Designing Elegant Product Visualizations in CINEMA 4D & After Effects
In this series of tutorials, we will learn how to take a sketch for a watch idea from the initial design all the way through to the composited render.
What you'll learn
In this series of tutorials, we will learn how to take a sketch for a watch idea from the initial design all the way through to the composited render. This tutorial takes a full pipeline approach so that you can see every step that it takes to design, model, texture, animate, light, render and composite a full product visualization. We begin in Illustrator designing a path rendering of the watch as a top down view. We then save those paths to be used as splines in CINEMA 4D. After bringing our splines into CINEMA 4D, we use many different modifiers to bring the splines to life as 3D geometry. After our modeling is finished, we texture and light our shot. We add a few camera shots to fully showcase the aspects of our model that are most appealing. We then take the rendered frames into After Effects to do a full composite; complete with lens flares effects and much more. By the end of this training, you'll know how to take a simple sketch idea from it's infancy to a polished 3D portfolio piece.
Table of contents
- Beginning Our Watch Design 8m
- Creating the First Gear 7m
- Duplicating Cogs for the Gear 7m
- Creating a Gear One-third the Size of Our First Gear 6m
- Creating Decorative Patterns for the Insides of the Gears 7m
- Making Spirals for the Gear Decorations 7m
- Designing the Watch Faces 5m
- Adding Detail to the Watch Face 7m
- Making a Far Outer Rim with Our Existing Path 3m
- Adding Minute Ticks 5m
- Designing the Hands 7m
- Saving Our Illustrator Paths and Outlines to Use as Splines in CINEMA 4D 3m
- Setting up the CINEMA 4D Project and Importing Paths to CINEMA 4D 9m
- Creating the Main Watch Casing 9m
- Creating the Outer Rims with a Sweep 8m
- Using Extrude with Our Watch Faces and Hands 7m
- Extruding the Gears 3m
- Trouble-shooting Splines that Create Problematic Geometry 6m
- Creating the Large Gear from Multiple Splines 8m
- Using an Array and Boole to Make the Minute Ticks 8m
- Using Booles to Make Room for the Gears 8m
- Creating Glass for the Face and Inner Section 8m
- Sweeping the Circles for Realistic Details 6m
- Creating the Filigree for the Outside Edge 7m
- Modeling the Band Connectors 7m
- Using Mograph to Create the Watch Band 8m
- Finishing the Watch Band 7m
- Using a Deformer to Edit the Watch Band 4m
- Creating the Wind 8m
- Adding Final Details 8m
- Building the Main Rose Gold Texture from an Existing Shader 8m
- Creating Materials That Complement Our Rose Gold 8m
- Applying Textures for Maximum Contrast and Readability 9m
- Using Selection Tags to Apply Multiple Textures on a Single Piece of Geometry 8m
- Setting up Camera 1 7m
- Setting up Camera 2 8m
- Setting up Camera 3 9m
- Setting up Camera 4 4m
- Creating a Gradient for Our Environment Lighting 3m
- Setting up Our Main Lights 7m
- Setting up Additional Lights 7m
- Finishing the Light Setup 9m
- Using Planes of Geometry to Bounce Light on Reflective Surfaces 4m
- Troubleshooting Geometry Issues 3m
- Editing the Assignment of Our Materials 4m
- Tweaking Our Materials 9m
- Editing the Key Light 3m
- Setting Our Render Settings 7m
- Checking Our Render with the External Renderer 8m
- Adjusting the Camera Focus Distance for Maximum Contrast in Our Depth Pass 8m
- Splitting the Project into Multiple Projects for Easier Rendering 8m
- Adding Subdivisions on a Shot-by-shot Basis 10m
- Rendering Our Shots 4m
- Importing Our Passes into After Effects and Organizing Them 4m
- Using the Ambient Occlusion Passes 7m
- Creating Depth of Field with Camera Lens Blur and the Depth Pass 8m
- Faking Depth of Field with Adjustment Layers 8m
- Using the Alpha Pass with the Depth Pass to Fix Areas of Incorrect Blur 9m
- Using the Alpha Pass to Replace the Background 4m
- Adding Vignette and Filter Flare Ghosts 9m
- Creating Tracks for Lens Flares 8m
- Adding Lights and Parenting Them to the Null Objects 6m
- Creating Lens Flares with Knoll Light Factory 8m
- Editing the Look of the Lens Flares 9m
- Keying the Flare Brightness Over Time 9m
- Creating Astigmatism and Chromatic Aberration 5m
- Adding Our Watch Brand Logo with a Mask Reveal 6m
- Using the Pixel Motion Blur Effect 5m
- Transitioning Between Shots 6m
- Rendering Our Watch Commercial to a Sequence 3m
About the author
Laura is a passionate visual effects and motion graphics author at Pluralsight. Ever since her first exposure to After Effects in college, Laura has had an eternal drive to learn more about motion graphics, and teach others what she has discovered. Laura began working at Digital-Tutors (now a Pluralsight company) as a motion graphics artist, creating visually-appealing advertisements and informative art for the site. Throughout her time at Digital-Tutors, Laura contributed greatly to both the ... more