Cinema 4D tutorial: Creating a logo from Illustrator

What did we do? In todays workshop we looked at how to set up scenes in Cinema 4D which were imported from an Illustrator 8 file we created earlier. We opened Illustrator and made sure the centre point was in the middle of the page, this ensured that our files could work in Z space. I chose to create a logo using simple geometric shapes.

We made the basic logo in Illustrator, it didn't really matter what it looked like. We used the ruler guides and made them snap to the centre so that the object we were working with would now work in Z space. We used simple shapes and the pathfinder tool to create this logo to create one solid shape. We then saved the file ensuring that it was saved as an Illustrator 8 file and it worked with cinema 4D. 

Before we even opened our file in Cinema 4D we had to ensure that the render settings were correct, this made sure our file imported correctly, we changed the output settings and the save settings and once we had done this we could open our filled begin to work on it. 

We created a border around our page to make sure we didn't go over the edges, this was helpful because we were safe to make things and helped us have a peace of mind when making our logo.

We imported the logo using File > Merge

We used the extrude tool under subdivision surface and played our logo on top of the extrude option in our layers panel, this created this effect and gave us our basic 3D object. On our extrude option we could change the caps and fillet caps to gave the edges a bit more of a lightness and made them not as sharp and basically look more attractive. 

We used the material tool bars to make the colours for our background and floor.

We used a camera and the lighting settings to make the composition look at how we wanted to render the final design. At first I chose this composition because of its simplicity and effectiveness. 

We added the shadows and highlights using the various settings which gave our design a more atmospheric look like it was meant to be there rather than just floating in mid-air. I was happy with the colours and the composition and felt that it was time to render our my artwork.