In this blog post, I share my journey of experimenting with Cinema 4D, Photoshop, and Illustrator, The use of old Photoshop poster designs and analyzing how i could expand and progress my use of technology from a 2-dimensional aspect and dive head first into the vast world of 3D.
Below is an example from a series of posters i was designing inspired by Prateek Vatash's gallery of dystopian-themed images his use of colors and gradients sparked my interest here is a link to his entire collection if you like what you see below wait until you see this guy's work, he's an incredible designer. ill post a couple of links to his socials to give you an example of what i want to achieve from this course.
https://abduzeedo.com/node/88192
https://www.instagram.com/vatash/?hl=en
I always experimented with 3D aspects of design using Photoshop, finding gradients to play with shadows and space, last year I went through a phase of adding gradients to every design and piece of artwork I painted emulating the above.
Using the inspiration from last year's themed posters I decided to set about how I could add a 3D element to either web design or visually in Photoshop instead of relying on lighting and gradients to give you the visual aspect of depth,
I started with simple clones and displacer effectors utilizing noise textures to emulate turbulence or motion, set the animation speed to 0.1, and rendered 20 individual TIF images which I later imported into After Effects as an image sequence.
Visual Map of adding texture and noise displacer in Cinema4D
after finalizing on a desired noise texture and material it was time to start animating and making final touches to how i wanted it to look.
Examples of building texture nodes and creating my own textures.
I then copied and pasted the clip reversed it and slowed down the speed to give the final result above, the total time for completion not excluding rendering, probably took around 20 minutes or so.
I was satisfied but also kind of wanted more at the same time, I delved a bit deeper into the software did some research and more experimenting, and came back with a fresh approach. but I wanted to expand beyond what I thought was capable. I had this idea like a true artist evoking his emotions into their work I created the ultimate masterpiece, pun not intended.
Animating this 3D heart model using Voronoi fractures and push-apart effectors set at a random value created this really interesting animation. again rendered into over 300 separate TIF images and sequenced into after-effects to guarantee I had some recoverable images if the render crashed at any point.
the concept of this design was to fully immerse myself within a separate field that wasn't familiar to me, to take on a project, and to be able to expand my skills and knowledge whilst also really having fun.
after realizing Cinema 4D's potential i would like to incorporate the use of sounds and generated textures which I can then import into Cinema 4D to emulate this displacer effector to visualize what certain frequencies and Hertz look like or at least just for visual eye candy.
for now, I'd like to leave this quote here because I think it is rather relevant regarding learning new software
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.” – Stewart Brand.
