Step 1;

Ok first create a text object and use a bold font like Gill Sans Ultra Bold. Then create an Extrude Nurbs object and place the Text object into it.

You'll want the "D" to be bold so that we have plenty of room for the door part. I also capitalized all the words so that none of the letters would penetrate through the floor.

Step 2;

Create a cube and resize it and place it overlapping the "D" in the Door type; we will use this to create our door. Next create a Boole object and put the Door Type and the Cube into it. The order is important with the Boole object, put the type above the Cube object, so that the cube is cutting a hole out of the "D."

Step 3;

Now make a door by creating a few more cubes, one for the door itself and the other for the door knob base. Then create a sphere for the door knob. Select all the door objects and group them together, then rotate the door so it looks like it was just opened.

Step 4;

Ok now create a light for the inside of the door, I used an Area light with Soft Shadows turned on and the intensity up to 200%. You may have to experiment with this light to get the right effect.

Step 5;

Now light the rest of your image to get the desired effect you want. For me I added three more Omni lights with Soft Shadows turned on. I placed one in the front (keylight), one off to the side (fill light) and one in the back (back light).

The image to the right is the final effect I got with all my lights plus Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion turned on.

Step 6;

Ok now render out your image as a PSD layered image to bring into Photoshop to apply additional effects to it. For me, I like to enable the Multi-Pass rendering in Cinema 4d to render out the different attributes like specular, shadows, and etc. This way you can make custom adjustments in Photoshop without having to go back into Cinema 4d and re-render the image. For this image I rendered out the RGBA, Diffuse, Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination, Specular, Depth, and Shadow pass.

Step 7;

Alright so once you open up your Photoshop file play around with some of the layers to get the effects you want. Sometimes I like to go in and adjust some of the layer effects.

Now let's add some color to our image, right now it's pretty bland, huh? So create a Gradient Map and apply any color scheme you want. If you want to use the same colors I used I've included them below.

Step 8;

Ok now create another Adjustment Layer like a Curves or Levels to tweak the image further, give it a little more contrast.

Next, let's create a vignette, so add a new layer and fill it in black and create an image mask and fill it in with a circular gradient.

Step 9;

Ok now duplicate all the layers except for the vignette layer and merge them together. Then duplicate that layer and put the previous set of the images into a folder as a back up incase you need to go back and adjust the image further.

Step 10;

Ok now we want to create a shallow depth of field by blurring the image as it goes into the background. You can use the Depth pass you rendered out to use as a mask for this effect. You can find the depth pass in the Channels tab right below the Alpha channel.

I didn't like Depth pass that was rendered out for my image so I went back into Cinema 4d and rendered out a custom one. I disabled all the current lights and created a spotlight and lit it from the side.

Step 11;

Ok back in Photoshop, apply a Gaussian Blur to the top Door layer. Then create an image mask and paste the new depth map into it, now the image should look like it's blurring in the foreground instead of the background. To fix it invert the depth image and adjust the contrast of it so that there's more definition in the image.

Now your image should look like it blurs more into the background and your image should look like the one below....or whatever image you decided to create insteada...right?

Now go forth and create my students!