Aren't pooters clever? They can turn a so-so sketcher into an architect, a pretend golfer into a champion, a budding Brock into Fangio or apply any multitude of other skills to people by adding in the accuracy and neatness we may not otherwise have. They cannot add creativity or add talent of course, but they can certainly assist in removing the mundane allowing us to concentrate on that aspect - the human side if you will.

But there is a danger of letting all the whizz-bangery allow us to lose sight of a few things; the KISS principle.

Some years back, I was asked to make a TVC (television commercial - sorry) for a company that made chemicals. In this case, specifically a chemical that when thrown into an old, tired, gunky swimming pool that had turned green with envy, would clear the water and make it sparkly, arkly swimmable again. For anyone who has had such a situation, normally it is a hell of a job, messy, smelly and pretty ugly.

For this particular ad, creatively I thought I would start with an image of a grungy piece of water, with gluggy, gloopy sound effects. Gradually these would cross fade into sparkling blue water with a backdrop of laughing kids, splashing water and while this transition occured, from infinity an image of the bottle and the label (decal) would come forwards being full frame at the end of the 15 secs and a single voice over giving the name of the product.

Now here was the clever bit.

The water was computer rendered in Adobe After Effects using a plugin called Psunami, the bottle was modelled in Cinema 4DXL and composited into the shot using transparency. Finally, the audio was a combination of a v/o artist (using the facilities of the local community radio station for minimal costs), a mini-disc recorded track from the local swimming pool and a bottle of sinflower oil to get the gloopy sounds.

I was very pleased with the final composite, with the whole project taking around 4 days from go to whoa. It went to air on Channels 9 and 10 off memory in the cheap mid-dawn slot.

As you do, I was a member of one of the Cinema 4DXL user groups on line and mentioned this particular project and how it had been done; this after all is a major reason for user groups to share and pass on information for the good of all.

I had a response from a "newbie" to Cinema (but was a "gun" in AE) about texturing. In my commercial, the bottle had little texture being white polyethylene - a simple model to make using a spline and rotating the shape around it. The decal was built using the tools available in Cinema and "mapped" onto the bottle.

This user however wanted to make what looked like rusty galvanised iron as used in roofing. The shape of a sheet of galv was easy to model; simply extrude a wavy shape to the length required. For the texture to make it look grey, dirty and rusty however was a bit trickier requiring using Photoshop and various plugins to get the final texture Just Right. Once I had an image I was happy with, it could be mapped onto the corrugated sheet model - front and back. It could then be turned, mirrored, duplicated or whatever to make sure it didn't end up as an embarassing recurring pattern that would look odd indeed!

All in all, not being a whizz in Cinema 4DXL, I probably spent about a day or so perfecting the technique.

To be immediately brought back to earth.

When I went back to the user group to explain my technique, the first response I received was something like "Ya mug! Why not just get your digital camera, find some old corrugated iron and photograph it to get a variety of textures? Save a heap of computer work, buying textures, using Photoshop etc".

He's right. Sometimes we DO make it too hard when an easy way is staring us straight in the face. Sure, there is a huge satisfaction in making some software perform a task to order, but time is money - especially to professionals - so before embarking on a creative, outline the steps and see how they can be best approached without being to clever about it.