PUT YOUR 3D ART ON THE MAP

Chief art director Pál Varsányi shares his top tips for getting the most out of camera mapping in Cinema 4D

1. Be precise

At the beginning of the whole process try to place your guidelines on the image as accurately as possible, so the 3D camera position and field of view will be the closest to the original camera. Using loosely placed guidelines will give you false results and will lead to more and more headaches as you build your scene.

2. Go for low-poly where you can

My experience is that most objects you create in your scene don’t have to contain a high amount of polygons. Since the image used for mapping is usually full of details and the camera movement is limited, you can get away with low-poly objects in most cases.

3. Lighting matters

If you just recreate a photo in 3D then you don’t really have to care about additional lighting, the image already has its own. But if you want to add any extra objects to the scene which are absent from the original photo, then you have to recreate the lighting environment or at least something similar in order to fit the new objects seamlessly into the scene.

4. Use Photoshop

To enhance the range of your camera movement, Photoshop or similar software are great to add extra info to the scene. When an object overlaps a part of your background in the photo, you can still cheat: cut out the foreground object from the photo, paint the missing parts on the background (Content-aware Fill can be a great time-saver), and use this new texture for the background object instead of your original texture.

5. Experiment

Not exactly a camera mapping tip, but works fine here, too. You can always go further than creating a scene with a nice camera and static meshes. You have millions of 3D software tools in your hand, so why not try other things with your objects. Blow up, melt, disintegrate, deform, etc to see some unexpected results.