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In this tutorial, I will teach you how to design a painting frame in Cinema 4D to hold and display your masterpieces in any 3D scene that takes your fancy. This tutorial is written for beginners, but it covers a variety of techniques, so more experienced users may benefit from its content too.  So, without further ado, here we go...

	Step 1: Create a cube object by clicking the add object button or selecting Objects -> Primitive -> Cube from the menu. Go to the attributes menu and copy the settings shown on the left. Make the cube editable by pressing C on your keyboard or Right-Click on the Cube icon and choose (Objects) -> Make editable.
	Step 2: Now go to YX view by pressing F4, then go to Tools -> Polygons. If you have done this correctly, the cube wire frame will now be light-blue colour. Select the Knife tool by pressing K or selecting Structure -> Knife. Cut up the cube as illustrated on the left click-dragging and holding shift all the way across the cube. This will now become your frame.
Step 3: Go back to the perspective view by pressing F1. Select the polygons shown in the bottom left image (red) with the live selection tool (Tools -> Live Selection). You may need to rotate the perspective to reach all polygons needed. With the polygons on the image selected, go to the Extrude tool by pressing D on the keyboard or finding Structure -> Extrude in the menu. Then go to the Active Tool tab and enter the settings as shown in the bottom right image. Click Apply. As you might have noticed, the polygons selected have now been extended and form a frame.
	Step 4a: As you can see, the frame is quite rough, so we will bevel it. Go to Bevel with Structure -> Bevel, and enter the settings shown in the image to the left in the Active Tool tab. These settings can be varied to give your frame many different funky shapes. Make sure that you still have the selection shown earlier, or things will start to look weird.
	Step 4b: If you render your model now, your result will look like the image opposite.  As you can see, though, its rather boring, grey, and plain. You can stop now if you really want, but I would recommend you to keep reading this tutorial as it can be very useful knowing how to texture your models properly.
Step 5: We will start by making selections for the texturing. To start, press Ctrl + A to select the whole object, then deselect the area on the front where the image will be and the area on the back that isn't the frame (i.e. This is usually a plate of wood, holding the image in place) using the Live Selection tool. This will become your frame selection, so you can texture it without having the same texture all over the model. When you have selected this area, go to the Set Selection tool via Selection -> Set Selection. As you may notice there will  show up a red triangle on the right side of the Cube icon (Object). This is the icon for a Polygon Selection Tag.  Click the red triangle if you haven't selected it already, and go to the attributes tab. Click on basic in the Attributes and name it Frame. This will make it easier to texture up this selection later.

	Step 6: In this step, we will almost do the same as in step 5, so I will only cover the differing points.  Select the area where the picture will be with the Live Selection tool (shown in image, selected is shown in red), and go to Selection -> Set Selection. Now choose Attributes -> Basic and name it "front". Do the same with the back part of it, but name it "back".
	Step 7: Now to put textures onto our model. You will need to make four new materials (textures) in order to do this - 2 wooden materials, 1 sky material and 1 painting material. You can get good textures here if you need them. Download two wooden textures, preferably one lighter an one darker. Make a new material by pressing Ctrl + N or going to Materials editor at the bottom and choose File -> New Material. Do this four times. As you can see on the image, I've already added my materials and textures. Mat is the frame wood. Mat.1 is the back wood. Mat.2 is the painting itself.
	Step 8: Now comes the tricky part of assigning a texture to the materials. Double-click the material called Mat, go to the colour subsection, click the bar to the right of the texture text and duplicate the settings shown in the image opposite. A file window should pop up. Just go to your lighter wooden texture and assign it as the texture. Now go to the Specular subsection and change the Width to 22% - this can be varied to give you different results. These settings may also need to be changed depending on the texture that you use.

- Tutorial written by Trigona

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