C4D Essentials. 01 Modeling a chair

how every rock from prior studios and welcome to this first in a new series where I'm going to deal with kind of the essentials of cinema 4d so get back to the basics of modeling texturing rendering and so forth so for this first one I'm going to recover something I did for my very first tutorial many years ago which was modeling a chair now this example I'm going to gloss over quite a lot of things I'm just going to show a few core skills that are really useful and kind of fundamentals to learn just the very basic tools which will get you an awful long way in fact it's probably the three or four tools with which you can make anything in cinema 4d now there are other tools that we'll learn later on down the line but for now we're going to dive in we'll use these simple tools and we're just going to concentrate on simple modeling over a fairly simple but very useable object so with no further ado let's jump straight in and get started okay so in cinema 4d because this new scene and I'm going to start off just by creating the base so I'm going to add a disc to the scene now there are many many different ways you could model this base this is going to be one of those kind of five legged and a metal bases with akka central pillar and so I'm going to make the radius let's say 45 centimeters and I'm going to take the disc segments down to two and for the rotation segments I'm just going to choose five and this is a pretty quick where I'm going to take that down to one I can add cuts if I need them so this is a pretty quick way of getting five points that are equally spaced without having to worry too much about what you're doing with them and I need to go into edge mode and I'm just going to select the kind of star point ones and I'm just going to right click and I'm going to choose bevel and I'm going to bevel those points and what I'm looking for is the kind of the thinnest point here I'm ignoring the middle I'm just going for this is kind of the end of my leg so I'm happy with that I'm just going to go back into polygon mode I'm going to delete those ones and to select that central poly and it T just to size this up obviously hopes if I do this and all my axes okay so I'm going to bring that up to about there and pretty happy with that that's looking kind of where I want it to be I do need to raise it up a bit so I'm just going to go into my side view now lift them up to let's say probably five centimeter so I'm just going to use the coordinate manager just to type five in there so I know it's really accurate okay so now I'm going to select all of my polygons which is if you have one selected already which I have my central one it's UW to submit connected and I'm going to hit D for extrude now you could hit ctrl and just drag up and sometimes you'll find that you won't get your settings here and you need to create caps so I'm going to turn that on and I'm just going to drag in the viewport and I'm going to type this up alright say probably six centimeters so I'm just going to type six centimeters into my offset field there and I'm going to now select just that central polygon again and I'm just going to raise that up another sailors will take that up to say 15 okay so now we're looking we've got a reasonable looking start to our base so you can see that because of that extrusion we've got something slightly old going on and that's the bottom edge of the front facing part is slightly further in towards the center than the top so we need to fix that so I'm just going to go into point mode I'm going to take a rectangular selection tool and in options just make sure that only select visible elements is turned off because I want to select all of those points across the bottom and I'm just going to scale them up like so so they're now a level and I'm just judging this like so okay so that's looking pretty much where I want it to be what I need to do is I need to add a few cuts now because if I was just smooth this I want to do that if I was just smooth this mesh now using a subdivision surfaces we'd find that it's a it's more like a starfish than the base of a chair so I'm just going to undo that I'm going to go into my knife tool in the loop mode and I'm just going to make a few cuts I'll do this in my top view and I'm just judging this based on the grid the underlying grid that the viewport grid there something like cut there I'm going to make it cut the there there and there and now we should find all knits don't each make some cuts down the end just to make sure the legs on to smooth off at the end but we should find that we have a much nicer looking mesh so we still got some issues to sort out we need some cuts of cut across the top but we could do that maybe with some extrusions so let's have a look at some of the different options we've got here so I'm going to turn that off just going to select polygons across the top here like so I'm going to turn that back on and I'm just going to hit ctrl and drag up once okay so I'm also going to do the same on the underside so let's take these Poly's here and then make sure we get the next ones out just so that we can flatten off the underside exactly the same as we did for the top okay so hold down ctrl make sure you're dragging on the right axis okay like so and that's looking pretty cool okay so what do we need to do now well we need to sort these ends out so again I'm just going to turn off the sub D just because I find sometimes it's easier to do this kind of work when I'm looking at the underlying mesh also if you're getting certain kind of confusing mesh feedback what you can do is you can come in to your display here and if you turn on isoparms that will clean up what you're seeing so with I suppose or just on a normal wire frame you can see the underlying subdivisions and these blue lines are the actual mesh so this look the polygon mesh and if you turn on ice upon view you're only seeing your original edges and poly which is sometimes very helpful anyway let's go back to our top view turn off the sub DS go into knife tool and I'm in polygon mode I'm just going to add some loop cuts again just around like so and the last one just there okay and now you'll find when I turn this back on we have much more water expecting so now we could add casters or rubber feet so I'm going to go from a rubber feet for this particular one and but before we get to doing the feet let's just finish off this base so I'm going to take this central polygon here and hit I for extruded inner I'm just going to do two extrudes here and now what we're going to need to do I might do one more actually just to try and round this out actually probably all right list so now with those two extrudes we should have a nice circular shape there which we can extrude upwards and this is going to be like a come just an extra bit of polish just to help us get what we need right this one this central section here I'm going to do an extrude in again and and then you why to increase that selection and I'm going to extrude it down like so okay so that's given us a really nice rounded collar and the reason it's round not this hexagonal shape is because we've got a hexagon each side of it there where the legs are coming out so is actually kind of rounding off between two hexagons and I hope that makes sense but that's kind of what's going on there I only think it might be worth just doing a little bit of an extra extrude so I'm gonna hit ul just to make a loop selection there and just do one more just slightly frightening extrude right so let's call this the legs that's we can cool I'm going to now add let's just do the feet so the the feet I want to be really very simple I'm going to take a disk and it's going to be five so let's make it actually six so let's make it three centimeters across and two segments and 36 is fine I'm just going to hide from view the lakes themselves just turn on lines make this editable so we now have this central section here which I want to raise up it'll do that after we'll extrude everything first so I'm just going to go to select everything right so I'm going to hit ctrl and drag up to make an extrusion now I'll show you underneath now you can see that this is actually hard there's no caps on there which is what I meant when I was talking about there the other section earlier on doesn't matter fan out because I'm going to lift these up like this and then I'm going to hit UW to select all and hit D create caps is on so this is a the other way of doing the extrusion and I'm just going to give this some thickness so this is detail is possibly unnecessary for this model and but it's still nice to show you how these different things work so now on games hit control drag up and this is just going to be a little extra section of foot hit T and I'm just going to use the blue axis band here to control once I've sort out what I'm doing okay so you L loop selection T and I'm just going to use this axis band to bring that down like so I for an inner selection and then I'm going to hit ctrl just drag that back down a little bit this again like I say this is probably unnecessary detail and I could go in and I can add kind of all the nuts and bolts and everything what I think I would actually do for this particular model is just select those and hit I just extrude that inner learning hit with V and I'm going to go select set selection I'm going to call this the foot metal and now that's kind of going to be a setup for a different material there's going to drag this straight up this is just a pin and with both still selection it's going to hit you all right there we go right so now we have one foot we have a tag so if I double click that you can see what we've got actually I need to add to that selection later okay so select polygons there we go right so this selection now I can apply different material to it very easily and we have a foot so let's call that foot I can drop that selection go back object mode and I'm going to add a mograph Corona and this is going to be a radial Corona they're going to be five clones as you can see and now our radius of the circle that we made or the disc that we made the legs out of verse 45 so let's make this say probably going to be about forty three and we'll add the foot as the claim now you can see that the the axis is wrong the plane that these kinds are being generated on is wrong so I'm going to select the cloner and we'll just change this to XZ so they will now sit on the floor we might need to rotate it let's have a look let's turn our legs back on let's go into our top view so we can see we need to rotate this and we can just do this just so now we can also see that's probably one too many there we go okay so I would also say that the radius of the cloner is too big let's take that back one and I think even the feet might just be it just may be a touch too big in which case I can just select the actual mesh itself just reduce that in size just a little bit we'll take the subdivision which is for the legs and we'll just lift that up a touch just so that the pins are going into there okay so that's looking pretty cool this is you know this is just a maybe 10 minutes work something like that 12 minutes and also I'd be doing this an awful lot quicker if I was not explaining as I go if I was doing it kind of as I as I think now I won't make an adaptation here too I may change this but I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to lower the ends of these these legs I'm just going to select these polygons across the top of each leg and it's just a zoom in so I don't get any other police I say and this will help to just give a little extra form maybe not let's just try with the extras head okay slip those okay all right yeah okay I think that's a bit better I may even take some extra edges just to shape these a bit more we'll try it and see what it's like so this is something I do as line kind of so this may be based on a particular style of chair something that I like both but I've seen all that Laurent has asked to have a kind of a representation of and I like to kind of prototype a little bit on the way so even if I think I know what I'm going to do it's nice to just kind of play with these ideas sometimes and that's what you're saying we do hips open just going to come in select a few of these edges pop around here just finish this selection off and I'm going to lower these edges and this should give us a bit of a kind of a slope not a direct kind of not a ramp like this but more of a kind of a tapered affair so let's grab those throwing them down like so so yeah that's the slightly more pleasing and I think once there's the materials on here and there's some reflections in place I think that's gonna work really quite lovely okay so I'm now going to grab all of the bits we've got here hit alt G just to group them together and we'll call this the base and and I'm going to add a simple column to this base now until my cube I want a cylinder so I'm going to take a cylinder and let's make the radius probably about three maybe it touch bigger so like okay so we'll go for five and the height we can make probably about fifty actually let's make the radius smaller let's make this 2.5 or lift it up and we'll extrude some out at the bottom section it's also too tall we don't need at that tool so let's go for say 35 35 is probably going to be about right okay so height segments let's make that two and we'll make it an editable mesh I'm going to take a loop Oh polygons not edges so make sure you're in polygon mode for this pot just select all the way around here zoom in so you can see what you're doing a little bit more clearly and I'm just going to rotate my view just so I can see across the bottom and it D to extrude and I'm going to extrude them pretty much right the way out like so now I'm just going to go into my top view make sure that's sitting centrally it she isn't quite so I just need to I'm actually going to move the base rather than that cylinder because I know that cylinders bang in the middle so let's just move that to match up alright so okay and that's to do with the the disk we made the feet from being a five sided object so it's never going to fit it's not going to be equal in the same way a four-sided word or anything you know an even sided nature right so before we do all the connection bits up here let's start on the actual seat itself it's all cool this the column we might add a bit more detail to that later on but we might not let's see and let's get on to the base so the base is going to be done there's lots of different ways of doing this it could be done with box modeling it could be done with lofting or sweeping I'm going to do it kind of a combination of box modeling I suppose in in technique and but I'm just going to do it as though it's kind of a paper thin object to start with and then I'm going to shape it and add the thickness afterwards a little bit like how we did with the base now I'm basing this the design of this chair very loosely on a 50s beams task share which I really love you can use the same technique for whatever you kind of chair you want to make and I'm just going to eyeball it I'm not making a very specific chair on doing this really by eye but the the chair is kind of a this is just one of those traditional 50s chairs and as slightly egg-like okay so I have a plane now which is one by one I'm gonna make it editable and so that we're not seeing those parametric lines and let's just very very roughly create the shape that we want so I'm going to drag that up holding ctrl just to create a basic back okay so I can tell immediately that aren't bring that edge and that edge forward just going to bring them for a little bit that should do it for me okay I think what I need to do is add just a few divisions to give me something to work on so I'm going to select both these polygons and I'm just going to go down to subdivide and I'm going to do a subdivision smooth subdivision which will curve off the edges where the divisions are right so so although this is still too smooth and it kind of in this direction it's given me a very rough shape to work with so I'm going to take I'm going to point mode and I'm going to take these three points here and I'm going to move them down and back about so far and then the central one of those points I'm going to take just a little bit further like so now that looks quite extreme as it is that's fine I'm going to take these three points just move them forward I'm gonna lift them up just a little bit and that will give us a slight lip for the kind of the thighs that just make it a bit more comfortable I'm going to take these three I'm just going to lift them up just to touch about so and now I think we can probably look at it smooth so let's add it to a subdivision surface and still not quite there we need to uh again to do this a slightly different way I'm going to take those polygons so I'm going to rotate them back like so okay happy with that but I need to make a few more divisions so I'm going to take a knife and I'm just going to make it cut around the back I'm going to make it cut across the front also going to make it cut across the back there just so I can shape it a bit more and I'm going to do two cups I'm lengthways and let's just doing this in the top view so I know what I'm doing I could turn on snapping and I could turn on guides and all these kind of things times that's a really good way to work I'm not going to do it for this this is just a basic kind of modeling by eye tutorial and I don't want to get too bogged down in some of those extra details which don't think of necessary if you're learning what you'll be ordering in a basic kind of way at this point right so what I want to do now is just make sure I can do this in the front view believe my right hand V let's just bring this up to full view okay right so I can see I've got a few weird lumps so those two need to raise up all I'm doing here is I'm just smoothing out this line and you take lap on that on and use the scale tool just bring them in just a bit and actually I think I might take all of those and just bring them in just to touch like so okay let's look at the side view right so now I'm going to show you a new tool and I'm going to take that central point and if we come down to the attributes manager with our live selection selected and change this mode from normal to soft selection you'll see in the preview we get this kind of a yellow fall-off and if we go to the soft selection controls here we can change the radius of this fall off and as you see the yellow changes there and this means we can kind of gently it's like easing the magnet tool but we can gently bring some of these points back without it being too drastic and I'm doing that with a few just to kind of make this very slightly more more domed I'm going to take that central one there and bring it down just it okay this lets you just kinda you get that natural fall off without having to worry about any harsh Jaggi things going on and it can be a massive massive help now i think the top of this chair might be just slightly too far forward so I'm going to take just a few of these polygons across the that points across the top probably these four maybe those five points there just drag them back just a little just because I don't want them to be kind of hovering over the shoulders it's not kind of a wrap around the shoulders chair okay right so I'm going to go into object mode and I'm just going to hit T so I think this needs to be widened just a little bit I've also noticed I've got a strange cut so I obviously made a mistake somewhere along the line so I'm going to go to polygon mode let's turn off soft selections so go back to the live selection tool and we can go to our options and we'll go to normal mode right now we can see I made a cut here I need to make that cut go right the way across so let's turn off the subdivisions and it going to knife mode now I'm going to use the line tool and as I get close to a point or an edge or a polygon you can see it gets highlighted so I want that point there I want to drag right way across like so now if I turn on the sub DS we should have a nice smooth shape okay I can see there's a little bit of bump going on there as well so let's fix that now I'm going to go into display mode and you go to lines and points so lips that plane which is our chair base into the live selection mode I'm just at that point and that point eighty just widen them out just at that point and at that point I'm going to reduce them to about there and all I'm doing is just kind of smoothing off this line all right so that's looking pretty cool happy with that so what I need to do now is give it its depth so I'm going to select all and I'm going to hit D for extrude to make sure that create caps is on and I'm going to just give one very small extrusion to start with and turn on or to increase this maximum angles just something over 90 degrees I'm going to do another one to give this a bit more thickness and this is going to be kind of the plastic shell that these chairs had and now I'm going to take a cut and paste those polygons that I had already selected UI to invert the selection and just delete and that will get rid of all the ones I don't want so this is going to be my chair and that newly created that I just pasted in is going to be the cushion section because what I like about that Ames example of this chair is that so it's kind of this this cushioning so it's like a plastic shell with a fabric and foam cushioning so we need to have down to a sub D as well just so that it matches up I'm going to take the cushion I'm going to hit D and I'm going to extrude this I'm going to give it a very thick extrude there and one smaller one and there we go okay so we now have our two sections and what can do is go to the loop selection on edge mode and I'm going to take that loop that goes all the way around the edge and I'm just T just to scale it down on the x-axis just so it's slightly less thick like so now I'm going to go into object mode and I'm just going to recess this softer part just very slightly into the plastic just so it's it's slightly better okay so that's going to go like that now because I decreased the size of that extrude you can see we automatically a slight seam look now you can go in and get out stitching and everything for this example I'm not going to I think that's absolutely fine how it is just for kind of a low detail version of this model now I do need to add a better detail to the bottom so I'm going to go back to our original chair model and just get into how I like under here and see how I want to do this I think what I'm going to do is add a bulge and frost it like this I'm going to take this and hit I for an inner extrude bring those polygons forward and down like so and I do another one and now this is going to be placed over the column so I'm going to do one small extrusion just flatten this out okay so that's almost ready I think one more and then T and you can see at the moment if you're in scaling where you can see that the size is here and the y-axis is just two and a half centimeters I'm snip zero and that is now perfectly flat might be intersecting slightly so we can just drag it down and then we get now if you want to go and clean up any of this mesh then this is a good time to do it I'm just going to take those points back up so they suit the egg shape a bit more and I think now we can take a lot chair shift it so the center of gravity is over that point and if you wanted to you could come in and you could make cuts and you could add the handles and the levers and all that kind of thing and you could extrude this back up and you get it add the bolts that are holding this on add a plate all that kind of thing but I don't think we'll ever see it for that close this chair wasn't really made for that was made to be seeing it kind of a three-quarter view and maybe in the distance and I just wanted to show you a few tools so if you wanted to make the control handles you do exactly the same as this column all those sort of things and if you wanted to make like a genomic Lee shaped paddle to go on the end of it you know what let's just do it like no point we just sitting there talking about it let's just do it so it's a cylinder I'll make it really quite small radius of one let's make it about 30 centimeters and probably don't need 36 divisions here and we'll make it in the let's go for the x-axis right so let's add a polygon or just plain we'll make this three by six bring this out like so actually let's not do this with a plane let's do this with a box so I'm going to show you a slightly different way of doing this so let's go three by three by three bring it out to the end of our arm make it editable and I'm going to add some divisions okay awesome extrusions so I'm going to hold down control bring that out and I have the whole thing into a subdivision surface let's get back into that cube let's just grab that end face again actually it doesn't matter which face I'm going to just make a cut first just a root cut just to add a slice around there just to neaten up that back end okay now I'm going to take this probably got on the front here and let's just zoom out slightly control drag that out I'm going to just scale this sideways like so hit e4 move I'm going to drag out a bit of a paddle and probably do one more actually let's lift all of these up and that was new y by the way just to increase a selection UK to go back to that which is a decrease selection pull down control and I known to just for they're down like so and I think I need to take this end polygon which is still facing out and just rotate it so that we're keeping that kind of form looking reasonably good okay so this is going to be our one of our control handles now this really is rough and ready but it will do the job so let's take all of those group them together just call this the handle I'm going to copy that hit V to go to our pop-up menu projects back into project 1 paste and now I can just rotate that 90 degrees I can bring it out just a little bit bring it up into there again I'm not going to go into drilling all holes and creating all of the details for that that's it for another tutorial I think so let's just take that cylinder and reduce the length through it so it's not popping out the other side okay I think I might do one thing just to make it look just in case we see this area and that's just to make the cylinder editable and go into my right hand view and let's just turn on garage shading and I'm going to click on mode I'm going to take my knife tool and I'm just yet in line is fine I'm going to add a cut across there and I cut across here I'm gonna loop select my cut didn't go all the way through okay so next get back I just stepped back so I've not got those cuts anymore and make that editable polygon married knife single or visible only I have turned on she's not good so let's make it cut because there and then a cut across there now I can take my loop selection do a little extrusion more like so and I should find I've got it's essentially just a little bit of a collar I might actually just neaten this up just very slightly just by getting all of those polygons and in world space so that's not caught up just drag them out a bit yeah there we go so now we can see just a little bit of extra detail right okay so sorry about that slight detour I'm going to well so now you can just grab some materials grab that on on just stick it on the chair and grab another one stick it on the fabric let's just give that a nice color just like a nice bright orange I could go to my content browser just grab myself and one of the textures or another texture pack there's my ones let's go for a brushed metal just throw that directly on there or throw that on to there and onto the arm I'm going to grab another new material which is just going to be a very very very basic black plastic all I'm doing is just using this the specular here and just going to crank it up very slightly and give its light in a with hey it's not really material tutorials and I'm going to worry about it too much go back to my objects and we're going to open up the base just apply that to the foot and there we have a fairly rough and ready but reasonable looking chair okay so we can close all these down I'm going to group them all just call this the task chair and I'll set up a render for this on I'm going to bother showing you that will talk about rendering properly at another time time when I've got you got space to actually come and go through what I'm doing with you that and we'll do the same with materials because this is the very first of the new cinema 4d essentials course I want to concentrate on various tasks at a time and this was just to kind of get you using a few of the the modeling tools and thinking about how you can go about actually creating things so we'll do more specifics on materials and rendering later on there's also a few things that I would just point out so this scene just we go has one two three four subdivision surface object in it now you can if you want just use one and you could group all of those things inside one which works quite well especially if they're all at the same subdivision level which they are so let's add one to the scene and we will take a cube we will take a cushion we'll take the legs and what else was there and the chair and you can see it's now looks like a right mess well if you take a null and you drop that under the subdivision surface first and then you put all those objects as a child of the null you now have the same results as you had before but you can then start deleting certain objects so all those extraneous sub DS you can get rid of and you end up with the same end result the same chair okay so hopefully that's been of some use and I hope it's been an interest it's quite fun nice little chair it could do some starting up and if you were going to have this just in a render of a room I think it would be absolutely fine it's not going to be perfect for close-ups but then that's not the look the point of this tutorial is to get you kind of started and up and running so thanks very much and we'll see you all again in the next video

Channel: rob redman

Views: 97,821

Keywords: Chair (Product Category), Cinema 4D (Brand), Animation (TV Genre), c4d, model, modeling, tutorial, training, vfx, 3d, archviz, 3D Modeling (Film Job), Visual Effects (Film Company Role Or Service)

Id: -Rx-9xfo5W4

Length: 41min 10sec (2470 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2015