for edge to create the width for glass effect. Set up in cinema4d as before.

To create the glass effect:-

Content Browser

Using the Content browser (on far right hand side) we can find and customise, as needed a pre-set texture to create a beer bottle look. To access this effect double click on presets and select “broadcast (designed for tv)”: > “materials” > “glass”. 

Some of these can use a lot of memory to render, that why you need to understand how they work. Double click on glass-stained > untick “bumpmap” this makes glass smooth. The bump map also slows down render time. 

• Hold cmd and pull the glass texture before releasing, this create a duplicate.
• Apply textures
• Create background

Select the label material, go to the colour channel and on texture, select the beer label jpeg. Select no on the copy prompt, as this isn’t needed. Set your reflectance as before + in Fresnel select Dielectric and set present to Jade. This sets the object to reflect light in a certain way and can be tweaked as required.

Top Tip: 

If you move one of the polygons(such as bottle or cylinder) by accident or on own it can knock them out of place, this ruins the effect. To avoid this select both objects when moving them.

Beer Bottle - Example Artwork

Outcome

Beer Cap
- Example Artwork 

Tin Can - Example Artwork

Above are the outcomes for the beer bottle and tin can using the example artwork. In an additional post I will display my own artwork for the prototype experiment.

How Did I Find It?

I really enjoyed learning these techniques within Cinema 4-D and feel they put me in good sted for future design work.

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