Cinema 4D Artwork

Information

The artwork created on the previous pages is rather polygon intensive...or rather too intensive for the appliation that created them (trueSpace 6.6). Also, I found that these works were tripping over every bug inherent in that program....and as the bugs were fixed by Caligari (makers of trueSpace), I would invariably find new bugs. Finally, I had enough and searched for an application that was both powerful, easy to use and very stable. "Madness" some of you might cry, "That's crazy talk - No such application exists!".

But they do.

I found that Cinema 4D by Maxon (www.maxon.net) is one of the most easy, powerful and fun computer animation programs to use. Go to their site and download a demo. As if that isn't enough, you can also find over 25 hours of FREE video tutorials at the Cinema4D Cafe...many created by another ex-trueSpace user, Nigel Doyle (aka. 3DKiwi) from New Zealand. Mr. Doyle is considered by many Cinema 4D users to be one of New Zealands national treasures right after Peter Jackson...which as fate would have it, was one of Nigel's best friends through grade school and into High School....what a small world....or small New Zealand anyway.

On the links below, you will see that I have redone that same troubling scene that caused me so much trouble in trueSpace...but with Cinema4D, it was a walk in the park. The bottom two images were created after only 6 months with using the program...so in addition to modelling time, I also had to learn the program...not as daunting a task as you might expect. The first four images took over a year of part time modeling and texture work to finally complete. The finished scene has over 848 separate pieces, 31 textures, and easily over 650,000 polygons. The full scene requires 42.5Mb of memory when loaded into Cinema 4D. Yes...its big. But it was worth doing...and Cinema 4D never let me down.

Related links

• Full Chamber - Front View
• Reactor Tower - Detail Shot 1
• Back of the chamber showing floor detail and the overall size of the chamber itself -- this thing is huge!
• High-up shot looking down at the tower. The floor detail can be clearly seen with bits of nernies added to help sell the sense of speed when animated with motion blur.
• A detail study of the lower reactor tower (this is where most of the action will take place in the finished animation). It was modeled prior to starting the surrounding chamber.
• Backside shot of the same tower - showing the reactor glows to full effect