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AUGUST 22, 2003 Extrusions in Maxon's Cinema 4D
Once you have the guides set, you can delete the bounding box, since we won't be needing it, and Cinema 4D will import ALL of the lines in a document. You don't want all those extra splines cluttering up your 3D space. Now create your art from scratch or copy and paste it from an existing Illustrator file. Once your file is done, save it to your drive in Illustrator 8 format. This is very important because Cinema 4D has problems with Illustrator 10 files. Sometimes it might work with 10 format, but most of the time you will get nothing when you try to open the file in C4D. I always use the Illustrator 8 format, which you find under the "Compatibility" pull down in the secondary dialog that opens after you choose "Save As" from the File menu and select the location and name for saving your file.[an error occurred while processing this directive]  Before we move on to C4D, make sure and delete the guides that you placed at the center of the document. Don't forget that Cinema imports ALL the lines in your Illustrator file, and that includes guides! Now launch Cinema 4D, and we're on to step 2!! Step 2: Importing the Illustrator art work into Cinema 4D Before we import our Illustrator file, a brief word about grouping and overlapping objects. Any time I'm creating artwork for C4D, I always break up my objects into small and non-overlapping parts because Cinema tends to randomly connect or group objects as it imports them. Even if all of your overlapping objects in Illustrator are grouped together in an orderly fashion, Cinema will mush them all together in an uncontrollable way or give you far too many individual splines, depending on how you have the following dialog set. Go to the EDIT menu, and select Preferences. Then twirl open the "Import/Export" section on the left hand side, and select "Illustrator Import."  Using the technique I described above, I created the following type file in Illustrator.  Using the Illustrator file from Figure 6, and the "Group Splines" option, you get the following result....  Note that there is now a separate spline for each object in the word. Pay particular attention to the compound letters like "b," "d," "e," etc. notice that cinema has grouped all of the splines that make up each letter. The important difference between these two options can be seen when you drop the spline group onto an "Extrude Nurb" object. Prev 1 2 3 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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