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Building the Asset Army

Lesson 4 in UI and Data Design for Film

Lesson Information

Here’s where things start to get intense! Ash will introduce you to his Cinema 4D workflow and demonstrate how he generates large amounts of detailed content. Learn how Ash sets up his Photoshop documents and integrates assets into the beginning stages of the "Golden Frame."

 

Homework
Assignment

1. Make 10 - 15 render assets from Cinema 4D

2. Composite 1 Photoshop image using your Cinema 4D renders

18 Comments

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I don't know if anyone else had this idea, but i rendered a lot of assets from C4D, and loading them 1 by 1 into photoshop, selecting the alpha and then copying/pasting into the base document, felt daunting. So I imported them all into after effects (with alpha) dropped them into a single composition and saved a frame as a psd file. Seemed to work ok - plus all the layers were named after the original file names. I know photoshop has import to stack - but this doesn't seem to handle alpha channels, anyone know of another way?

Hey Ash,
Did you ever build the PC that you mentioned in this tutorial? If so, can you give the specs and let us know where you had it built? I've been thinking about making the leap form my beloved Mac to PC so I can take advantage of the Octane render. The class is awesome. Keep up the good work.

Hey Ash I was slightly confused in the tools overview video when you were talking about setting up the document. Maybe I misinterpreted what you were saying but it seems like you were saying there was a difference between making your comp at 72 ppi vs 300 ppi. I'm sure you already caught this but it doesn't actually matter what ppi you set it up in WxH pixels. 1920x1080 @ 72 ppi is the same res as it is at 300 ppi. Ppi only affects resolution if you set up your comp in WxH inches, or any other off-screen measurement.

love this tutorial! Was waiting for this one as well. How did Ash animate the object with the poly FX on it? When I press play nothing happens, so I guess Ash prepared it a bit. I feel like this can help seeing the different effects of the random effector

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To animate polyFx set the Random -> effector tab -> Randome mode to Noise or Turbulance and with play it should animate now. I wish you happy exploring. And btw it could be easier sometimes to ask on our Slack channel.

Hey, I think the resolution does not matter, when size of your file is in pixels, cause u simply cant put more pixels than the amount in your settings. DPI only matters when size of your file is in cm,mm etc.. When the size of the document is 4096x4096px for example u can set settings to 72dpi or 300dpi or 1dpi or 1000dpi and it does not change anything. Correct me if I am wrong please.

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You're right, and this seems to be an incredibly common misconception. Setting something to 300 DPI is fairly irrelevant to designing assets for a screen without a print application. Since the artwork will be displayed on a screen it will be beholden to -the screen's- DPI (usually 72 but higher on retina displays of course); 300 DPI only matters when you're designing for print and specifically refers to pixel density. The image resizes when Ash changes the DPI only because he has pixels selected as a unit and because he has the "Resample" box checked.

If Ash had had his units in inches and changed the DPI, the inch size of the document would appear unchanged. However, if he checked the pixel size both before and afterwards, that would have changed despite the inches remaining the same.

This was the lesson I was most looking forward to… and it didn’t disappoint.
Having not done any 3d work in over 10 years I’ve just started teaching myself C4D, this was a great primer, and watching your workflow has really helped me to think in a different way.

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