Cinema 4D: The Artist's Project Sourcebook

good stater book

The book tells you up front that it is not going to explain the inner workings of Cinema 4D. With a very good reason. Cinema 4D has excellent help documentation that explains every function down to the smallest detail if you're interested. Perhaps this should have been explained, but if you point your mouse over anything in Cinema 4D, then hit "Ctrl+F1" on Windows or "Cmd+F1" on the mac, you'll get the help documentation that goes along with it. The book is designed so you don't need to learn all of the esoteric names that come into 3D applications. The majority of which are named after obscure mathematicians who made arcane equations that figure out how to interpret light, (it's incredibly complicated), refract it, etc. Instead, the book gets you designing new things immediately and if you want to learn more behind the scenes, you can read the help documentation. If that's not your thing, both Cinversity.com, (which is Maxon's official training site), and digital-tutors.com, both have free training that just covers things like shaders, light occlusion, ambient lighting, volumetric lighting, etc. if you want a more detailed knowledge of 3D in general.So you now know the purpose of the book: to get up and running with Cinema 4D as fast as possible. Does it work? Yes. It's incredibly well-illustrated, showing exactly how to manipulate parameters to get the scene to look right. The DVD includes a lot of extras, including a basic rundown of what's what in Cinema 4D. The font is huge, but it comes in handy when you're walking through a project. If you follow through the exercises, you'll understand how to model and animate scenes without a detailed knowledge of what makes a program tick internally. If that's your thing, read the help documentation. If you by this as an e-book, you'll be cheating yourself as there's some six gigs worth of training material on the DVD.

I always say that it's not about the book, but the reader. Nevertheless, this is an amazing book for those who are starters and those who are a little more advanced in this subject. Great info, great excercises, great everything!

The book.Pros: Step by step tutorials were quite (?) easy to follow and interesting to do for a beginner like me.Cons: Because C4D has a lot of palette controls tucked within palettes I was spending a lot of time, going back, trying to find where check boxes, sliders and different channels, etc. were nested. Might be just me though, not seeing things under my nose.Readable screen grabs used throughout the tutorials which was good but a few sentences from the author about why I was clicking/checking something would have been very helpful. I suppose you can always go back and experiment after you've completed the tutorials but C4D is such a big programme to learn, it is very easy to get lost and you do need 'lots' of help.The DVD.Pros: None !Cons: Couldn't open the DVD. I don't know how you can do the exercises without the necessary files off the DVD (Kindle ?). Gave the first two projects a try and guessed what texture/image files I needed and made my own. The further on you get you need to load prebuilt sets. It was mentioned in a previous review, if you were able to download the files, problem solved.Overall. If the DVD worked I would have given this 4+ stars. Instead, 1 star and returning to Amazon. I might at a later date reorder and hopefully the disc will work. If the files became downloadable, definitely would recommend buying.Update to review above......Since writing the above review the author has emailed with a link to download the necessary files which I am very grateful for. Thank you. I'm now slowly ploughing my way through the tutorials.With the aid of another C4D book, which delves more into why and what all the various settings and tools are for, I might learn something.I don't think you can get the hang of C4D from one source but this book does help you a lot to get familiar with it's ways of working.Overall. Well worth buying and if you have problems with the DVD, download the files.

I like this book.If you're new to c4d and need a crash course of all the basics, then get this book.Covered modeling, animation, rendering, mograph, etc.The black background with blue text that everyone is complaining about is only found for a few interviews the publishers did with people working in the field of animation.The book is easy to follow and walks you through each exercise step by step.You get a CD with videos/tutorials and exercise files, if you end up with a broken CD then there's a link to access them online.This is one of the most current and best books for beginners looking to learn cinema.As a bonus you also get 3d glasses, I wear them around town.