Learn to do photo realistic architectural visuals

[Alex Bailey]

Hi,

 

I live in the southeast of England and work for a architectural practice near Brighton. We recently bought Cinema 4D to do Architectural Renderings and was wondering if there are any courses i can go on to learn to do some fantastic visuals.

 

looked on the internet and haven't been able to come across anything apart from 2 day courses run by private firms.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[-MerlyN-]

I dont know much about C4D in detail, but in general, regardless of software used, doing "fantastic" CG visuals takes years of practice.

 

To get you up to speed I'd suggest you start with the tutorials, that ship with the program. You can have a look at cg academy, gnomon workshop and some others, which have very awesome tutorial dvd's. Most of those are indented for 3dsmax, but the principles apply to c4d aswell.

 

If you have no experience in CGI I fear your company just wasted a good lot of money, at least if you expect to produce stunning visuals just by having the software...

[Tommy L]

Alex,

I went on a couple of those 2 day-ers. They tend to be expensive and not over-productive in my experience. The learning process is different for everyone, but I find that tutorials combined with asking questions on this forum yeilds the best results.

My colleague is learning Modo and has a guy come in 4 hours a week to teach him one on one. He loves it and says he learns more in those 4 hours than in a week on his own. He pays the guy like $35 an hour I think.

When I was at college I did some private lessons (teaching Autocad to lower year students) one on one. It was fun, engaging and good for both teacher and student. I think I charged 20 pounds an hour.

Another advantage to doing regular one on one is the teacher can set you a goal to acheive by next lesson, then retro-actively correct your mistakes.

So yeahy, maybe finding a local under-employed freelancer for lessons would be good.

[Alyosha]

hey there, although i switched to Max a while ago myself i used c4d for over a year and i loved it.

 

I also had great and quite effective learning experience using video training tutorials you can purchase on the web, just google "video training for cinema 4d" and look about.

 

I remember some videos from 3d fluff or something which were pretty great but i think they are like 5 years old by now and were done for c4d 8 or 9 or somesuch so probably much has changed since then, though i used them successfuly to learn c4d 11

 

 

 

Apart from that, as said before, "fantastic renders" take years of practice and a knowledge that encompasses much more than mere technical knowledge of any given program:-)))

 

 

But with a serious, disciplined (and preferrably enthusiastic) approach you will be able to put together solid renders in a manner of months and actually make use of the purchase and the program.

 

Also depends which modules you bought with c4d, "advanced render" module or an external render engine such as vray or maxwell are a must for any sort of decent renders, if you just bought the basic package you can forget about it.

 

In your position it would be probably best to go for advanced render since it's already integrated with c4d and is fairly easy to learn (much easier than vray at least) and still produces great results in the right hands.

Edited November 26, 2010 by Alyosha