I told myself to learn as much as I can before I die. These past days I've been trying to learn how to make 3D objects in Blender and Cinema 4D. And from an artistic view, It is both a blessing and a curse learning to make 3D.
Making a sci-fi cinematic desert
The hardest part of creating in Blender and Cinema4D is the steep learning curve. There are so many things to know and a lot of room for irreversible mistakes to happen if you don't know what you are doing. However since information is so easy to come by these days, you could learn the basics needed in a day or two. Youtube tutorials are a blessing for an amateur 3d artist like me.
A girl looking out over the canyon
However if you already worked with photography and cinematography as I have before, the creativity is endless in visualizing your ideas and making them real. As you can see on both animated gifs, I love doing landscape images and depiction of explorations and desolation. It is easy to set your environment in Blender and Cinema4d like you want as if you were holding a clay and forming something abstract into that meets your eyes. And it is amazing how something you've only imagine looks like the results you've made.
A bowl of milk in Blender
Blender and Cinema4D also come with a lot of effects, however, Blender is free to use and download. This liquid effect is probably not one of the best, but it showcases how liquid rendering works and that how it can interact with certain objects with the correct settings, but most importantly how easy it is to set this up to get this simulation. I have seen crazier stuff done with this on other tutorials too. This was the project that I started with and this result blew my mind.
A digital dolly zoom in
Another crazy thing about these programs, especially if you are into cinematography are the many camera functions you get. The number of lenses, aperture, bokeh effects you can set was beyond my expectations. Like this dolly zoom effect, I tried with and resulted as intended. The motion camera setting in Cinema4d is amongst one of the best things an amateur can ask for as well. It's superior to Blenders but also so easy to rig as if you wanted to make a movie scene like you imagined you can certainly do it easily here.
Motion camera through a mirror
That is what I've learned so far. Being a photographer and cinematographer, learning 3d is almost essential to further improve your crafting and your creativity, especially since digital art, is evolving more and more along with the never stopping tech progression. Hell someone will probably render a whole movie in Blender one day now that all those GPU rigs stop mining cryptocoins.
Piece