The Beautiful World of ‘Floreal’ How digital artist Edgar Suárez used Cinema 4D to depict innocence and strength.
For his short film “Floreal,” Madrid, Spain-based freelance motion designer and art director Edgar Suárez created a rich marine environment to tell a personal story of birth, family and memory.
Created with Cinema 4D, After Effects and Octane, the film blends beauty, craft and story and conjures volcanic rock, limpets, corals and flowers in a delicate luminescent world.
We talked with Suárez, who also created a vibrant and stunning intro animation for the 2022 ZBrush Summit, about both projects, as well as his journey from fine art to digital art. Here’s what he told us.
Tell us about your journey from fine art to motion design.
Suárez: I hold a BA in fine arts from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, specializing in video, and have an extensive background in illustration and industrial design. I first came to Cinema 4D during school, and after a year of learning was able to create my first piece, which I am particularly fond of.
I eventually began lecturing on 3D design at a well-known VFX school in Madrid, and then I went on to work as a motion designer for a production company. At that point, I realized I wanted to focus on working with Cinema 4D and it has been my main creative tool ever since. I am currently a freelancer, which allows for a great deal of creative freedom.
What projects do you enjoy most?
Suárez: I love projects where I am free to create my own world and explore different styles. Because of my fine arts training, which focused on how to combine critical and aesthetic concepts to give conceptual and narrative sense to a piece, this is where I feel most comfortable.
From the moment I get a call from the client, I start developing a mind map with ideas, analyzing concepts and researching references. I always have a pen and a notebook at hand. First, I draw the storyboard freehand, and then I find the graphic style, color palette, fonts, image composition, etc., and create the first still frames before animating and editing.
Talk about your work on the 2022 ZBrush Summit video.
Suárez: I felt very honored to receive an email from Maxon asking about a project on my Behance portfolio. They had chosen it as one of their references for the event video, and I was asked to create a collaborative piece based on a set of models and branding instructions.
I felt very comfortable because I was given absolute freedom to create the piece. I enjoyed working with the models and creating the still frames, particularly the ballerina. I wanted to take her out of context and her pose in a free fall.
Please tell us how “Floreal” came together.
Suárez: I started with a clear idea in mind—the final video needed to evoke purity and luminosity and be dominated by white. It was also clear from the outset that I would use sea elements and the flower as the main character.
I like to begin by revealing small details and eventually move to an overview of the message I wish to convey. I often start off with closeups, in this case, details of the sea plants and the flowers inside the rock, moving to an external shot of the volcanic cube. I used soft focus to highlight the primary elements from the background and placed some elements near the camera to emphasize depth in every scene.
This project was done entirely with Cinema 4D, Octane and After Effects. The composition and animation came together throughout the creative process, while I tried out new materials and techniques. The hardest part was evoking the ocean floor without water, just through sea plants in motion.
What was your inspiration for the project?
Suárez: I created “Floreal” after my son Andrea was born, and it combines concepts of past, present and future. My son is depicted as a delicate, innocent and fragile flower, and there is a reference to the concept of birth when the flower slowly opens its petals. The rock represents my grandfather Floreal, with his determined personality and the memories that last forever despite the passing of time.
The overall aesthetic, including the sea and volcanic elements, was inspired by my home island, Tenerife, and its volcano, Teide. It is a symbol of my longing for the sea when I am far from the Canary Islands, my roots, my identity and how it all reflects in my work.
Talk us through the creation of the scene elements.
Suárez: I worked from experimentation and memories of diving in the sea around Tenerife, which is full of limpets and sea anemones. I created many elements by hand with polygon modeling. For other objects, I used Parametric Modeling to animate them more easily, relying on displacer, taper and smoothing deformers.
The sea anemones were also generated parametrically and then cloned with a time offset so they had subtle variation in their movement. The flower started off in my head as a lotus flower, although a bit more voluminous. I modeled and rigged a single petal, and again cloned it with a time offset.
How did you achieve the delicate luminescence look?
Suárez: The flower was textured with a PBR material and utilized subsurface scattering for the translucent effect. The same goes for the coral, although it was based on procedural material. In both cases, I achieved a wax-like look that allows the light to shine inside, making the elements look semitransparent.
I really liked experimenting with these properties because the object’s appearance changes depending on how the light hits the surface. When the light was very intense and direct, the result was beautiful shades of orange. When the light was rather dim, the result was translucent white. The development process was slow and involved a lot of trial and error, but I enjoyed every part of it.
Tell us about creating the rock cube.
Suárez: I used Cinema 4D’s Volume Builder to create the cube and added a Random Field to carve the cavities and holes into the surface. The rock material was achieved by using Octane’s Mix Material to layer a PBR material with a gold-like metallic material and including dirt node with a bitmap texture.
How do personal projects like “Floreal” fit in to your life?
Suárez: Personal projects are very important to me because they allow true creative expression. Through them, I can address personal topics that I’m dealing with, capture my ideas and concerns, and learn new techniques. I try to create at least one personal project per year, though it can be complicated balancing them with client work.
When I work on a project and am about to show it, I wonder whether it really is complete or if it could be better. That is why I find feedback from others in my field so valuable. Giving and getting feedback as well as acknowledgment of good work is always positive and rewarding and motivates me to continue working in the right direction.