1. Either load the file Bird.c4d that comes with this tutorial or your own model. Make sure that the wings are made invisible by clicking on the gray dots in the Object manager (one for visibility in editor, the other for visibility in render time).
   
   
2. In Render Settings go to Output (01)and make sure that the shape of your render is long. Mine is 800 by 300. This will let you render the whole bird without superfluous background.
   
   
3. Use the perspective view and rotate and move the mesh in position. The reason for this is that this view shows you the safe areas of the render with two gray lines (02).

01

02

1. Render the Image to picture Viewer and save the file as Side_View.tif (03)
   
   
2. Repeat the process and take another shot from the top naming it .... Top_View.tif (04). Imaginative or what?
   
   

03

04

1. Fire up photoshop and bring Side_View.tif in.
   
   
2. As you can see I have also a picture of the head of an eagle that I scanned (05). It doesn't matter at this point what kind of bird you are using. All we are doing is to use the textures of the pictures to paint the skin of our mesh. Many times when you texture you will find that images do not have to be the same as the end result.
   
   
3. Drag and drop the image of the eagle onto your reference and you should get by default a new layer in photoshop. Name that layer Head.
   
   
4. Using the Free transform tool scale the picture down to the same size as the eye, making sure you have dropped the opacity to about 50% so you can see the layer underneath (06).
   
   

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1. Using the Lasso tool cut around the eye and copy and paste it in a new layer (07). Name that layer eye
   
   
2. Go back to the Head layer and again using the Free transform tool rotate the image to fit the beak. Make sure that you overlap a bit.
   
   

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1. Again using the Lasso tool cut around the beak and copy and paste it in another new layer. Name that layer Beak
   
   
2. You should have now 4 layers as in (10)
   
   

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Click on the eye icon on the Background copy layer to make invisible (11). Now go to Layers, Merge visible (12).

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1. Using the Clone stamp tool fix the image so it looks right (13). You might need to use other tools like the Blur tool, Smudge and so on. When you are happy save the image and you are ready to bring it into Cinema.
   
   
2. In Cinema get a new material call it Head and from image go to the place you have saved this image. For cinema you need to create a folder in the same place as the file and call it Tex and put all your images there. Cinema will navigate there by default and find your image files (14).
   
   

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1. Before you do anything else delete any uvw tag that you might have on your mesh. Now drop your Head material on the mesh and and in the texture tag settings choose Frontal projection and disable tiles (15).
   
   
2. Using the Move, Rotate, and Scale tools in the Perspective View, project the texture so it fits on the Bird's head. Frontal projection works like a slide projector, so it is very useful for quick texturing. This technique is also used for mapping textures to buildings without having to use loads of polys. If you learn to use it well many times you will find that there is no need for unwrapping meshes and going in all the trouble that this entails. Not always though, there are times where it can not be avoided. But this technique will help you work fast when all you need is a simple texture (16).
   
   

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1. Now go to texture and choose Generate UVW Coordinates (17)and your texture will be fixed on to the mesh so we can deform it later on with bones (18) . If you look closely you can see that there are some problems with the texture. If you load it into photoshop make changes you want and in the material settings and choose Reload image. The image will be textured again with all the new changes.
   
   
2. We're almost there. What we need to do now is to make an alpha texture to load it in the alpha channel so that it allows us to texture the rest of the body, making transparent the areas that have not been painted in photoshop.
   
   

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1. Go back in photoshop and using the same file give your self a new layer and call it Mask (19). With the paint bucket tool fill it with black and lower the transparency so you can see the layers underneath.
   
   
2. Using the Rubber, rub out the area covering the face making sure again to go well over the edge. Leave a kind of jagged edge like the plumage of a bird.
   
   
3. From Filters choose Gaussian Blur and blur it down so that there will be a blending in of the materials later on.
   
   

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1. Leave only the Mask layer visible and Save As..., Head_Alpha.tif (21).
   
   
2. Back in cinema load the image file on to the Alpha channel of the Head material (22).
   
   

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1. You will see now that the body of the bird is knocked out by the black in the Alpha channel (23).
   
   
2. To fix that create a new material, name it Foundation and drop it on the mesh. Make sure to drug it to the left of your Head material in the Object Manager (24). The reason for this is that cinema reads materials like layers in photoshop, but instead of going from bottom to top, it reads from left to right. So materials to the right, as you look the screen, cover those to the left. Using this idea you can create transparencies the blend to each other.
   
   

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Finally, go to render settings and from Effects choose Cel renderer. Use the settings bellow (25)or experiment with your own settings. This kind of texturing works well with this effect because is not as precise as unwrapping meshes, so you can use it to create a kind of watercolor effect or a vector type.

25

1. The technique is basically the same for the rest of the texturing. Make sure you have the materials in the order that the alphas are supposed to work. If you think of layers you should be able to use the technique without problems. I have divided the bird into 4 sections, each one with it's own material, head, belly, back and tail. Of course you can use less or more sections according to what you want to build.
   
   
2. The same applies for the wings. Good luck.
   
   
3. Here is a the whole bird textured (26)
   
   

26

In the next part we will be setting up bones to animate the bird.