Bevel Tips and Techniques in Cinema 4D

hi guys this is Mike in this cinema4d tutorial I'm gonna give you bevel tips so the first tip is going to be transitional bevels so when we have a type of crease that we put in say if you're gonna model a car hood or car bonnet you're gonna have this creased metal that runs across your your hood but it transitions into a very smooth and smooth out so we don't have that crease so in order to do that we can go to say a plane but we want to make sure that we stay with very low polygons very low geometry so we're gonna bring this down to three and let me go to my top view and we'll bring this to go to our displays and give a wireframe and we'll press C on the keyboard to bring make this editable now what we want to do is we want to have this transition that goes from one end to the other but smooths out towards the back end so the way we can do that as we can go to our edge and we can use our slide tool click on an edge and we're going to bring this over click on this edge bring this over and then just slide this together we'll go to polygon mode live selection will go to perspective mode and then we're going to select these polygons here and we're just going to pull them upward in this axis okay next book we want to do is we want to go to subdivision surface and we're going to drag our plane underneath the subdivision surface you can see how the we have this smooth transition so if you want to toggle between your subdivision surface and turning it off we can go to Q on our keyboard and now I'll bring it back and forth if you need to toggle that so they're going back and forth to our object manager so we're gonna go to a live selection or excuse me we're gonna go to edge mode so press return until you get to your edge mode and we're going to select our edges if we double click with our directional tool and then holding down shift double click again on this edge now we have these two edges selected we're gonna go to M s on our keyboard to bring up our rebel our bevel and what we want to do is we want to add in an edge that goes on either side of each of these two selected edges so in order to do that we're going to give this one subdivision and we're gonna click and drag until we have a nice tight very tight bevel okay great so let's press Q on our keyboard and let's do a return command our to see our bevel with it rendered and I'm going to go to my subdivision surface I'm just gonna put this up to three for our editor just so we have a smoother render command R and you can see this very nice crease that we have on our bevel but what we want to do is we want to smooth out these these edges here so this crease just kind of blends right into our geometry so what we're going to do is we're going to press key press Q on our keyboard in order to take off our subdivision surface and we want to spread out these edges just a little bit so we have a little bit of a smoother transition so we can go to our slide tool again and let me zoom in so we can kind of see this a little better so I'm gonna click this edge I'm just gonna slide it click this one and slide this off we want to make this pretty even click and drag and then click and drag and let's rotate around and see make sure this is pretty even so I'm looking at the spacing between these lines so zoom out rotate around and Q and then we'll do a command R so now you can see that we have this crisp edge here and it slowly smoothes out until in this nice transition and so we can experiment a little bit with these spacing of these points so if we can go to point mode let's zoom in here a little bit and let's pull these a little bit tighter and we can spread these ones out a little bit more so there's a little bit of a manual approach to this in order to get it to the way that you want it now if I press Q command R you can see that we now have this nice smooth transition and you can go back and forth and trying to get the amount of crease that you want if you want a pretty tight up here and then it smooths out you can do that as well make sure I have a my subdivision surface on and you can see this nice smooth transition but we have a nice sharp crease here in this lesson I'm going to talk a little bit how better planning can help you avoid a few of the problems you have when beveling geometry in cinema 4d so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to a disc and I'm gonna go to my top view f2 on your keyboard and we're gonna bring the segment rotation segments down to 8 and disk segments to 2 and then I'm gonna press C on the keyboard and then I'm going to go to NB and let me go to my top view again and what I want to do is I want to select these polygons and I'm just gonna expand this just scale it out a little bit and now we don't want to do is go to edge mode select these edges and dissolve I'm gonna make a copy of this because we're gonna be making a few different versions so I can show you what I'm talking about a little bit better so what I want to do next is I want to go to polygon my polygon pen go to point mode and what I want to do is I want to command click and drag and extrude this out bring my point over here to the center command click and drag snap this weld these two points command click and drag and I want to weld these points together so this line stays straight and we make a nice corner do the same thing over here make sure this is nice and straight command click snap command click weld that make sure this is straight bring this into a corner command click and drag well these bring this over here command click and in order to make these nice and straight keep this nice and organized what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my rectangle selection select these points press T in this axis holding down shift we're going to go down unto 0 hit our spacebar to toggle between our last use tool spacebar again hold down shift get down to 0 and we're going to do the same thing over here to our sides ok great next what I want to do is I want to go to edge mode select my live selection select my edges and then command click and drag once and I make command click and drag again okay so before going any further I want to make my second object so I'm gonna go to my I'll just name this object to object one it doesn't matter what it's called just make it a little bit organized here so object to let me go to model mode and just kind of bring this over up so we have some room I'm gonna go to edge mode or point Mosby fine polygon pen now I'm gonna set this up a little bit differently so I'm gonna command click and drag let me zoom in here and I want to make sure this is straight make sure these points are straight this lined up a little bit command click and drag weld these command click and drag Lemang command click and drag and then pull these points down make sure these are welded to the same thing over here well these pull this out command click and drag so extrude these and then let's just fill in these corners here whoops command click and drag weld command click and drag weld and command click and drag and weld this and then we can do the same thing we did before press 0 select these points T down to 0 spacebar T that's 0 spacebar to zero and get these nice and just nice and organized nice and nice and clean we can kind of make it close to the object that we have over here but doesn't have to be exact so now we're going to go to edge mode and we're gonna extrude select these edges command click and command click okay let's go to our perspective mode and what these objects made and you see they're not exactly perfect and we can shape this so it's a little bit closer to each other but the point is now that we have these two objects kind of the base made for each one you can see how the corners are a little bit different between each other so it's a little bit different in terms of its geometry and I'm going to show you where I'm headed with this when we start adding in the bevel so what I want to do is I want to select these two objects and I want to hold down command and drag so we have a duplicate of these so I'm just going to go to you can name this object three object four or object 1 a and object to way whatever you want to do just so we're a little bit organized and I'm just going to hold down option double click double click so we hide those two objects in fact let me go to model mode I'm just going to drag this so they're not right directly on top of each other oops remove them over to the side here okay so we have our object 1 and what I want to do is I'm going to go to our polygon mode and I want to select these polygons and I want to command holding down this axis click and drag and I'm just going to pull this down so we have this nice little insert I'm gonna select these polygons and pull these down and I'm gonna drop this into a subdivision surface okay so we have this nice round nice smooth transition but we want to get a nice crease we want to have a nice edge on these areas here so I'll show you this edge here so suppose we want to have this edge nice sharp crease same here and on these around this lip of this insert so what I would do is I would go to my directional tool I will double click on this so we have a selection here a mess on our keyboard to bring up our bevel and I'm gonna put an edge on either side so I'm gonna add one and maybe I want to get this a little bit tighter so go to Q and kind of see how that looks now I'm going to put another one here on the bottom so I'm just going to double-click MMS and we're just going to have zero subdivisions so we have an edge on the top we already have one here on the bottom so when I press Q we have this nice edge here at the bottom and at the top so let's go to these two edges here double click shift double click MS and then we're gonna put in an edge on either side of this edge so we have a nice crisp like we have here and then we'll put this in an hour subdivision okay so let's do the same thing to our second object but you'll notice that we have slightly different geometry so I'm gonna do the same thing I'm gonna go to our polygon pen will do the UL I mean uh polygon Pam will polygon mode and we'll go to ul select these go to e command click and drag and then we'll put a bevel ms and we have one subdivision so we're just gonna pull this out and then we have another one here we'll do the same thing so I'm just going to double click ms 0 subdivisions and then we'll put in our subdivisions down here at the bottom and we can use our directional tool if you select and then select all the way at the edge and then just double click that wool we'll have a selection that goes across both of these so what I'm going to do is give this another bevel one subdivision it'll be fine and I forgot to bring this down so I'm just going to undo I'm gonna bring this down a little bit and then I'll go back to my edge mode ms and then bring out this nice bevel okay so I'm gonna put this into a subdivision surface my object two and now let's take a look at our wireframe so if you press M V on your keyboard you're gonna have your wireframe garage shading lines and so we're gonna zoom in here and you can see this this bunched up mess of geometry and if I go to my object object one and go to edge mode and let's click off so we deselect that that selection and we zoom in here we can see this the sort of a mess of geometry so in order to fix this what we would do is I would go to my polygon pen go to point mode and you know there's a couple ways you could do this you can use your your weld but I like using the poly polygon pen tool and I'm just gonna click and drag that's gonna weld click and drag and that's going to weld click here that's gonna weld and I'm gonna click over here and that welds that so now we don't have that weird bunching of geometry let's move over here on this side we can do the same thing so I'm just going to weld weld and weld here and weld here so now that fixes that one issue by having this edge that comes all the way over and connects tear we then cleaned up that that edge but boy that's a lot of little tweaking and working and this is just a particular case where we just have these two edges here so it could be a problem as you move forward and it just becomes a sort of a mess now we have something similar over here but instead on these edges here we have this complex geometry all bunched up here on these corners so I'm gonna go to my object - let's take a look and see what's going on here so I'm going to turn off my subdivision surface and you can see what's happening this geometry as it got beveled out in this corner it's subdivided and now we have this quad system and it's just making this mess of our geometry so what we would do is we could use our polygon pen tool but we can also use our we could use our weld so if I go to my my selection tool one of our selection tools you can use rectangle selection so we'd select these points space bar and then we're gonna weld it right in the center point do the same thing over here space bar and that welds together so let's press Q on a keyboard so that fixes that we got that nice and cleaned up but now we have a few more of here we would have to do the same thing press Q spacebar well dad select these guys well that one come over here let me rotate around zoom in spacebar weld spacebar select and then we got that cleaned up and then we have this one more in this corner over here let me Center this a little bit zoom in select these space bar select these space bar and weld in the center ok great so that's all cleaned up but boy that was a lot of work I've just going back and forth and this again this is just one little section here so that can be a real issue as you're moving forward so if with a little bit of planning you know and this will come with experience as you start modeling you'll start to see little areas that you know are gonna come up and you're gonna have this little issue so we're gonna have issues here as we use different types of geometry depending on what we're trying to do and there's all kinds of reasons why we might want to have this system and let me turn off our subdivision surface and we might have a reason why we have this particular set up and this is just sort of a cutout but this would go along with a a global geometry that we would have for a particular model so as we're doing this it's a good idea to plan out our objects a little bit better so in this case you can see in our first object how this issue came about right here on these corners so let's zoom in here and let's add in our little inset real quick and we'll just go to UL polygon mode select this here e command click and drag and pull this down and let's grab our polygons here and we'll just drag this down trying to even getting this pretty close but doesn't have to be perfect so I want to bevel this out here and I could do this easily enough we didn't have any problems in this inset so just go to e return get to our edge mode double click ms bevel that out make sure we have one subdivision e double click ms 0 subdivisions i'm gonna have that so i'll be a nice tight crease but you know what's gonna happen when we add in this bevel here we're gonna have this issue in these corners so instead of fighting that what we're gonna do is we're gonna select these two edges and we're gonna dissolve so now we're gonna put in our bevel so now we don't even have to worry about that just yet we'll go to ms sure we have one subdivision so we have that bevel on now now we can go to our polygon pen tool or a knife tool will go to point mode let's zoom in deselect these points and now we can bring our edge but clicking and putting in a cut line here and here so now when I go to my subdivision surface we put that on real quick you can see now we don't have that issue so it's just a matter of predicting when you're gonna have an issue where you have a lines connecting into each other and then you want to bevel that out make sure you you take a look at what you're doing before you start before you start applying your bevel okay so now we got that one let's figure this to get a solution for this one so we have our object and let me just get a subdivision surface in here because we know we're gonna need that deselect these points turn that off for a minute and so let's go to polygon mode let's go to ul now here we're gonna have an issue with the corners as we had before so how do we fix this problem before we even extrude you know before we give this an insert before we extrude this downward so what we want to do is we want to protect this edge this edge here so let me go to my directional tool and select this edge this edge here we want to protect so in order to do that we could we could do that in a few different ways we can use our slide tool and just clone that out so holding down command and we're just gonna pull this in so we know we're gonna have a bevel that's gonna go on this edge so we can pull that and we can also use our knife tool we can use our loop cut tool we can also add in a cut if we want to do it that way we can do it that way as well but the point is is what we want to protect this edge before we extrude it down so I'm going to go to polygon mode select these polygons ul select this loop and we're going to go to aren't extrude holding down e we're going to extrude this down and now we can go to our edge and we can add in a bevel I'm gonna do this separately so you can see this so I'm going to select that edge I'm going to MS and now I'm going to extrude this oops I want to make sure this is that zero subdivisions so I'm going to extrude this down excuse me not extrude I'm gonna give this subdivision this bevel now I'm going to do the same thing on this bottom here just kind of get this even so now when I put on my subdivision surface you can see that we do not have any of this bunching that we had in our previous example so the point on this one is to make sure that you protect your edges if you're going to be adding in a bevel so it's all about the intersection of these of these points of these vertices so what I want to do next is just simply go to our polygons here select these pull these down go to our edge mode double click just like we did before holding down shift double click ms and then we'll go to one subdivision so as you can see we have two different ways to different scenarios but if we just use a little bit of planning before we start adding in our bevel you can avoid doing a lot of extra work and so I'm just going to put our subdivision surface on each of these press a return you can see we have this nice clean edge on our objects I put a link in the description to download project files you can also go to astronomic 3d comm to download project files from this tutorial and all the tutorials that I've made so far thanks for watching

Channel: Michael Balchaitis

Views: 18,750

Rating: 4.9564271 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4D, Bevel, Tips, Techniques

Id: G_sNbmwuBRo

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 29 2018