I found a lack of resources available to learn cinema 4D’s new camera mapping module, so I played around with it and created a tutorial so that others could see it power and ease of use.
1.Take a picture of a hallway.
a.Hallways are a good starting point for camera mapping, simple geometry to
project onto itʼs essentially 5 cubes: floor, ceiling, left wall, right wall, and the end
of the hallway.
2.I ran some adjustment layers to stylize the photo a little bit
b.first I ran a black and white filter over it.
c.Then a hue/saturation layer to make it seem a little darker and creepier, I turned the
opacity on the adjustment layer down to get a more subtle effect than just colorizing
the layer.
d.a simple curves layer to bring out the shadows just a little more
e.duplicate the original photo and set the blending mode to overlay, this produces a
night effect for what weʼre going for a creepy hallway.
2.Now that we are done adjusting the photo save a of the photograph without layers
and bring that into photoshop.
b.split the photograph into layers based on the five peices of geometry that we will
be projecting this on, naming layers is important once we get into cinema.
ProjectionMan has the ability to read alpha channels so masking will work just
fine. Save this PSD file with layers to something you can remember like
“hallway_brokenup.psd”
3.Now into cinema4D. The first thing weʼre going to do is add a doodle object you can
do this via the menu tools > doodle > add Doodle Frame. Under load bitmap under
Doodle Object properties > then load the PSD broken up into layers.
4.Add a visibility tag under cinema4D tags and lower the visibility a little bit so you can
see the 3d viewport.
5.Alright now a little explanation as to how camera mapping works. Essentially you are
using a stationary camera to “project” textures onto simplistic models, allowing you to
do simple slow camera movements.
6.So we create five cubes and label them: floor, ceiling, right wall, left wall, and
backpane. Rotate and scale each cube until they visually line up with the walls in the
photograph. Donʼt worry about getting them exactly just yet weʼll have to do tweaking
once we project textures. Create a camera and position it so that it lines up with the
doodle object, this is camera weʼll be using to project textures. Here is the geometry I
came up with just by eyeballing it.
7.Now for texturing, add the PSD file to the luminance channel.
8.Apply the texture to any of the cubes and under projection select Camera Mapping
and select the “CameraMap” camera we created. Under size X, Y click calculate and
that will project the material at the correct resolution allowing for a little more
movement and detail.
9.Under window select “Projection Man” to bring up the new UI for Cinema R11. Drag
each of the cubes under the PSD, under the Camera projection. Select the correct
corresponding layers with their alpha channel IE backPane (cube) should be
assigned backpane (PSD layer), etc etc. Weʼre loading the luminance and alpha
channels for this example.
10. Now render a scene so we can see how everything meshes together, if there are
black streaks near the edges try readjusting the height, width, and depth of each
cube, surprisingly I found that the depth of a cube has the biggest impact in getting
those “stretch marks” around the edges to disappear. Because camera mapping
rendering is so quick, this is actually a relatively painless to make lots of little
adjustments and keep re-rendering the scene. Here is an example of stretching, this
was fixed by decreasing the width of the cube.
11.Now for the animation:
duplicate the camera mapping camera and rename it “moveCamera” or
something similar. Now weʼre just going to animate this camera slightly over 180
frames to get a nice smooth transition that still maintains that 3d feel.
12.You may experience more stretching as you animate forward, keep scaling and
changing the geometry, but remember that camera mapping has itʼs limits and can
only go so far with 1 photograph before quality starts to diminish.
13. Viola! Camera mapping using ProjectionMan and PSD layers.
