Beginner 3D Tutorial Using C4D!

August 2, 201411 yr

Output:

Part 1: Lightrooms and materials.

- Lightroom:

There are many free lightrooms available on the web. You can either download one or possibly create your own. All download links will be provided at the end of this tutorial.

- Materials:

Think of materials as colors. Those colors (or materials) will be used for your C4D text. There are some material packs available on the internet but I HIGHLY recommend you learn how to create your own.

Part 2: Fonts and resources.

- Fonts

In my opinion the font is just as important as the overall design of the signature. You can't have a good looking signature with a shitty looking font; which is why I'm introducing you to dafont.com.

- Resources:

dafont.com features thousands of free fonts available for download! It also includes specific themes for fonts such as 'Old School', 'Western', 'Curly', and other awesome fonts. What I like to do is search for a font that relates to the signature. For example, if you're making a Batman signature, try searching for a Batman font.

Part 3: Render settings.

- Rendering:

Rendering is important if you want to make your text high quality. Without rendering, were all pretty much fucked. I'm going to show you the render settings I use. I will also show you how to save your render settings.

1) Open render settings.

2) Make the settings just like mine:

3) To add the "Global Illumination", go to "Effect" ---> "Global Illumination":

4) Save it by going to "Render Settings" ---> "Save Preset"

Part 4: The Actual Turorial.

1) Open the lightroom that you downloaded from the web.

2) Go to Mograph ---> Motext.

3) Edit the text, font, and depth. For this tutorial, change the depth to 15. The text and font is up to you. It's recommended that you use a sharp font that has no curves.

4) Drag the materials you created (or downloaded), and drop it onto the text. Your moText should now look this this:

5) For this tutorial, we are actually going to use two colors. You already chose the first color, so it's time to choose a second. Once chosen, drag it onto your text just like you did in Step 4.

6) The second color is going to be the outline. (The image I posted in the beginning of this tutorial has an outline of yellow). Click on the second color, and for the 'selection', type R1.

7) Right now it looks like crap, that's because we didn't apply Caps to our text. Think of caps like a bevel on our text. It gives it the addition 'outward' or 'inward' look to our text. This will help make the outline stand out a bit more. To apply caps, click on your moText layer, and go to the "Caps" tab.

8) Use the following settings for the Caps

9) The higher the "Radius", the more the outline will stand out. The first "Radius" represents the outline in the front. The second "Radius" represents the outline in the back. A good rule of thumb is to keep both the same size. To show you an example of how "Radius" works, I decided to increase it to 50 (Please for the love of god don't do this) and show you the results.

10) We are almost done, just a few more steps!

11) Now, here comes the easiest part of GFX. All the designers of OSBot do this, and it's impossible to live without: Copy and pasting. (jk please don't ban me). We are going to copy/paste the moText layer twice using Ctrl + C/ Ctrl + V.

12) Now we need to make the text go back to back to give it a cool looking effect. To do this, rotate the entire canvas by holding the number 3 on your keyboard and dragging using the mouse. Your canvas should look like this: (Ignore the white lines)

13) Select the second moText layer and use the blue arrow to drag it BEHIND the first moText on the canvas. This sounds confusing as hell so I made a gif: