1. The first step is to open up cinema 4d. Go ahead and start your abstract by creating a sphere primitive (objects > primitives > sphere). A sphere will appear in your main view port:

2. Now make your sphere editable by right clicking the sphere, and select "Make Editable". Nothing should appear to happen. Now select your polygon tool from your tool bar on the left. Gridlines should appear on your sphere:

3. Right click your sphere again, and select Magnet. The magnet tool lets you edit your spheres polygons by clicking and dragging. You can create simple abstracts and objects using it. Here is what I am going to do. First, I am going to click a polygon near the top of my sphere, and I will hold shift and pull straight out:

4. Do this several more times right to the right and left of your first spike. Make them different lengths and give them variation. I made 3 more spikes extruding to the left, right, and in front of it:

5. Now, without holding shift, start making extrusions on the spikes themselves. We will do this by pressing on a polygon on a spike, and dragging outward of the render. It should look something like this:

6. Repeat steps 3-5 on the bottom half of your sphere, except instead of dragging straight out, drag at more of an angle:

7. The next thing we need to do is use our Bevel tool to create a more complex abstract. Right click on your sphere/abstract, and select bevel. Now press anywhere in the render and drag outwards:

8. Repeat step 7, except when you right click, select extrude inner:

9. Repeat step 7 again with Extrude:

10. Repeat step 7 again with bevel:

11. Now apply a matrix extrude (Structure > edit surface > Matrix Extrude) with the following settings:

12. Your render should now look somewhat similar to this:

13. Only a few more steps until the basic render in complete and we are ready to add materials. Right now, we need to add Hypernurbs to our render. To do this, we will click Objects > Nurbs > Hypernurbs. You will not see any effect take place yet, this is because we have not applied the nurbs to our abstract yet. To apply the nurbs, click on the sphere object in your objects tab (located on the right side of cinema 4d) and drag it into HyperNurbs:

14. Now, to get rid of the grids on your render, click on the model tool:

You have now completed part one of the tutorial, here in my render so far!

The next part of this tutorial will show you how I set up my material for the abstract! Please continue to part 2 of the making of Annexia.