hello everyone my name is matt i am a freelance software developer and now a motion designer out of auckland new zealand i started learning cinema 4d in december of 2019 and three months later was contacted by a major international brand for my very first gig when they found my work on behance my very first render was this watery testicle looking sphere thing here and within three months i was creating stuff like this [Music] [Music] this is going to be the video i wish i had when i was starting to learn cinema 4d there is a ton of great tutorials out there around cinema 4d but not so much documenting the learning process the resources that you should be using when you're first getting started hardware decisions what render engine you should go for and what the actual process was like learning a cinema 4d because it's quite a difficult program to get started so we're going to be answering all of those questions as well as providing you a bunch of tips all the resources that i used and what i would do differently if i was to do this again if you're after timestamps and you want to know something specifically then i'll have them all linked down below but without further ado let's get started so for a bit of context let's talk about why i learnt cinema 4d in the first place by day i am a software developer and i was getting a little bit more just you know building forms for people and i needed something a little bit more creatively fulfilling as well as being something else that i could offer clients as an extra service i settled on motion design particularly with cinema 4d because of its integration with the lottie plugins so you can take your animation and then you can export that out through lottie there's a series of still images and you can put that into web-based projects where you can animate it basically add a little bit more life into a website so it's not just a static page there were some other options as well when it came to what could be good for the type of work i was doing after effects obviously is vital i actually have a friend who works in the motion graphics industry he's worked on all of the marvel films all sorts of amazing stuff nicholas hodgson so you can go check out some of his work below he has some tutorials on gumtree as well after talking with him for a little bit we both decided that cinema was going to be for me blender from what i could tell was a very feature complete program it's amazing they've got a huge community there that was one of the main benefits of going with blender they have a very open-minded collaborative community focused community cinema 40 was a little bit more locked off because it was a paid program whereas blender is free i went with cinema 4d specifically because the type of work that i was looking to include in my web-based projects as well as the type of work that i wanted to have as a portfolio on my instagram and i thought i would genuinely love to create was based off cinema 4d if you're looking at getting into cinema and you're looking at you know blender and cinema 4d and houdini if that's the route that you want to go down find out what kind of work you actually want to create and then find out what type of programs that people are using to create that work again it's the tools don't make the artist but at the same time you do have to kind of narrow down and pick something that you think is going to work well for you blender is absolutely fantastic cinema 4d also fantastic but they do have slightly different use cases let's talk about my experience my 30 days of learning cinema 4d it was challenging it was super super challenging especially when you're trying to be self-taught as well having it some direction or having some kind of structured process is really difficult when you're not paying an institution to have that so being self-taught is i found that really difficult i was very lost when i was getting started because i didn't know where to start what tutorials to look at i didn't know what tutorials were even worth my time what this university stuff was grayscale gorilla i designed like there were so many different resources out there and i just didn't know where to start there is school of motion and they offer this full course where they take you from the basics all the way to the advanced stuff and that's quite expensive it was around five or six hundred dollars uh i'll have all this information in the article to support this and all the learning resources but it was quite expensive and i wanted to do this as cost effective as possible so i was looking at the grayscale guerrilla stuff i was looking at a ton of youtube tutorials and there are so many we'll get into this a little bit later on there are so many fast fantastic creators on youtube who are making cinema 4d a lot more accessible if you're one of those thank you very much i found you incredibly useful that was the first kind of bit it was trying to find a direction of learning so i could use my month efficiently i settled on the grayscale gorilla stuff because i have a ton of different training videos on there they have some really advanced topics so it scales pretty well i'll do another another whole video around the grayscale gorilla experience because i don't think that's what you should jump into but we'll talk about that a little bit later on i did find the skillshare tutorials that i picked up things like don mufassi patrick foley there was andre lebrov there was eye design as well cg shortcuts i found those project-based tutorials very very useful so i wanted to start off learning the fundamentals of cinema and that was quite tricky when you open cinema 4d for the first time it is very overwhelming but you will get used to it i promise it just takes a little bit of time the basically the the things that you need to learn and i'm going to rattle them off very quickly here modeling texturing animating lighting keyframing motion design or animation concepts forces and dynamics what render engine to choose any kind of hardware associated with running cinema 4d there's a lot of different things that make up an image you're going to be learning how to use a camera a virtual camera you're going to be learning how to make an object move through 3d space you're going to be learning about how to work in a 3d space there's a lot of different things here that can really get you overwhelmed quite quickly especially if you're learning by yourself and you don't have somebody to ask or to kind of help you out when you get stuck and inevitably you're going to get stuck multiple times i spent three days on a particular issue and somebody in the grayscale gorilla slack fixed it in about i think half an hour and that was completely off their own time they were amazing so thank you grayscale gorilla chat you were amazing [Music] i started off mainly doing stills or they call them style frames i think and that's basically just where you create a still image of something and render it out and that could take anywhere between 10 seconds to five minutes depending on how complex that is and that's what i would suggest starting off with as well it's creating still stuff that doesn't move as soon as you move into animation that's a whole other thing where you need quite powerful equipment to be able to be anywhere near efficient rendering out a series of 900 frames of something and then getting that wrong and having to re-render that again because that happened to me i had to re-render out things multiple times which sometimes took up to three days to get a single animation out it's a very computationally expensive so start off small start off with the fundamentals get your style frames good essentially learn how to use lighting and all that kind of stuff and that's basically how i started off so i started off with the skillshare tutorials for that and they were beyond amazing i'll throw up some uh examples of the things that i was creating and a lot of the good stuff i found really came from skillshare so don mufassi and patrick foley stasi shortcuts idesign they were all beyond amazing and it's about kind of creating something that's fun something that you can you know go and show somebody and they'll be like oh that's so cool how did you do that and you're like i'm a genius you know when you're learning especially you need those kind of like little victories and sure like doing a project you're basically just following a set of instructions but if you take that project and you turn it into something else something that's uniquely your own that's where you really start to feel a sense of accomplishment and progression and that's what i would recommend you do as well throughout this month i started off with the style frames and then as i got a little bit more confident i started working through the ui a little bit more i wasn't having to constantly ask people how to do things then i started to get into animation so i created this one with um don mufassi's tutorial and that was that was really cool a lot of people really liked that kind of vibe that kind of set me on the animation path which is really what ended up getting me a job my very first motion graphics job with a major international brand i can directly contribute the animations that i did for the don mufassy tutorials to the own first basically original animation that i created and then that got me a job doing motion graphics it's pretty cool so as you progress past kind of learning how to manipulate the primitive shapes you start learning about forces and dynamics and how to work with those how to create still frames based off of that and you basically just kind of grow from there it's still very complicated but once you've kind of got the initial cinema 4d stuff down then you can start looking into third-party render engines which is trips up a lot of people i think a lot of people spend a ton of time figuring out what render engine to go for we'll talk about render engines a little bit later on because that requires talking about hardware as well we're talking about cinema 4d now so in terms of the main issues that i found with cinema 4d especially being self-taught is that you don't have access to somebody to help you out a lot of these issues the documentation for cinema 4d isn't as good as i hope it would be i think they can really improve on the documentation there that was a big stickling point for me it's also quite difficult to kind of figure out a structure in which to learn stuff because there are so many different things involved with cinema and you don't really know what the fundamentals and the key concepts are and that's where i find like a school of motion program especially interesting because that will give you more of a structured learning program this university stuff i think is also fantastic it's also free when you get cinema 4d so i would highly recommend looking into that if you're wanting something a bit more structured follow all this university stuff it is free one of the guys from idesign also he he does a lot of those tutorials and they're beyond fantastic so if you're looking for structure highly recommend adversity or the school of motion stuff the other thing as well is that when you do get stuck and you are self-taught you don't have anyone else to ask online slack communities are beyond amazing there are some super helpful amazingly talented people in there who are quite happy to just spend you know 10 15 minutes of their time walking you through a problem or they'll download your file they figure out what's wrong and then they upload it again and your issue is fixed there are some very friendly very passionate community-oriented people who are willing to help you out i think because they mainly know what it's like to be in that situation especially if they're self-taught so please get involved in an online community the gsg's one is amazing i don't know about too many others but the grayscale gorilla site community helped me out miles when i was starting and some of the really frustrating things that i spent two days on had no idea to fix how to fix and somebody else could fix it in about 15 minutes please get involved with some kind of community be a good person provide value where you can and then pay that forward once you've kind of fixed your issue and document everything as well document the issues you have because more than likely somebody else is going to have those issues as well when they're learning i was quite happy with where i ended up after that month i managed to go through a ton of skillshare tutorials i went through a lot of the greyscale gorilla stuff i was getting more into the advanced concepts so things like working with dynamics and forces field forces that kind of thing it takes a while it really does it requires a lot of patience because there is a lot of things to cover within cinema 4d and you are you're not realistically going to be super proficient in a month's time there's there's just a ton of stuff that you could if you're spending eight hours a day for entire months doing it i didn't have that much time but realistically i think you can create some really really cool stuff and figure out figure out whether or not cinema 40 is actually something that you want to continue with there's i think a two-week trial for cinema 4d so you can check that out now we're going to be talking about hardware and render engines because this is something that really trips up a lot of people what render engine do i choose there are entire videos about this i'll again link a couple below let's get into it the main render engines you're going to see online are going to be octane redshift arnold and corona your hardware choice as well what systems you're currently using are also going to impact what kind of render engines you're going to be able to use there is also the physical or standard renderer which comes bundled with cinema 4d which works across mac and pc if you wanted to use something like redshift or octane specifically that's bound to nvidia hardware and things like the macbook which i was learning on you cannot use redshift.octane on a mac yet apparently support for that's supposed to be coming but as for now not able to use it because they use amd gpus on those devices if you're wanting to use all of the third-party render engines you also have a good cpu or a gpu something like a 3900x plus or a niveta gpu 2060 to 7080 then you basically get full range of all the gpu engines so things like arnold redshift octane corona i think corona and arnold are both cpu and redshift gpu and octane gpu if you're figuring out which one to learn i would basically just pick whichever one you have access to resources essentially i went with redshift because the grayscale gorilla had a very in-depth guide to redshift i'm going to be checking out arnold as well soon because they also just uploaded a very comprehensive arnold tutorial series octane i think is very popular for people getting started because it just looks amazing you don't have to tweak as much straight out of the box so if you're wanting to go easy as possible i would go octane there is a bit of a caveat with that and the fact that octane apparently is less stable than redshirts and arnold it doesn't crash it crashes more often than those two i think redshift and arnold are also very good engines to get started with us as well primarily because they have more options available to you they're more flexible and you're going to have to learn how to texture objects you do uvs and displacements and all that kind of stuff i think at the end of the day it'll make you a more well-rounded 3d artist if you really understand how to use redshift or arnold at the get-go you can also very comfortably work within the standard and physical renderer and get very very very good with that and that will make transitioning to something like octane arnold whatever else easy as well because you already know the fundamentals and those basically kind of change and chop between each of the different uh render engines they're just different buttons to press essentially uh or they call things differently the fundamental concepts are the same so you're not going to make a everlastingly long bad decision here all of the render engines are good you can produce fantastic results with both i would go with redshift or arnold if i was feeling a little bit daring and i had time to kind of really invest into learning the two systems if i wanted something a little bit quicker and easier and can also produce some amazingly instagram worthy results i would maybe pick up octane and see how it goes a lot of these also offer free trials so see which one works for you i know that arnold for me personally it just clicks a little bit better in my brain in terms of how it's structured and laid out so yeah that's it let's talk about hardware more specifically we've talked about the amd and gpu side but a lot of people when they're learning cinema 40 they haven't gone out and bought a 3990x threadripper multi-gpu system they're most likely starting off on a laptop like i was i started off on the 13-inch macbook pro that is currently recording the audio for this video done a whole video based on learning cinema 4d on a laptop and so if you're looking at this video and you're on a laptop and you're like i'm not going to be able to run cinema 4d on a laptop you can you can 100 run and learn cinema 4d on a laptop your experience is not going to be as good as someone who's got 4 20 80s in a single rig however it's still going to be great i basically did the bulk of my learning on a 13-inch macbook pro on the standard and physical renderer hp were very kind to send me one of their high-end omen laptops to use for checking out redshift because that wasn't available to me on the max ecosystem it was a 15 inch device it had a 144 hit screen an rtx 2080 which is the top of the line gpu it was the max q version though so it was a laptop version of the rtx 2080 they do have a 17 inch fully fledged rtx 2080 as well it also had an i7 cpu and theirs so i was able to do a mixture of cpu rendering as well as gpu rendering i found the gpu rendering to be a little bit fast so i went from a 13-inch macbook which was kind of like the bottom tier all the way up to the top end of the mobile world the main benefits between going from the macbook to the hp omen was that i was able to use redshift which was immensely vital in me getting the motion graphics job because they were using redshift it meant that i could develop and work faster so when i was changing lighting when i was changing out textures previewing things it meant that my ipr window it just rendered faster so as i'd be able to make changes quicker and work more iteratively based off of that it's something that i couldn't really do on my 13-inch macbook pro it just took a bit longer being able to use something powerful like that as well it's not a workflow restricted for like students either or people who are just learning andrei labrov who is an amazing 3d artist who also has such an amazing youtube channel i would highly recommend going to check him out he does all of his work his lock development work on his laptop and then when he needs to render out something beefy maybe that's not a style frame it's an animation he just sends it to his render farm at home or at his studio it's a really elegant solution so if you're thinking about buying a laptop to learn cinema 4d on think about that more as like an investment for your future because you can do basically everything you need to do on a high-end laptop and then just send it out to a virtual render farm if you need to or you know build a desktop pc after you've done a couple of jobs and you can use that as your render engine as well you have that flexibility to kind of go where you please whether that's in between houses or to university do your work there at home uh or you know go to a client's office and be able to do some look development on site with them it's a really really nice solution so thank you very much hp for exposing me to uh that kind of level of flexibility i really appreciate that i'll link some of the details for the hp omen that i used down below so you can go and check that out maybe if it's something uh worth looking into for you let's talk about learning resources because that's probably what you're here for to find a curated list of people to go and learn from i'll have these all linked down below so you don't have to listen to my voice i'm just going to give you a little bit more context around the kind of stuff that they do so you can make a decision based off that so first of all is the skillshare people so people like patrick foley uh visual don or dom farsi cc shortcuts and idesign they all have beyond amazing project-based tutorials they're less about kind of concepts and more about creating something really really cool it's a very good feeling when you can see kind of what you're going to be able to create because a lot of those tutorials you will be able to create the exact same thing that they're showing you it's it's amazing and then you can change that and modify that and do what you want so i would highly recommend the skillshare tutorials it's also very price efficient in terms of the value that you're going to be getting out of that subscription so skillshare i would highly recommend checking out there's going to be a link below uh it is an affiliate link but the tutorials down there are absolutely amazing and i would highly recommend them we've got andre lebrov who just oh man he's just so good patrick foley as well visual don they're all on youtube cg shortcuts eye design uh grayscale gorilla also have some fun fantastic tutorials up there as well grayscale gorilla they do a lot of more advanced type of tutorials they are a paid service but they also have a youtube channel as well which provides a ton of value in terms of podcasts the school of motion podcast i really enjoy the guys who run that are fantastic sorry guys and girls motionography as well grayscale gorilla also have a fantastic podcast they're all very entertaining very personable and you'll get a lot of good information out of that too [Music] in terms of paid resources i basically only use the grayscale griddle plus content now this was a very very compelling buy for me because not only did you get a lot of good resources for learning cinema 4d so the basically their fundamentals course starts off at r14 i don't really recommend that because even though the fundamentals are there it's quite outdated now um i would definitely recommend going and checking out the cineversity course which is free and that's a lot more modern you create some really cool stuff with that but the rest of the content on grayscale gorilla site is best in class i think they have some really great tutorials around um force forces and dynamics um advanced redshift training on all training as well uh they have some really cool like project-based stuff as well for like titles it's it's a very good service and bundled with the community that it comes with so you get access to the grayscale gorilla slack that was entirely money very very well spent if you were looking at getting the grayscale gorilla plus thing straight away maybe not the reason that i did is because you got access to a whole bunch of materials so you got i think two material packs the everyday material collection as well as the modern service material collection i think it's called and that basically meant that i didn't have to go and learn texturing straight away i could just slap a you know a pre-made texture on it and it was fantastic i really enjoyed that so if you're wanting the textures then it's still very good but i would maybe recommend checking out the free stuff first and the skill share and then if this is something that you really want to dive into or you want some more advanced tutorials around ren shift and arnold because i've yet to find better tutorials on redshift and arnold than the ones on the grayscale gorilla site then i would jump into that after you've kind of got your feet wet a little bit i should also mention that one of the reasons why i was really excited about cinema was its integration with web flow specifically it's what i use to build all of my client websites and webflow has some really good tutorials around integrating the uh cinema 4d with the lodi plugin and then straight into uh the webflow project so that was another big sell for me webflow do an absolutely fantastic job of their learning resources so it made the decision quite easy now for what i would do differently this time around if i was to do the entire month again what would i do how would i structure it here we go i would spend less time wondering about what render engine to choose i would just pick one and go i would start off with the standard and physical and get to know that extremely well and then after i've got the fundamentals down of how to texture how to uv how to do all that kind of stuff then i would move on to redshift or arnold or octane it doesn't really matter just learn one stick with it and then one starts to bug you or you really like some other things then you can go learn that too it's it's not as if you have to compromise and just learn one you can you can learn everything if you want to i would initially start off as well with the cineversity tutorials those are very high value they they want you to learn the program they want you to get good with the program because the better you get and the longer you have the subscription the more money they make at the end of the day so the cineversity stuff is actually really high quality just because it's free doesn't mean it's bad it's actually very very very good so i'd start off with this university stuff basically first and foremost and after i've done that i would also do the skillshare tutorials that's a very kind of low-cost entry to learning cinema 4d so i think the skill share is around between 15 and 20 bucks a month they're gonna have to check the prices on that but the skillshare stuff there are a ton of amazingly talented artists on skillshare who do some amazing cinema 4d tutorials they're very project-based but you'll be able to create some very practical very cool things that will give you more of a taste of whether or not you actually want to do cinema 4d after i started with the skillshare and done a lot of the youtube tutorials then i would look at getting something like grayscale gorilla plus because the everyday material packs the collection packs that come with the plus subscription are absolutely phenomenal they also have a ton of great other products available too they have advanced training on redshift and arnold they have been very good with updating the gsg plus library of content over the last you know a couple of months it hasn't been too many things over the last month or so but apparently they're just waiting for nab to kick off some new content so that's basically how it structured that i would try and do as many practical things as possible things that are going to generate you like an instagram post or portfolio piece and then you know you can go from there into your motion graphics journey and get a job and start working and then after you've done that you can buy a pc and then you've got a gaming rig and a rig that's going to make you money and it's a tax write-off so when when that's basically my cinema for the journey so far so thank you very much if you're stuck around this long i have instagram down below leave any comments uh if you've got any around learning resources that i've missed because i'm sure i have there are a ton of great content creators on here who do stuff with cinema 4d theokur as well he was also another one he was fantastic yeah that that about wraps up this half hour long video so thank you very much if you've stuck around really appreciate it uh i will be doing some more cinema 4d content in the future so like and subscribe you know if that's a that's a thing and we will see you in the next one l also thank you very much hp for sending out the laptop i wouldn't been able to test redshift without it so cheers guys i appreciate you very much that'll be all thank you very much and i will see you in the next one