Just received Cinema 4D 2012

[Gare]

Hi Raw Habitz and to get back to your original question: paths themselves can be copied to Cinema 4D, but you need to export them to Illustrator file format, and everything on the page goes to AI so if you have a bitmap in a margin of a page, that will go, too. So make certain you only have vector paths on the page before exporting.

Sadly, no, Xara and C4D are different types of art media, so paths can be used to build shapes in C4D, but you can't export a finished drawing and hope to make 3D art out of it. At least, not good 3D art .

A lot of members have chimed in with good tips here, and most of them have to do with the "sculpting" as opposed to "building" method of making objects in C4D, which supports both methods. Sculpting involves taking a primitive off the Objects>Primitive menu, simplifying it so it's no longer a dynamic shape (press C with the object selected), and then using the selection tools in combination with the point, vertex and path tools to move areas around. Plus there are a lot of nice and easy modifiers in the Structure and Functions menus.
But if you want some of your Xara skills to remain within C4D, building 3D objects can be done by projecting a 2D path in a direction to declare a third dimension.

There are at least four operations you can use in Cinema 4D (any version I can think of, I began with v8) to project a path you've created in Xara along a third axis to create a mesh.

Extruding you probably already know form Xara; you project a closed path through space to create the third dimension. Also in C4D is sweeping, which runs a path along a second path and if you check the Attributes for the Sweep NURBs parent object, you can change the end scale and other things. Additionally, you can control the size of the swept path by using a rail, a third path that figures into the Sweep recipe.

Lofting involves several paths and the can be different shapes but you'd best stick to identical numbers of control points. Anf then there's the Potter's Wheel Lofting NURB, all of these are accessed under Objects>NURBs.

C4D does have its own pen tools, but I've never seen drawing tools in any modeling program that equal Xara's for intuitiveness and ease of use.

Congratulations on your purchase, by the way. I understand that the latest version of cinema 4D has physically-based lighting tools!



My Best,

Gary