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Last update 31 Jan. User rating:. If you need help or have a question, contact us Would you like to update this product info? Is there any feedback you would like to provide? Click here. Popular Downloads Macromedia Flash 8 8. Counter-Strike 1. Cool Edit Pro 2. Microsoft Office Service Express your ideas, solve problems, and connect Cheat Engine 6. C-Free 5. Mozilla Firefox About the Reviewers Matt Grigoryan garnered a fine-tuned creative skill set of over a decade that includes art direction, motion graphics, team management, training, leadership building, graphic design, animation, and traditional layout.

Matt has worked the gamut—from feature films to broadcast to software development, constantly refining and expanding his creative skill set.

I'd like to thank Jen for trusting me enough and allowing my two cents being included in her fantastic book. I'm proud of her and glad she's in my life, both professionally and personally. As for me, I'd like to thank everyone who's been actively encouraging my development as an artist and a contributor in today's field of graphics. Starting with my parents for accepting my decision to pursue two art degrees, colleagues for providing much needed perspective when needed, and those close to me for being a never-ending fountain of support.

With an extensive and varied background ranging from music composition to photography, Jonathan has created a company that leverages technology to tell captivating stories. With Cinema 4D, he enjoys pushing the boundaries of what it is capable of. His passion projects include short films and visual effects. In , his short film The Box went on to be accepted into several major film festivals.

Since then he has spent many years creating original content and performing live as a VJ across the country. This lead to a discovery of the art of motion graphics and a love affair with Adobe After Effects. You can upgrade to the eBook version at www. Get in touch with us at [email protected] for more details. At www. PacktLib is Packt's online digital book library. Here, you can access, read and search across Packt's entire library of books.

Why Subscribe? Simply use your login credentials for immediate access. This beginner's guide will walk you through creating and animating a 3D scene, with tips and techniques for everything from photorealistic rendering to motion graphics.

Chapter 4, Materials and Shaders, will bring character to your models by adding surface properties. Chapter 5, Lighting and Rendering, will introduce lighting to add additional realism and dimension to your objects, as well as explore global visual settings. Chapter 6, Animation, provides an overview of the linear animation process as we animate a camera and lighting in our 3D environment. Chapter 7, MoGraph, provides a brief overview of many common MoGraph objects such as cloner and tracer, as well as how to work with Cinema 4D's built-in Dynamics system.

Chapter 8, XPresso, provides an introduction to node-based programming showing the usage of Math to connect properties of objects to one another. Preface Chapter 10, Optimizing Your Workflow, brings everything we've learned together through exporting multipass renders and spatial data as we composite our final animation in Adobe After Effects. What you need for this book A basic understanding of computer graphics and linear animation will be helpful, but not necessary. The book provides a step-by-step introduction to working in 3D space as well as working on a timeline.

Cinema 4D is our primary tool, but we will also briefly use Adobe Illustrator for drawing Bezier splines and Adobe After Effects for post-production compositing. Who this book is for This book is for designers and artists with a basic proficiency in animation or computer graphics, as well as professionals with an understanding of 3D animation in another software package. Conventions In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.

To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use: Time for action — heading 1. Action 1 Action 2 Action 3 Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with: What just happened? This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed. Have a go hero — heading These are practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned. You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information.

Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text are shown as follows: "You may notice that we used the Unix command rm to remove the Drush directory rather than the DOS del command. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On the Select Destination Location screen, click on Next to accept the default destination. Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

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Users of other instances of design software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator will notice strong similarities in the default layout. This chapter will serve as an introduction to Cinema's interface so that the tools we refer to later on will be easier to find.

This version should be sufficient for students and will contain most of the features mentioned in this book MoGraph, which will be discussed in Chapter 7, MoGraph, is available in Broadcast and Studio only. Broadcast targets motion graphics professionals, while Visualize is directed at architects and designers. Studio contains all of the features from the other three versions. The different versions are designed to offer necessary functionality at a lower cost for specific industries.

MAXON has always done an excellent job of ensuring that its software supports a wide range of computers dating back multiple years. R12 was the first version that did not support PPC Macintosh computers, almost five years after Intel-based Macs became standard and well after most major animation and design software applications had discontinued support.

While Cinema can be installed on many older machines, 3D software is notorious for being a processor hog. A multiprocessor machine with ample RAM is recommended, and render speeds will be much improved on more powerful machines. Many shortcuts can be accessed by left-, right-, and center-clicking with a mouse.

It's not impossible to use Cinema without one, but you'll find it much easier. A note for users of previous versions is that R13 represents a major shift in Cinema's core architecture. While many of the principles in this book will apply to R If you are unable to find a tool in the location specified here, start by searching in the software's Help section.

If you are still unable to find it, it may be a feature specific to R Understanding 3D space Up until now, it's very likely that all of the work you've ever done on a computer has been in 2D space. Text documents, e-mails, videos are all there on a flat surface. When we draw a box, we click and hold on the screen, draw the box to the dimensions we need, and release. We're left with a rectangle—a shape with an X and Y dimension.

Pick up a nearby object and examine it. If you took a photo of it and put it on your computer, it might be x , but you'd only be seeing part of the object; an image, rather than an object. Who knows what might be on the bottom or the back; you've only got part of the information!

By holding it in your hand, you can turn it around, see where it bulges out and where it contracts, where its edges are sharp, and where they gently curve. If you've ever had to create a perspective drawing, you know that it takes a little practice to wrap your mind around how objects and environments look from a certain angle. Imagine a photo of a long road stretching ahead of you—the road closest to you appears much wider than the road far off in the distance, but we know that the road is actually of a consistent width and our eye, or the camera's eye in this case, is forcing a certain perspective.

So if we sit down with a pencil and paper, or open Photoshop to try and create a rendering of what we see, we have to figure out how to visually force that perspective in our composition as well. A cube is made up of six perfectly equal squares that come together at 90 degree angles. The perspective you see in 3D renderings is entirely dependent on the camera angle, which means once we've created an object, we can create a rendering from infinite angles with little additional effort, as shown in the following screenshot: As we move on to exploring Cinema's interface, it's important to establish our coordinate system — how 3D space and direction are represented on our 2D screen.

When we modify an object, we'll often have to specify if we're modifying it in one, two, or three dimensions, as well as which dimensions we're choosing to modify. When you open Cinema 4D, you'll see a perspective grid. The center point represents 0,0,0. The red arrow represents the X axis, the blue arrow represents the Z axis, and the upward dimension which will be colored green when we begin creating objects is the Y axis. H rotates on the x-z plane, P rotates on the y-z plane, and B rotates on the x-y plane.

Let's begin exploring the menus so all of those letters make a little more sense! Commands in Cinema can often be accessed in a variety of ways—it's common to have a keyboard shortcut, a location in a drop-down menu, and an icon to accomplish the same task. As you progress through this book, you'll most certainly develop your own preferred method.

When we introduce a new tool, we'll explore multiple options to access it, but will default to the Command Palette when we call on that tool again.

For example, we can create a cube by navigating to Create Objects Cube, but we can also click on the cube icon in our Command Palette. Certain functions can only be accessed via the Main Menu, so we'll refer this area for less common commands.

The following is a screenshot of the Main Menu: The row of icons located underneath the Main Menu, as well as the icons on the left-hand side of the screen, represent Cinema's most common functions and are referred to as the Command Palette. This is shown in the following screenshot: These icons are broken into Command Groups, which represent related commands.

Clicking and holding on the Primitives icon cube gives you access to Cinema's built-in objects. Releasing the mouse on one of these objects will add it to your scene; releasing the mouse without selecting an object will leave the submenu expanded and allow you to click again to select an object, as shown in the following screenshot: Let's select the Cube icon to place a cube in our scene.

When you create a cube, you'll notice three arrows appear. Our Move tool is selected as the default option, as shown in the following screenshot: [ 12 ] Chapter 1 If you click-and-drag anywhere on the window, it will move your cube in the direction of your mouse in all three directions.

This is because we haven't locked ourselves into an axis yet. Notice in the top bar that the X, Y, and Z icons are all selected. Deselect the X axis, then click-and-drag; the cube now only moves in two directions. If you want your cube to move only in one direction, you can either deselect two of the three icons, or simply select the specific arrow on your cube and drag it to the desired position, locking yourself in to the selected axis.

You'll also notice red, blue, and green triangles just to the outside of our cube—these represent axis bands, which confine movement to just two axes: The icons on the left-hand side of the screen represent methods of interacting with objects.

Depending on the task at hand, all these steps may not be necessary, but the basic order of operations is to select an icon on the left allowing you to control an entire object, point, edge, or face , then select a command from the top move, scale, rotate and then select an axis X, Y, Z.

So if we want to move an object on the Y axis, we'd select the object icon, then the move icon, and deselect the X and Z axes. Viewport The center section of Cinema's interface is called the Viewport. This is where you'll be able to view all the objects in your scene. Let's create a cube so that we have an object to orient ourselves. If you click and hold on the small 4x4 grid to the left of View, you'll notice the icon changes to blue.

If you move the window around, you'll notice a bar aligning on the edges of neighboring windows. This allows you to customize your layout by moving individual panels anywhere you choose in order to tailor your software to your workflow. Additional pre-defined layouts can be found in the Layout drop-down menu at the top-right corner of your screen. For consistency, we'll use the Standard layout for this book. At the top right of the viewport, you'll see four icons, which represent common commands for the viewport.

This is shown in the following screenshot: Clicking and holding on the first three icons allows you to pan, zoom, and rotate the viewport. These camera adjustments can also be accessed via your keyboard by holding down 1 Pan , 2 Zoom , or 3 Rotate as you click-and-drag with the mouse. If holding down 2 or 3 to zoom or rotate, you'll notice that the previous position of the mouse cursor is replaced with a crosshair.

This represents the anchor point for your camera movement. If we hover over the top-right corner of our cube, press 2 on the keyboard and move the mouse, we'll zoom in to that corner. If the mouse is not hovering over an object, the anchor point defaults to our background, enabling faster, world-oriented camera movement. You can also navigate using the left, middle, and right mouse buttons while holding down the Alt Windows or Option Mac key.

Clicking on the fourth icon shows you additional views—Top, Right, and Front, as shown in the preceding screenshot.

These are orthographic cameras and do not show perspective. When working in 3D, it's important to remember that what looks correct in one viewport may not be accurate in another. Working with multiple angles open at once is an easy way to ensure that you're making the intended adjustments to your model. In our new four-camera view, you'll notice each window has its own individual menu bar. Clicking the fourth icon in any of these cameras will expand that view to fill the available viewport area.

You can also switch between views by clicking with your center mouse button. While in single-camera mode, clicking on the center mouse button will expand all four views. To expand an individual view from four-camera mode, hover your mouse over your chosen view and click on the center mouse button, as shown in the following screenshot: Navigating to Panel Arrangement will give you alternatives to the standard four-camera view.

If, for example, you're working on detailing just the top of an object, you might not be as interested in the Right and Front views, and want to see the Perspective and Top views at the same time; you could select 2 Views Stacked to gain more screen space for each view.

Let's explore additional viewport options. While in four-camera mode, if you select an alternate camera from this menu that is changing Left to Bottom, Cinema will remember your choice when you switch between views. You can create an endless number of cameras in your scene. The Display menu gives you multiple shading options. This will allow you to see your model as a single smooth object, or as a wireframe, or a combination of both.

Let's delete our cube and add a sphere instead Create Object Sphere. As we switch between display modes, you will want to deselect the sphere in order to see the most accurate representation, as shown in the following screenshot: Our default display—Gouraud, is set to give us a relatively accurate rendering of the textures and geometry of our object: [ 16 ] Chapter 1 If we change to Gouraud Shading Lines , you'll see an outline of each of the individual polygons in our object: Switching to Lines gives us a transparent view of our object only showing edges.

Note that these display options have no effect on our final rendered output and changing them will only affect how the object is displayed in the viewport as we work on our scene.

If you're working on a more complex file, you may find it helpful to switch to a different mode in order to save processor power. Render options The process of turning the on-screen model into an image is called Rendering. Rendering takes your scene that looks blocky and segmented during editing and turns it into a smooth, beautiful image. There are many third-party rendering plugins for Cinema, but we'll be using the built-in Advanced Render module. The render engine for R13 has been greatly improved by the addition of Physical Rendering, which we'll explore in Chapter 5, Materials and Shaders.

A rendered model looks very different from the on-screen preview, so we'll want to check our progress every once in a while along the way. The following is a screenshot of Render icons in the Command Palette: [ 17 ] Getting to Know Cinema 4D The three icons in the center of the Command Palette with the clapboard in the bottom-left are the Render icons.

Clicking the icon on the left renders the current Viewport window. This will not save an external image and only renders a preview in the Viewport. Clicking on Viewport while it is rendering will cancel the process. The center icon will render to Picture Viewer according to the settings you have entered in the window represented by the third icon, Render Settings.

Objects and Attributes Manager When we create a new object, the object name will pop up in a window at the top-right corner of the screen. The following is a screenshot of our Objects Manager: Here, we can rename objects, select groups of objects, create parent-child relationships, and control many other functions. Objects can be selected by clicking on them in the viewport, but often in more complex scenes where one object is obscured from the camera by another, it becomes valuable to be able to select it from a list.

It is therefore a good practice to name your objects as you go along, otherwise, we could end up with hundreds of objects named Sphere and Cube and never find anything! At the top-right corner of the window you'll see a magnifying glass icon, which represents the Search tool. If your objects are named correctly, it can come in handy as you create more complex scenes.

The following is a screenshot of the list of properties of an object cube in the Attributes Manager: [ 18 ] Chapter 1 Clicking on an object in the Objects Manager will open a list of properties in the Attributes Manager.

The information available in the Attributes Manager varies depending on the type of object. For example, if we create a sphere, we are able to control its radius and segments. For a cube, you can control the size of each of its three dimensions, the number of segments per side, and the radius of the fillet if you've created a cube with rounded edges. As we create additional objects, lights, cameras, and materials, we will regularly access their information in this panel. Points, edges, faces, and editable objects Objects in 3D space may look solid, but they are actually hollow—a combination of dots and lines that the software connects to look like real objects.

A cardboard box may be hollow, but the cardboard perhaps has thickness of one-eighth of an inch, still giving it some visibility, no matter how thin.

A 3D cube, by default, has no thickness whatsoever. The six sides, referred to as faces or polygons polys for short , are created by connecting four individual points in space by lines called edges. A cube has eight points, and when all of them are connected to one another, these six 2D shapes come together to make a perfectly hollow cube. It would be easy to manually create a cube it's only eight points but certain objects, such as spheres, are much more complicated.

Most standard 3D software isn't set to naturally understand curves, so any roundness to an object is created by multiple points in space, connected by straight lines. When enough of those tiny straight lines are put in a row, our eye is tricked into thinking we're looking at a curve. Imagine building a brick archway. If you build your archway using 10 bricks, it will look segmented and choppy. But if you build your archway using bricks, the shape appears much smoother. Objects such as spheres and cylinders can have hundreds of individual polys, so Cinema has built in a number of primitives to save time and effort.

They can be found in our Create Objects menu that we visited when we began exploring our viewport, or by clicking and holding on the primitives icon. The process of converting an object to a polygon is referred to as "making it editable". Let's create a cube and examine how we can modify it. When the cube is selected, we can modify it via the Attributes Manager. By default, our cube is cm on all sides.

If we want a taller cube, we can enter a new value into the appropriate field in the Attributes Manager. Let's change the Y value to Another way to modify the object is by using the Scale command.

Let's select the Scale icon in our Command Manager. We've previously discussed that selecting a single axis locks our transformation to that axis, so let's select just the Z axis and attempt to scale. The cube scales all directions proportionally! This is because our cube is parametric and not polygonal. When primitives are still in their parametric state, many of our controls are disabled. If you select the Polygon icon in the left-hand Command Palette and attempt to select just one face of the cube, you'll be unable to click on anything.

With our cube selected, click on the icon at the top-left corner that looks like two spheres with arrows on both sides, as shown in the following screenshot: This icon converts our object to polygon this command can also be accessed by pressing C on your keyboard. Now, if we select the Scale tool and click-and-drag just on the Y axis, our object will scale in the correct direction. The Coordinate Manager is located to the left-hand side in the Attributes Manager.

The Coordinate Manager allows us to enter specific values for position, scale, size, and rotation. You can also use it as a reference when you are scaling objects visually—it will update as you make modifications, so if you know you want to be around a certain value but prefer to eyeball it in your composition, you can spot-check as you go.

Let's select the Polygon tool, then move the mouse over our cube. If we click on a highlighted face, note that our axis moves from the center of the cube to the center of the selected face, as follows: Now if we move the axis, it only affects our selected side. Selecting Point mode or Edge mode will have a similar effect. However, note that our controls in the Attributes Manager have been replaced with the Basic Properties menu instead of our previous options.

It is standard practice to leave primitives as parametric options until we specifically need to modify an object. Once the object is converted to polygonal, there is no way to return it to parametric—meaning commands such as filleting rounding edges , number of faces, and so on will become much more difficult. Materials Manager The final piece of the puzzle is the Materials Manager, located to the left of the Attributes Manager, as shown in the following screenshot: [ 21 ] Getting to Know Cinema 4D The Materials Manager allows you to see and edit all of the textures you've created in your scene—wood for floors, brick for walls, green leafy textures for outdoor scenes, and so on.

Since we have not yet created any materials in our scene, it is currently empty. Double-click in this window or, in the Materials Manager, select Create New Material to create a new material. When a material is selected, its properties appear in the Attributes Manager, as follows: You can also double-click on the material to open it in a new window.

Time for action — customizing the interface It was mentioned earlier that we'd be staying in Cinema's default layout for the rest of this book for consistency. As you learn how to model, texture, and light your scenes, however, you may find that your workflow is best suited to a different configuration. Thankfully, Cinema's interface is entirely customizable, so you can experiment with what options are most useful to you.

Let's dig in and move things around! Perhaps you're working on a desktop computer or using multiple monitors. Let's imagine you're working on a laptop, or in a situation where screen space is at a premium. The main issue is that you may want a little extra room for your viewport, since that's where most of our work will take place.

Let's move and minimize in order to get us some more space. While holding down the Ctrl key, click on the gray dots to the left of your timeline underneath the viewport.

Since we're not animating just yet, we can get it out of our way and gain a few extra pixels. Let's take the same action for our animation controls underneath. We can always click on the gray bar to expand our controls later.

Early on, particularly when we're focusing on modeling, we may not have a major need for our Materials Manager. It's good to keep this one around, though, since we may want to assign preliminary materials as we go along just so we're ready when it's time to actually texture our objects. Instead of pressing Ctrl along with clicking on the corner of the manager, click-and-drag.

Release the window above the Attributes Manager. You may also want to change the size of this new window, as all three panels on the right side of the screen will take up equal space by default. Giving more room to the Attributes Manager will still allow us to see a set of materials without compromising too much of our important information below. Repeat the process for the Coordinates Manager. Let's move it on top of the Materials window.

Again, you may want to adjust the proportions of the windows in order to maximize space where it's needed and take space away from areas we're not accessing as frequently, as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? There are a number of reasons to customize your work area. What we've created here is something that functions well on a small screen, is optimized for modeling, but retains all our necessary tools.

There are a number of pre-made layouts that are set up for different purposes, which can be accessed via the Layout drop-down menu at the top-right corner of your screen. It may be useful to use some of these layouts as a starting point, but once you've found a configuration that works for you, you may want to save it by navigating to Window Customization Save Layout As You can also save a layout as your default at startup, which is particularly helpful if you're working with multiple monitors.

The V menu is shown in the following screenshot: [ 24 ] Chapter 1 The V menu provides a useful shortcut to quickly switch between view and selection options.

The M menu is shown in the following screenshot: The M menu accesses tools for polygonal modeling. In the chapters to come, we'll explore the tools and learn some tricks in Cinema 4D as we create an animated flythrough of an office.

We'll learn how to model by exploring various techniques for creating a desk, chairs, and cabinets; we'll create textures to set our pieces apart from one another and add style to our environment; we'll add depth and shine with our lighting, and we'll bring everything to life through animation and rendering. Summary At this point, we've started to dig into Cinema and learned a little about all of our main areas.

We learned about Viewport and Cameras, which form the main area of our screen where you can move around and modify your models. We also learned about Command Palettes, which provide shortcuts to your main toolset.

Finally we saw Objects and Attributes Managers, which help you in selecting and modifying properties of your objects. Now that we've taken a look at where everything is, let's learn how to use it! Over the next two chapters, we'll learn the ins and outs of modeling as we begin creating our animation. Since we've done some interface exploring in this chapter, there won't be quite as many detailed instructions on where things are located as we go along.

If you forget where you left something, you'll always have this chapter as a reference! Dimensionality comes from how color and light bounce off of polygons in 3D space. In this introduction to modeling, we'll explore how complex models can be created starting with primitive shapes. Say you want to build a coffee table—you'd go to the hardware store, measure and cut a piece of wood for the top, and measure four equal pieces for the legs.

Then you'd attach them all together so they can be moved around as one unit. Modeling Part 1: Edges, Faces, and Points Or imagine you're creating a vase—you could take a large lump of clay and carefully sculpt out the shape you desire by hand, or better yet, you could put it on a lathe and ensure that your shape was perfect the entire way around.

Both methods are effective, they just yield slightly different results. As we move forward into modeling, it's going to be easy to get lost in the details, so it's important to routinely take a step back and examine your model from a high-level perspective. Reference images, or better yet, an actual tangible version of what you want to make, will come in handy.

Beginning with primitives Referring back to our vase analogy, we will spend this chapter and the next focusing on two different methods. Let's begin by becoming familiar with the different properties of commonly used primitives. This will get us thinking about how we can shape our figurative "lumps of clay" into real, recognizable objects. The following is a screenshot of our Primitives menu: [ 28 ] Chapter 2 The first thing we'll model for our office will be a desk. Looking at our Primitives menu, a couple of key things will stand out—we'll certainly want to use a cube for our tabletop, and we'll need to create legs by either using additional cubes or cylinders.

For the purposes of this book, we'll be using centimeters, but if you feel more comfortable working in a different scale, you can change it at any time. Note that changing the scale will simply convert your measurement, so if you're working in inches and you switch to centimeters, a inch cube will now read as centimeters, rather than just changing the display units and forcing your cube to be centimeters. The following is a screenshot of our Project window: It's also useful to change the scale depending on the sort of project you're creating.

A mobile phone may be easiest to work on in millimeters, while our office is best suited for inches or centimeters; but if we were working on an exterior scene, we might want to choose feet or meters. Since changing the unit does not affect the absolute scale of the file, we can switch back and forth to whatever is most appropriate at the time.

If you are working on a project with a team, it's common practice to make sure everyone is working in the same scale to ensure consistency as files are traded back and forth between artists. The following is a screenshot of the Cube Object window: Let's first examine the attributes of a cube. The default size is cm or x, where x is your unit size if you're not working in centimeters on all sides.

If your end goal is to just have a simple cube, then the default segment settings one segment per side will be sufficient. However, if you're using the cube as a starting point for more complex geometry, you can create additional polygons referred to as subdividing by changing the Segments values. With the cube selected, change the Segments X value to You'll notice that our cube is now divided into multiple sections along the X axis. In order to not increase our polygon count which will increase render time , it's best to keep these segment values as low as possible.

If you render the current view, you'll notice the cube looks exactly the same, since we've simply divided the cube and not modified anything else about it.

This will not be the case for objects like spheres and other curved objects, as the smoothness of the curve is determined by the number of segments on an object, but we'll cover that later as we explore additional primitives. The number of segments you assign to an object will mostly be important once we convert an object from parametric to polygonal, as discussed in Chapter 1, Getting to Know Cinema 4D.

Separate Surfaces detaches the sides of the cube from one another and is another option that will generally only be useful if we are converting our object to polygon. Turning on Fillet will round the edges of our cube and allow us to control the radius and number of subdivisions.

A higher subdivision count will result in a smoother curve, but also increase polygon count and should only be set as high as necessary to achieve the look you desire. Changing this value to 1 results in no curve at all, but instead bevels the edges of our cube.

Let's set our cube to cm on all sides with Fillet Radius of 5 cm and Fillet Subdivision of 1, then render. Our edges look slightly rounded instead of angular, like they appear before rendering. This is due to our Phong Angle settings, seen in the following screenshot: Phong shading is a technique developed for 3D modeling that allows surfaces to appear smoother than their geometry would otherwise force it to appear.

This allows you to create spheres that have low-to-mid-range polygon counts that still render as smooth, continuous objects. In the Object Manager, you'll see an icon to the right of our cube that looks like two spheres set diagonally from one another.

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