Scott Benson
Forum Replies Created
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You can become incredibly competent at this program without an iota of design skill. There are entire skillsets within C4D that don’t require a single art class – rigging, dynamics and Xpresso (C4D’s visual scripting language) are three examples. You can always team up with a designer if you get really good at the math functions of the program, or you can just model real objects by taking measurements (Apple’s already done the design work if you want to create an iPod).
Basic design skills are also something you can learn as you go if you want to. There are crash courses online.
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I’m in the same boat, and I recently made the jump to Cinema 4D from plugins like Zaxwerks ProAnimator to compliment my After Effects knowledge. I also tried to learn Maya awhile ago, and it just didn’t make sense to me. Cinema 4D’s interface seems to be more geared toward artists and visual thinkers. It also integrates well with After Effects and other compositing tools.
As far as which one to choose, I picked Broadcast because it seemed to have the bulk of the things I was looking for (including MoGraph, which is awesome) without being hugely expensive. It’s somewhat irritating that you can’t just pick and choose modules (I’d really like the Depth of Field Post Effect, but didn’t want to spend the extra $1600 to get Studio just for that). I figure I’ll get good enough at Broadcast now and then upgrade to Studio next rev.
If you do switch, make sure you go through a series of tutorials to learn it from the ground up. It seems pretty critical that you get into good habits with the program earlier. It’s a LOT more complicated than Photoshop, After Effects or any other program I’ve used.
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Also new to this, so I don’t know if there’s a way to hide polygons from rendering, but it sounds like your problem has to do with a little checkbox in Attributes Manager called “Only Select Visible Elements” when the Live Selection tool is chosen. Try ticking that box and see if you still have the problem with weird polygons being selected.
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Illustrator does work, but you have to save your file as version 8 or prior. You can then either open it directly into C4D using File->Open, or in the Objects pane, choose File->Merge Objects and it will bring the paths into your current scene.