Creating A 3D Logo - Part 1

1. The First part to creating your 3d logo is to come up with a design. A logo design can be whatever you want! When designing your logo, try to keep a few things in mind though: A simple logo is often best, Too many colors will not turn out good (I typically just use shades of black). Logos can be anything from some simple text (See Google.com), or something more complex like the GreyCobra Productions Logo.

2. Ok, once you have an idea for a design, its time to start putting this to Photoshop. In this tutorial, I will use a simple logo (If this is your first time, I recommend doing the same as more complex logos can take a bit of time to design). To create the logo, make sure you use the pen tool to create a vector shape. I am assuming that you know how to do this, but if not, follow along. Select the pen tool, and make sure your settings look like this:

Click to enlarge

3. Now add an anchor point using your pen tool. What's an anchor point? An anchor point is any point set with the pen tool. We will use these to create and edit the logo we are designing.

4. Now, add another anchor point in the top right of your documents. You should see a straight line be pulled across between the two points (a line segment).

5. Seems simple enough... It actually is not to difficult once you get the hang of it. Make another anchor point down in the bottom right of your document. Then make another one towards the center, and close up your anchor points by clicking anchor point 1.

6. Now we have the basic shape done for your logo. Not that interesting. What we need to do is add some curves in our logo to give it a more trendy design. To do this, Go up to your tool selector, and select the convert point tool:

6. This tool will allow you to change the way your anchor points bend and curve. This tool is very useful, and can be used for many things, but in this tutorial, I am trying to keep the steps as simple as possible. Click on one of your anchor points, and start dragging outwards. See what happens!

7. It makes the angle into a rounded curve. You should now see two extra points coming off the anchor point. You can adjust these points to change the amount of curve, length, and other attributes of your shape. Continue changing your anchor points until you have something similar to the following shape:

8. Yes, its a very simple shape, but I am just here to show you the basics to making your own personal logo. Now that we have our shape all drawn out in a vector shape, we can export it to a file that Cinema 4d can use. Before we do this, I will try to explain to you why we had to design the logo in vector. A vector logo allows us to resize our shapes to any dimension we want without ever losing quality. Vector shapes can be very simple, or can be very complex. Text is another example of a vector, no matter how large you make it, it will never lose quality. Ok, now for exporting. Go to file > Export > Export as Paths to Illustrator. Now save your logo as a .ai file.

Your all done with part 1! Remember, you can do much more with your shapes than I have, and create multiple shape layers to make your logo even more creative. Once you have completed this part of the tutorial, continue on to part 2 to learn how to make your logo 3d in Cinema 4D.