Kent Oberheu 'Covers' Peachpit with CINEMA 4D

Peachpit Press book covers on Apple applications created with MAXON software.

Over the past 2 years, Peachpit Press has relied on the creative services of Kent Oberheu to craft a new line of book covers. Kent was encouraged to "think different" as these covers were destined to encase how-to titles for Apple software applications. Kent chose to realize this vision using CINEMA 4D. What resulted is a family of book covers that evoke the hip, up-to-the-minute vibe of Apple products.

Challenged with creating a strong brand for the Peachpit series, Kent cleverly established a solid identity for Apple's Professional and Productivity product lines: Final Cut Studio, Aperture, Logic, iLife, and iWork. Each cover took from 15 to 55 hours to complete, with one frame rendering in about two hours. Actual concept designs were the most time-consuming part of the project. The illustrations were created with the CINEMA 4D Studio Bundle and Advanced Render module, starting with Release 9 and completing with Release 10.1.

Kent elaborates on his creative process, "In CINEMA, I start working with splines that I intend to form into nurbs meshes. I rely heavily on navigation in 3D space. I've found that CINEMA 4D's navigation tools are intuitive so I can work my way around relatively complex splines and surfaces quickly. It's almost like I'm working on an actual wire model with my hands. I quickly form several splines and turn them into surfaces by dropping them into a Loft or Sweep object. I like working this way because I can turn the surfaces on or off to see the results. I also typically work at one subdivision level in my viewport and set my 3D canvas to render at full level of subdivision. In some cases, I even nest my NURBS objects and use HyperNURBS to give me a further degree of subdivision when I need it for creating smooth surfaces at high resolution".

Kent relies heavily on rendering in the current viewport. As he begins refining and setting materials on objects, he regularly hovers back-and-forth between navigation and rendering in the current viewport to check camera angle, materials, lighting and surface continuity.

"The flexibility to change and save CINEMA 4D's interface and tool configurations is really incredibly handy. I rely heavily on my own configuration of the viewports and attribute editors in order to streamline my workflow", says Kent.

The final illustrations on the book covers were 7.5 x 5.125 inches, but Kent worked at three times that size for the illustrations, roughly 7000 x 5000 pixels at 16-bit. This was done to achieve a high level of detail in the images. Says Kent of this choice, "At that resolution, I needed the higher bit depth to be able to achieve the subtle gradations of color in the images. The result is that the images can be printed at sizes closer to those of my fine art prints".

Using the CINEMA 4D Studio Bundle since 2001, Kent's toolkit also consists of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on a PowerMac dual G5.

Kent considers CINEMA 4D to be the real time saver in his work, and when asked what the 3D project file size was in megabytes he knowingly replies, "The nice thing is that, as an artist, I don't have to worry about it. CINEMA 4D handles the subdivision beautifully, without polygonal overhead".

Artist's notes on the book covers can be found on Kent's Website.