Visualizing Products Using Cinema 4D 3D artist Beto Prado on designing a new watch concept for a client pitch.

When it comes to creating concept illustrations of new products, traditional methods and 2D software, like Photoshop and Illustrator, will only take you so far. If you really want to show potential investors how something could be built and function, you need to create it in 3D. That's why Brazilian 3D artist, designer and architect Beto Prado was commissioned to create the visualisation of a stylish new wristwatch for start-up company, Machine du Temps. See the product animation here:

Inspired by famous watch brands, Formula One cars and the angular features of the B-2 Stealth Bomber, Prado first drew his concepts out on paper. Next, he used Cinema 4D and After Effects to create and animate the futuristic watch concept for the client's promotional pitch.

Prado, who has long been an award-winning artist doing 3D illustration, branding and visual communication work for a wide range of clients, describes this project as being among the most challenging of his career. "Things you model are often already well established in the market, so you are not creating them," he explains. "This product had to be designed by me, and all of the curves and shapes and materials needed to fit together in a stylish and refined way."

Long before he learned 3D, Prado's passion was to draw and model dinosaurs and sharks. He'd start with plastic, clay, even bread, pretty much anything he could shape forms out of, and then he would draw whatever he had created. Fast forward to 2007 and he was working as an architect and designer using Photoshop and Illustrator.

Always looking for new ways of working, he came across ZBrush, which prompted him to start a 3D course at Melies School of Cinema in São Paulo, Brazil. He learned Maya but wanted something for he could use on his iMac to rig models and render scenes, so he settled on Cinema 4D. "It was perfect for designers and I fell in love with its great and friendly interface," he recalls.

For this project, Prado needed to model three different parts of the watch concept, the most difficult being the watch’s case, which needed to be attractive and curved to fit a wrist. To develop the curved shape with precision, he used Illustrator to create a projection of the box design over a plane surface that had been deformed using the Bend Deformer tool. The other main element was the strap, for which he used splines, cut with the Loft tool. “With the correct shape modeled, I used Boolean tools to design the cavities,” he explains.

Though the visualizations were not meant to show real machinery, they did need to feature the watch’s inner workings in a realistic way, which was challenging for Prado. “I don’t have the technical knowledge to create actual working watch mechanics, so my idea was to repeat the engine pieces I created in layers to give a realistic feel and look,” he explains. Once all of those elements were created in the correct scale in Illustrator, it was easy to export and then extrude them in Cinema 4D.

Prado has always loved creating his own procedural materials using C4D. To hone this skill, he recommends looking at all of the materials of everyday items and taking note of their textures and how they reflect light. Knowing he needed the watch case to be shaded with forged carbon, Prado researched the material online so he could use similar textures from the Cinema 4D content library in the bump, color and diffuse channels. For the internal mechanics, he used aluminium and brushed steel from the content library as well.

The animation was fairly straightforward, except for one tricky part where the camera glides over the watch's surface as the second hand ticks. "I created a 600-frame set of animation for the second hand and used different cameras for different shots, which were edited together," he recalls.

Ten physical cameras were used in total, some with movement, passing through the scene, in different positions but respecting the sequence of the frames. "So, for Camera 1 there were frames 0 to 60, then for Camera 2 there were frames 61 to 120, and so on," he says adding that he spent two days rendering those 600 frames, divided into the 10 camera shots.

All in all, Prado spent three months on the Machine du Temps project, rendering the various passes on his 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 iMac. He says handling the process from sketches to completion left him feeling like both an artist and an inventor, which he enjoyed. "There's no assurance that they will eventually pitch this model, but I did my best and that's my way of life," he says. "I work hard and have fun."