Cineware plugin overview

- [Instructor] Illustrator and Cinema 4D play very nicely together. You can send Adobe Illustrator files and extrude them in MAXON Cinema 4D, as I showed you in the previous movie, and now you can do the reverse as well. Introducing Cineware for Illustrator. This time, this is a plugin for Illustrator that will allow you to add and edit 3D object directly within Illustrator. You need version CC 2017 or higher in order to do so. So you can use it in order to design your label artwork for 3D packaging, for example, or to incorporate 3D elements seamlessly into your 2D artwork. Now I'm going to show you a quick overview of how to work with this free plugin. So first, you need to download and install the plugin. As always, I recommend to open your web browser and search for Cineware for Illustrator. Then click on the first link that you are going to see over here, and this should take you to MAXON's website where you can read more and also get the free plugin. After you download and installed it, open Illustrator and you should see a new workspace which is named Cineware 3D. Choose this workspace and you will see couple of extra tools and panels which are going to be available to you. I'm going to press Command or Control + Zero, and also narrow my Tools so we can work with this Cactus.ai file, which you can find inside the exercise files. So the first thing that we need to do is actually place some 3D model inside this document. And you're going to do it the same way you place features inside your artwork. So go to the File menu and choose the Place command, or you can also press Command + Shift + P, Control + Shift + P on the PC side. I'm going to navigate to the exercise files. And I have a similar file, this time with the suffix c4d. So I'm going to choose it and click on the word Place. Then my cursor will change to this little preview, I'm going to click at the upper corner of this document to place this cactus model. Now this cactus model is courtesy of E.J. Hassenfratz, an amazing Cinema 4D artist and LinkedIn Learning author as well, so check out his courses over here in the library. In this case, we are going to use this little cactus in order to merge it with what I had underneath. So the first thing that I want to see is actually the transparent pixels. And you can do it from this bar, which is part of the Cineware 3D interface, by changing the Transparency from None to Alpha. This will allow you to actually see the pixels underneath. Then you can use those three arrows in order to move your 3D artwork, so you need to click and drag on this in order to move it. You can also click and drag on this in order to change the tracking. And if you want to orbit the object, or the camera in this case, you can click and hold on the third icon, which is going to allow you to create something like this. So I'm just going to move it to place, let's say over here, and I think this is going to work very nicely in this example. Now note that you also have access to some of the Scene Structure as well as the Attribute and the Materials. So for example, if I'm going to open up the Subdivision Surface, I can see the cactus layer, I can click on its material, and if I like, I can actually change the material from here inside Cinema 4D. So I'm going to click under the Attributes on this Color chip and I'm going to switch to my Color Swatches, where I have this green which I'm using for the title, I'm going to select it, click OK over here, and this is going to update the color of the material that was used inside this document. So even if you have zero understanding about 3D and you don't even want to work with Cinema 4D, you can still get a lot out of this tool. Now to see the final result, I should mention that you should switch the quality from Draft, which is a great way to work because it is faster, to a High Quality render. And this will take some time, you will probably see a progress bar on your screen, and it's going to render this 3D element from Cinema 4D and show you the final result. So now if I'm going to click away, this is how it looks after this little modification. So these are just some of the things that you can do with the Cineware plugin here inside Illustrator. If you want to get the full story, check out Learning Cineware for Illustrator with Tony Harmer here in the library.