30 Hours of Cinema 4D

CINEMA 4D's impact on the Chinese market is increasing at an impressive rate. One factor that makes this very evident is the steady growth in the training sector. Shanghai-based Imagehost Digital Technology (IHDT) is one of the few selected certified CINEMA 4D training centers worldwide - and the first on mainland China. Manager and Certified Instructor Yan Ge, a.k.a. Hey Joe, offers training for a wide spectrum of participants ranging from film directors to beginning 3D artists with varying amounts of 3D experience, if at all. Participants learn how to use CINEMA 4D effectively to produce great-looking results.

At the end of each course, participants are tasked with creating a short film and are given only 30 hours to complete their project. The teams can determine the subject themselves, which have to be approved by the trainers before they start. Not only the limited time within which the project has to be complete but also selecting the best team members is a challenge for a successful cooperation.
Yan Ge explains: "70% of course participants learn CINEMA 4D from the ground up. About one-third have absolutely no prior experience with 3D software, and our course participants range from film directors to 2D artists and just about any other profession you can imagine. We've even had a few construction workers and auto mechanics! Everyone who has completed a course has performed well enough to receive a certificate. This is also in part a result of CINEMA 4D's easy learnability with its intuitive user interface, which is easy to learn, even for someone who's not a savvy computer user."

The best short films are selected at the end of each year, and last year's winner was the amazing animation 'Post-industrial Advertising Clip'. The group responsible for creating this film was inspired by an animation from a Norwegian company about the extraction of tin in the country's arctic North. As usual, this team also had the allotted 30 hours to complete their project. The team didn't waste a minute and got to work modeling, animating, creating MoGraph setups and determining which render settings should be used. Since the project also had to be rendered within the allotted 30 hours, models had to be optimized accordingly so the desired render quality could be achieved in Multi-Pass rendering.

Even after everything had been optimized, it looked like the five PC workstations would not be able to render everything in time. That's when the team members spontaneously took out their MacBooks and hooked them up to the network via WiFi. In an instant they were able to use CINEMA 4D's Team Render feature to help render their project and their problem was solved! "We're really happy with the cross-platform render system. Team Render makes it possible to quickly and easily use available computers across the network as render resources," stated Yan Ge.