MAXON Cinema 4D R20: A Detailed Guide to Modeling, Texturing, Lighting,

This guy has a chain of books each containing parts of the others. It's like he takes a few slices out of his master book and serves it up as a new book but the content is repetitive and not particularly informative.

Mesmo sendo em inglês, é de fácil compreensão visual. Um manual para todo momento.

I bought this book to start learning the basics of Cinema 4D.This book is well organized and gives you all the information to know the interface, the modeling tools one by one,polygon modeling, volume modeling; it helps you to understand render techniques, the use of lights, texturing, material creation, and some basic animation.It's a very useful book for those who want to be introduced to this wonderful software.

I was looking for a printed reference and instruction book to act as a supplement to the numerous YouTube (and paid) tutorials I've watched and provide a good introduction to a wide range of topics. I haven't found it.I really wanted to like this book and to be honest there's much decent content in it. However it suffers from a number of flaws that make it a difficult book to read and navigate.1. The book is divided into units, all of which are given a reference, eg CR1 for the rendering section, and a sub reference, which is the page number within that unit, so CR1-11 is the 11th page within the rendering section. That's fine - up to a point. However, neither the contents pages nor the index pages show the 'direct' page number for those units, so you have to flick through the entire book to find the unit and then locate the page to find the information you are looking for. It's just unnecessarily labourious compared with a simple absolute page number! It makes the book hard to use as a reference source - particularly as the unit-page references are are printed right next to the spine, so you can't quickly flutter through a load of pages until you reach your target, you actually have to open the book right up to see them!2. My biggest gripe is the quality of the printed images. They are dire, especially in some of the full screen screenshots. Contrast is low, as is resolution. The remedy? You can download a pdf from the author containing all the images. But then to follow along you need to constantly switch from the application to the images pdf, as well as finding the image reference in the printed book and looking it up in the pdf. Again, it makes using this book very tiresome, particularly in the modelling activities. It also renders reading the book on a train pretty useless. Had a full pdf or Kindle version of the book (text and images) been included with the purchase of the hard copy this might have changed my opinion and rating.3. Careless typos and poor language/grammar are scattered throughout - for example, 'will become correspondingly darker an more dull'; 'During manipulating light' (as opposed to 'While manipulating the light'); 'Why to use Paint Setup Wizard?' . Small points, yes, but when you're reading a technical book such as this I really want to know that every last detail has been checked for accuracy, which seemingly hasn't happened here.4. Some very important topics are not covered at all, eg using cameras, the character builder, dynamics, cloth, hair, particles, Bodypaint, environment objects and MoGraph. I appreciate there's only so much depth you can go into in a book like this, but as far as I could see there's not even an acknowlegment of these aspects of Cinema 4D, which might leave a complete beginner somewhat in the dark about half of its functions.5. I'd hoped that one of the modelling exercises was to build the bicycle on the front cover. It's not. The exercises are for much simpler models (chair, sofa, table, bottle, glass etc) and the bike is a pre-built model you download and use in other exercises (in the lighting unit).I would have given the book three stars were it not for the awful image quality and the lack of coverage of important topics (oh, and the annoying unit-page thing!). The two stars (would have been 2.5 if that was possible) are for the numerous useful nuggets of information in the book. There is lots of good 'what just happened' information and helpful explanations of specific functions of Cinema 4D - if only they weren't so painful to locate!

Excellent reading for those like me who want to learn everything about C4D, for starters and advanced users as well, very useful