Framing Your Paintings Tutorial Author - Trigona (http://forums.biorust.com/member.php?u=258)

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to design a painting frame in Cinema 4D to hold and display your masterpieces in any 3D scene that takes your fancy. This tutorial is written for beginners, but it covers a variety of techniques, so more experienced users may benefit from its content too.  So, without further ado, here we go...

	Step 1: Create a cube object by clicking the add object button or selecting Objects -> Primitive -> Cube from the menu. Go to the attributes menu and copy the settings shown on the left. Make the cube editable by pressing C on your keyboard or Right-Click on the Cube icon and choose (Objects) -> Make editable.
	Step 2: Now go to YX view by pressing F4, then go to Tools -> Polygons. If you have done this correctly, the cube wire frame will now be light-blue colour. Select the Knife tool by pressing K or selecting Structure -> Knife. Cut up the cube as illustrated on the left click-dragging and holding shift all the way across the cube. This will now become your frame.
Step 3: Go back to the perspective view by pressing F1. Select the polygons shown in the bottom left image (red) with the live selection tool (Tools -> Live Selection). You may need to rotate the perspective to reach all polygons needed. With the polygons on the image selected, go to the Extrude tool by pressing D on the keyboard or finding Structure -> Extrude in the menu. Then go to the Active Tool tab and enter the settings as shown in the bottom right image. Click Apply. As you might have noticed, the polygons selected have now been extended and form a frame.
	Step 4a: As you can see, the frame is quite rough, so we will bevel it. Go to Bevel with Structure -> Bevel, and enter the settings shown in the image to the left in the Active Tool tab. These settings can be varied to give your frame many different funky shapes. Make sure that you still have the selection shown earlier, or things will start to look weird.
	Step 4b: If you render your model now, your result will look like the image opposite.  As you can see, though, its rather boring, grey, and plain. You can stop now if you really want, but I would recommend you to keep reading this tutorial as it can be very useful knowing how to texture your models properly.
Step 5: We will start by making selections for the texturing. To start, press Ctrl + A to select the whole object, then deselect the area on the front where the image will be and the area on the back that isn't the frame (i.e. This is usually a plate of wood, holding the image in place) using the Live Selection tool. This will become your frame selection, so you can texture it without having the same texture all over the model. When you have selected this area, go to the Set Selection tool via Selection -> Set Selection. As you may notice there will  show up a red triangle on the right side of the Cube icon (Object). This is the icon for a Polygon Selection Tag.  Click the red triangle if you haven't selected it already, and go to the attributes tab. Click on basic in the Attributes and name it Frame. This will make it easier to texture up this selection later.

	Step 6: In this step, we will almost do the same as in step 5, so I will only cover the differing points.  Select the area where the picture will be with the Live Selection tool (shown in image, selected is shown in red), and go to Selection -> Set Selection. Now choose Attributes -> Basic and name it "front". Do the same with the back part of it, but name it "back".
	Step 7: Now to put textures onto our model. You will need to make four new materials (textures) in order to do this - 2 wooden materials, 1 sky material and 1 painting material. You can get good textures here if you need them. Download two wooden textures, preferably one lighter an one darker. Make a new material by pressing Ctrl + N or going to Materials editor at the bottom and choose File -> New Material. Do this four times. As you can see on the image, I've already added my materials and textures. Mat is the frame wood. Mat.1 is the back wood. Mat.2 is the painting itself.
	Step 8: Now comes the tricky part of assigning a texture to the materials. Double-click the material called Mat, go to the colour subsection, click the bar to the right of the texture text and duplicate the settings shown in the image opposite. A file window should pop up. Just go to your lighter wooden texture and assign it as the texture. Now go to the Specular subsection and change the Width to 22% - this can be varied to give you different results. These settings may also need to be changed depending on the texture that you use.

	Step 9: We will now assign a material to the back. Double-click the material called Mat.1, deselect the specular and duplicate the colour subsection settings in the image opposite.
	Step 10: The next step, making the material for the painting, is simplicity itself. Double-click your material named "Mat.2", deselect the Specular, go to Colour and assign the image you want on the painting as the texture. Note: Just a general pointer, make sure that you use an image that is as large as possible... otherwise the final result won't look very nice. The one I used was 800x800px in size.
	Step 11: Double-click on the material named "Mat.3". Uncheck all boxes with the exception of  Luminance, and assign your sky image as the texture. The sky image can be anything you like, and will be shown as the surroundings of the model. Duplicate the settings as shown on the left.
	Step 12: Add a Sky Object. If you don't know where to find it, look at the image opposite. When this has been done, click-drag the material called "Mat.3" to the object called "Sky" in the Objects manager. You now have a Sky Object complete with a texture! Note: As in step 10, avoid using small images here too.  In the right circumstances (and with a few tweaks) it is possible to use smaller images, but its hard to do correctly, and larger images nearly always give better results. Now to the texturing part of this tutorial. This can be a bit tricky.
	Step 13: Click-Drag all the materials except "Mat.3" to the cube icon in the Objects manager. As you can see, there are now three small icons with small circles in them, each representing materials you will assign to the model. We will now assign each of the materials to just one area of the frame, one for the front, one for the back and one for the frame. We will use the lighter wood in the frame, the darker wood on the back, and the painting on the front.
	Step 14: Click the light wood texture in the Object Manager once, go to the Attributes section, and click on the "Tag" tab. Now look for an empty field called Selection and give it a value of "frame" (without quotes). Press Enter. This is also shown on the image. You will now see that only this texture is assigned to the frame.
	Step 15: Do the same with the other textures, writing back in the selection field for the Dark Wood and front in the selection field for the Painting material. Click on the icon for the cube object to view all textures. The painting material might need to be adjusted slightly to put it into the centre of the frame.  This can be done with the Offset X and Y controls, but bear in mind that the height and width may also need adjustment too.
Finishing Up: Now that you have finished the tutorial, all that's left to do is hit the render button!  If you want the render to look better go to the render settings, turn Radiosity on and turn off the Auto-Light on the Options tab. I'll let you figure out these options yourself though!  Just so you know what to expect, here's what I made earlier:   Front Back I hope that you have learned something from this tutorial, and now have a nice render on the screen in front of you. If you want to contact me about this tutorial, just click on my name below which will refer you to the Creative Forums, where you can Private Message or E-mail me. You may be required to sign up.