Projection Man lets users rapidly create 3D scenes with actual geometry that are textured by a projected photographs of a scenes or matte paintings.
This feature allows users to project a texture from a camera view onto simple geometry to quickly and easily create complex set extensions or full 3D digital mattes that allow for CG camera moves. (You’ve seen C4D’s Projection man in movies like Sony’s Beowulf, Polar Express and Open Season and are likely familiar with a fairly simple version of this concept that came out with the Vanishing Point exchange that came out in Adobe's Photoshop/After Effects CS3 release.) While it’s been in C4D for some time, it now has it’s own tool/workflow window that opens in your main scene, allowing you to quickly patch scenes when the camera moves far enough to reveal texture “holes”, smears or tears that can be fixed with either Photoshop or BodyPaint. You can either simply paint on geometry, or--this is the coolest feature--drop in an existing photo or matte painting, screen it back and build you low res geometry underneath it. Then you simply project the photo or matte painting in, select any layer elements in Photoshop that you want included, and, presto, your geometry has been texturized. This can be done for each piece of geometry with drag-and-drop simplicity using the same piece of source art.
Modeling
C4D has a very robust set of modeling tools that cover typical polygonal modeling but also include HyperNURBS (BTW, NURBS stands for Non-Rational B-Splines - math lingo that has no place in normal people's vocabulary) which is an incredible modeling time saver because it allows for easy, non-destructive editing of complex curved shapes. The modeling in C4D is simple, straight forward, and easy to manage, thanks to the ability of working in both layers and groups - two different schemes that give maximum flexibility.
BodyPaint, now included with C4D instead of being a separate program, is a painting and UV tool (texture map coordinates for your objects). It’s interface/tool window has been updated to align with workflows in Photoshop. Additionally, BodyPaint supports Photoshop layer functions, blending modes and alpha masks. New to version 4 is the ability also to import paths and adjustment layers. BodyPaint doesn’t allow you to use the paths and adjustment layers, but their information is retained if you find yourself moving between the two programs for various needs. Also, you can now paint/apply blur, sharpen and colorize. A nice little nuance is that each tool you use in BodyPaint retains its own individual settings. There are new options for Jitter and Airbrush which behave in the same fashion as their Photoshop counterparts.
Oh, do you have some favorite Photoshop brushes in the .abr format? No problem, BodyPaint can use them. But it doesn’t stop there. Wacom Tablet support respects the typical parameters of the tablet but also the pen rotation feature of the 6D pen. Still not enough? You can now sample a texture, load in a brush profile, enable the rotation feature and create complex painting capabilities difficult to achieve any other way. Just as important as using a custom brush is saving it. New Save options now provide control over how and where you’d like the info to be saved. Nice.
