Hi, people will find that this tutorial is easier to follow than actually getting Cinema 4D themselves, but common sense will prevail and if you don't have common sense then ask someone that does, anywho, let's begin. (56k beware)

Ok, first we are going to look at the Cinema 4D screen itself as there are a number of features that work well with Abstraction, they are numbered and circled in red:



1. This is the Objects Tab, anything in this tab is to with the shapes that are rendered. This is used to create our basic shapes and later, to edit them
2.This is used to edit the structure of our shapes
3. This handily shows us every polygon that makes up the shape, it basically renders a wireframe over the shape.
4. This is the materials area, this allows us to add images and colour to the renders themselves.
Ok, now we understand the interface we are using, let us begin.

Firstly, we need a shape to play with, go to objects>primitive>sphere and this will render a sphere. We can't do anything yet so lets right click the sphere and click "Make Editable" Now we can start to modify our shape.


Now, lets start off with basic modification, to make it easy, we first need to display the wireframe of our sphere, click what I highlighted as number 3 on the interface and then right click the sphere and select "Magnet", this is where the fun begins.



Start by holding the shift button down and clicking the sphere, hold the left click button down and drag away from it, depending on which way you move the mouse you will make either a dimple or a little hill on the sphere. For now lets keep it as a hill, you will end up with something that looks like this:



Now keep doing this around the shape using these buttons to change the view:



and you will end up with something that will look like this:



Not looking to special at the moment but it's a start, if you haven't done so already you can mess the image up a little bit by dragging without holding shift down but you can do that for yourself, lets keep it simple. Now, we can start to make it look interesting, right click the shape and select bevel, now click the sphere and drag to the right or left, the different directions cause the image to fold inwards or outwards. Just do it one way or alternate between the to and after a few click and drags the shape will look fairly impressive like so:



Now you can either leave it like that and skip these sections or you can add more, right click the shape and select "extrude inner" then repeat what we did last time where we clicked and dragged a few times, after this you should have something looking slightly like this:



Now right click again and select "extrude" repeat like last time once or twice and you should end up with something like this:



it's a bit of a mess now but that's alright, if you want you can zoom out now and render it or you can stick around where we can make it even messier.
Now we are almost done, we can do something that will make it look even messier, click structure>edit surface>matrix extrude, keep all the defaults except where it says "variation" set it to "per step". Click ok, now zoom out a bit and look at the picture, it should look something like this:



Now that looks pretty darn good, but we can make it even better.
Click object>Nurbs>hyper Nurbs, you will not see any effect take place, but there will be. Over to the right there is a sort of shapes menu that looks a little like the photoshop layers window:



Where it says sphere hold click it and drag it over where it says Hyper Nurbs, your render should now smoothen out and look pretty decent like this:



Now we are going to deal with Materials, located at the bottom is the materials pallette. Now down there click File>New Material, a sphere should appear, right click and select edit, now you can edit everything to your hearts content, I'll let you mess around in there and sort out what you want the texture to look like, I want it to be simple so i will make my picture blue. Close the window and right click the material sphere again and select "apply". You will end up with this:



Now, all we need to do is render it, to do this at the top it should say render, click it and select "render settings" you will get this menu:



Click output and change the settings so it fits whatever size you want, I have 1024x768 because of my resolution so go ahead with whatever you want, now click the save tab and make sure alpha channel is selected or change the file type to BMP if you are gonna keep the render that way. Now close that, click render and click "render" to "picture viewer". Now your image will be rendered, wait for it to be rendered as this can be quite time consuming. After it has been rendered click File>save and do the standard saving process you would do with any other program. You have successfully created an Abstract render, here is mine:

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Ok we're done, but if you want to edit the render in photoshop, here is how you do it. Firstly you must of saved your Render as a tiff with alpha channel checked. Now open it in photoshop and open the channels windows, ctrl + left click the alpha channel and then copy and paste it on a new picture. Easy as that, here is a picture I made using an abstract:



Credits to www.greycobra.com for the tech brushes used on this image.