I recently finished a new animation for the company I work for called Dee Zee. The 60-second animation shows their company logo being cut from a piece of sheet metal, the excess taken away using a magnet, a stamping machine attaching the black border onto the logo, then finally a robot drops a rolled-up sticker, which unrolls to reveal their tagline “The Quality Truck Accessory People.” View the complete animation here:

I’d like to show you how I went about creating the laser etching effect and the chain magnet. I have broken them down into 2 separate videos, as one long video could get quite long. I have also included the original Cinema 4D project file to download. You can find a link at the bottom of this post.

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Adobe Photoshop is an amazing product, especially for a web designer like myself. However, there are some things that I think would really help benefit the workflow for any designer. I have compiled a list of features that I would like to see implemented in a future version of Photoshop. If I missed anything you’d like to see added to Photoshop, let me know in the comments! I plan to send my wish list to Adobe in hopes to see some of these features come to fruition.

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I have always been an avid user of Autodesk’s 3ds max software. With that I was always a Microsoft Windows kinda guy. All that changed when I got my first MacBook Pro. I absolutely fell in love with the operating system and hardware. I began to explore different 3D modeling packages such as Maxon’s Cinema 4D and Autodesk’s Maya. Cinema 4D has always been an easy to learn package and works great on both Windows and Mac. Since I found myself using my Mac more than my PC, I wanted to find something that worked under both Windows and Mac OS…Cinema 4D does just that.

One problem with 3ds max is that it is a Windows-Only package. After waiting almost three years for Autodesk to hopefully port it to the Mac, I decided it would probably never happen. Don’t get me wrong, I love 3ds max’s modeling tools…I think 3ds max has an edge over Cinema in this area. Cinema, however does contain a few tools I think are better than 3ds max. For example, the material editor and the physics engine inside Cinema. I’m writing this article to hopefully make it easier for people who are in the same boat as me…switching from 3ds max to Cinema 4D.

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This short film by Dan Trachtenberg is about a girl that wakes up with no idea who she is or how she got there. It is a take off the Portal video game from Valve Software. I thought it was very well made with great use of camera tracking.