Becoming a Certified Cinema 4D Pro User Motion designer Colin Wood talks about the benefits of certification.

Colin Wood is a 3D motion designer and generalist from South Wales who worked in the industry for several years before deciding to go freelance. He is fond of using simulations to bring life and realism to his work and has a passion for both the technical as well as the creative side of 3D.

After working in different positions for 10 years, gaining valuable experience in a studio environment and finally becoming a full-time freelancer, Wood decided to take the Cinema 4D Pro User Certification as a next step of his personal development.

We talked with Wood about his journey as an artist, how the certification process went for him, and how being a certified Cinema 4D Pro User has helped him. 

Wood: After finishing my multimedia studies, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and spent quite a while jumping from one job to the next. Then around 10 years ago I took a job as a multimedia artist at a training provider, which allowed for a bit of flexibility in the type of content I worked on.

This was a great position to be in and was my first real introduction to 3D, and from there I was hooked. A few years later, I made my first real step into the industry when I joined Bomper Studio here in South Wales as a 3D artist. I gained a lot of experience while working with big clients there.

After a few years at the studio, I began to focus more on improving my technical skill set and eventually became technical director at Bomper. I had the chance to work on massive projects with huge clients, in particular music videos for Foo Fighters and my personal favorite project to work on, Country Squire by Tyler Childers, where I was serving both as an artist and technical director, which I will always be thankful for. 

In early 2023, I decided to take the next step and went out on my own as a full-time freelancer. I felt like it was the natural step in my development, and the challenge of creating my own work and finding my own clients was both terrifying and exciting. 

Wood: I usually take on a mix of freelance bookings, direct client work, and personal projects, but there is not really a typical type of work I do — which is the beauty of 3D and the industry we work in.

I work with products a lot, ranging from still renders and large product families to something more abstract and dynamic. A regular client of mine has a wide array of water bottle products that require me to output thousands of still images — showing various color combinations, camera angles, and scenarios.

I also often include fluid simulations in my work, as I find the technical challenge very rewarding but more importantly, they are a great way to bring life and realism into your work.

One of the first personal projects I worked on when I began freelancing was an ident project for my company, Pixobubble, which has been featured on the Behance 3D art section. It allowed me to test different simulation techniques, experiment with styles and lighting, and even attempt a bit of sound design which is not something I typically do. 

Wood: I only became a certified pro last year, but I’ve already found that it is helpful to my freelance business. New clients and studios are typically able to see the quality of a person's work through showreels and portfolios, but it’s difficult to really assess how technically competent a person is beforehand, so having the certification helps give that little reassurance in terms of my capabilities. Overall, it’s a really good way for a more technically inclined artist to put themselves out there and showcase what they can do. 

Wood: The certification process was eye opening to me. Despite using C4D on a daily basis for nearly a decade, there were still a ton of things about the software that I was unaware of or didn’t use to its full potential.

Working on client-facing projects is usually very fast-paced with quick turnarounds which can make you fall into bad habits and essentially rely on brute force approaches to get a job done. It’s good to take a step back every now and then and look at how to work more efficiently. The certification process allowed me to learn much more about the wide array of tools available within Cinema 4D to assist with performing tasks. 

Preparing for the certification process required going back to basics. Without relying on fancy setups and worrying about overall look and feel, it was good to run through all the C4D features at the most basic level in order to get a real understanding of what everything does.

The exam itself was very comfortable, with Maxon trainer Athanasios Pozantzis emphasizing at the start that it's a very relaxed process. That really helped ease the pressure, especially when you haven’t faced an exam environment for as long as I had. The process is also very forgiving — if you fail a step but meet a certain threshold, you get to retake the test, focusing only on the areas where you didn't score well. This is important because there is so much to learn in the software, and it can be easy to slip up in a few areas you are less familiar with.