CV-Import Image As: Overview

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Instructor Donovan Keith

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  • Duration: 04:29
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Create 3D objects from your images in just a couple clicks.

Create 3D objects from your images in no time at all. Auto-detects Alpha Channels, video files, and image sequences.

Hold down Alt/Option as you call a command to load an entire directory and create: Materials, Decals, Planes, Sprites, Skies, Backgrounds, Foregrounds, and Gobos

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CV-Import Image As is set of plugins for Cinema 4D, that make it super simple to take an image and turn it into an object in Cinema 4D. We've all been there before. You've had a project file, and, I don't know, say a directory full of images. Each one of them's got a slightly different size, different aspect ratio. And you want to bring that into Cinema 4D. Well it's not that difficult really. I mean, you can create a plane, create a material, add it into your color channel, add the image into your luminance channel, into your Alpha channel, turn off reflectance, apply it, adjust the size of your plane to...actually you know what, that is...that sounds a little harder than it needs to be. What if we go to CV-Import right here? Well, we'll see all of the commands that we have access to. And if I choose CV-Plane from Image, I can load in our first cat here. The black and white cat. Huh. That just kind of came in. Well, that's really, it. You just grab the command, and import an image. It's going to automatically rename it. If your image has an alpha channel, it's automatically going to detect that. And, well okay, one image, so what's one minute save? What if, you had that full directory? Well hold down the Alt or the Option key, and your file loader's going to change, to a directory version. Choose open. Every single one of those images is going to come in as a plane, all of them appropriately sized to fit into a 400 by 400 plane. I'm just going to scale all these down, and I'm going to use the, grid clone tool, to drag these out. Make my grid, and delete my originals. Look at that. I've got all these images automatically loaded in, all with their own names. Okay, show me something I haven't seen. Well CV-Sprite from Image will allow you to grab an image that's got an Alpha channel. Like say, I don't know, a cloud. Something like this. And you can also load in, an entire directory of these, and you can manually lay them out. And notice that they're auto orienting to match my camera. When I render this, I get something that looks like a bunch of clouds, pretty cool. Now if I want, I can load in a sky with CV-Sky from Image. Just locate my sky image, and there we are. Loaded in, ready to be seen. Now what if I just want this to light my objects? I don't actually want to see it. Well I can just load in a background, and use a background, like this meadow tree right here. And it says, do you want to adjust your render and project settings to match the footage? And I'm going to say, yes. What's really cool about this, is it's going to adjust my render output resolution, and if this had been a piece of footage with a certain number of frames or a duration, my project would have adjusted to match that as well, which is also a nice little time saver. And here we have it. We've got our sky in there, and when we render, it shows up. All I have to do is go into my settings, I'm going to turn off scene by transparency here to further adjust how that sky is being represented. CV-Gobo from Image might be of interest as well. And a Gobo isn't... in theater is an element that you'll put in front of a light in order to cast shadow. And that's really useful when you want to evoke a mood. So here I have a cat in a cinder block room. If I use CV-Import and choose CV-Gobo from image, I'm going to navigate here to my prison bar scene. I'm going to grab this Gobo, and Gobo is a black and white image, where the black is not transparent and the white is transparent. It's going to apply it to my spotlight, and when I render now, those prison bars are showing on my cat right here. And this is a nice little helper. The other cool thing about this, is it's automatically resizing to match the width of my spotlight. And anyone that's tried to manually adjust the offset U and offset V has seen what a real pain this can be. CV-Import Image As is not going to change the world, but if you have a project where you need to import a bunch of images, this is going to be super helpful.
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