The Danse Multimedia made a decision back in early 2000 to switch to a more stable and powerful 3D package at the beginning of a 5 year project which required cutting edge software development and equally impressive imagery. We didn't have a lot of time to get the production pipeline flowing and after testing several 3D packages like Lightwave, Maya and 3DS Max, Maxon's Cinema 4D was the clear winner for stability and small learning curve.

In the beginning, the first major projects only required a solid feature set of modeling, texture creation, network rendering and basic animation. Fortunately, Cinema’s toolset seemed to evolve and expand at the same pace as the demands of our client.

The first task was to develop a logo and a brand mark for the name of the system, The Integrated Helix™ www.integratedhelix.com. The first branding icon was centered around a double helix easily created and manipulated to perfection via a circle spline and a helix spline in a sweep nurbs object. The real beauty of the image came from the texturing using a Bhodinut shader for the base blue and creating a glass shader with high transparency applied to a copy of the helix object slightly larger and in the same place as the blue helix. This creates a deep reflection much like car paint with a clear gloss coat(Fig.1). We then made a second image at a 3 quarter view on a white plane using reflectivity  and a compositing tag to give it a clean, white look with a little reflectivity and shadow(Fig. 2).