C4D Fundamentals | 03 - Introduction to Polygon Modeling

okay we actually want to keep going on the topic of modeling today and we want to have a deeper look into polygon modeling now if you have watched the very first introduction to cinema 4d tutorial from me you actually came across the parametric modeling and what the parametric modeling does just as a reminder again here is basically what you could expect from block building you just have a few basic objects where which you can use to build some well simple objects by yourself however this is pretty boring actually and you can only use user to build very very simple objects or some very simple based objects for which you can use later on to to add some more details but in the end you're really restricted to two simple objects and then in the last session in the spline modeling session we have gone one step further we had a look into we can build well more detailed objects a little bit more organic shaped objects maybe and we use the spline modeling methods for that and today we want to go even one step further and have a look into the polygon modeling where we can actually build whatever we want and are not restricted to to anything actually however what you have to keep in mind is as I have illustrated on this slide the complexity of it is increasing so when you use the parametric modeling it's actually quite simple the drawback of course is you can only build simple objects when you go to spline modeling it's a little bit more complicated you have a few things more to think about and to keep in mind but you have more freedom and you can build cooler objects and then it comes to polling and modeling which is indeed a little bit more complex and little I need a little bit more of experience for you to master but let's start in the very beginning at the very very base so that everyone is on the same ground here when we are speaking of 3d software or for in cinema 4d specifically we or the smallest entity we are dealing with is actually a small point in our 3d world and we also call that a vertex now you know that from school probably we can I use two points to illustrate a line and we call that an edge also in 3d software now we can use the same method and arm duplicate those points and what we get now is of course we get a few more edges but now we also have built a surface and to the surface we also refer to as a polygon and I'm sure you have heard of that before now we can go one step further and now use those polygons to create a 3d object by combining them together as you see here you build a little cube and yeah this is actually the very basic terms the way we build 3d objects we refer through there to that also as an object or a model now let me sum that up for short so when we talk about a model we can also refer to it as an object or mesh and it it is always made out of surfaces also called polygons and those surfaces are always enclosed by edges and those edges are always defined by multiple points also called vertices so that's what an object is made of we can use this method to build as I said in the beginning whatever we want we can build some objects like the pyramid on the left we can use it to build more complex objects like the sphere in the middle or we can even build something really really detailed like this mannequin here the right side however it's quite a bit of work if you would use a technique called point by point modeling where we really little literally add point after point or surface after surface to build those kind of objects so um this is extra where the parametric objects come in again so we can we already already have those kind of objects and cinema 4d you ready for us and we can use them to to add more details to them and go a few steps further what you have to keep in mind though is that we cannot just use parametric objects and add details we have to make it editable first and I think this is like one of her major thing to understand that we have two different state of objects we have an initial state for example the parametric object and when we make it editable it's actually a polygon object and let me illustrate that you for a second so for example when I have a cube in my scene you know now see that it's a parametric object and in the attributes manager you you see the different parameters which I can change too well edit or change the the form of my cube now let's say I want to use the parameters to to build something like this like a cube with a width of 350 centimeters okay so this is pretty easy now let's say we want to do the same thing but now use the technique of polygon modeling to achieve the same thing now this is just a really really simple example for you to understand the difference between a parametric object and a polygonal object okay so let me um just add another cube and I move it a little bit to the back so that you can see that we're actually doing quite the same thing now you see it's still in the initial state it's still parametric and I have to go to this button over here or use the C key on the keyboard to make it editable and I see on the icon here in the object manager that it's now a polygon object what I can do now is I can literally enter or access the polygons and and change it so for example I can use the point mode and with live selection tool selected I can select all the different points of map of my cube and then again actually use all the transformation tools we have in cinema to our for example move those pawns around now can you also go into the edge mode and use this to transform the position of the of the edge or can go to the surface mode and select the surface and then move it in one direction and now you see we get pretty much the same thing then we would do with the parametric object I just move the surface in a certain direction and then I got my my new cube so the same thing is true for the spline objects or the nerves we talked in last session about so let's say we want to build something simple like an extruded circle so I use this circle spline and I put it into the extrude NURBS generator and as I said also in the last session about the spline modeling we actually have here something which I like to refer to as a self-made parametric object because we now have again parameters which we can use to easily change the appearance of our object but now again if you want you go one step further and add more details to this you have to make it editable again and again I can just go over here to make editable button clicking and now you actually see that I can see my polygons and points and etches and use them or could use them to deform this object okay just so much about the the difference between the states so we have an initial state which would be something like this and to get into the polygons and to access the polygons we have to make our objects editable like so so another way to describe polygon modeling is by comparing it to making a paper plane when you build a paper plane you start off with a plain piece of paper and then you add detail of the detail by folding your paper now in the end you hope that your paper plane flies and in a way the same is true for polygon modeling you start off with a very basic object like a cube or sphere a parametric object for example or you can use your own NURBS generated object by using the splines and you make it editable to access the polygons and then you use a variety of tools to add details to your object and then in the end you hope it looks good now of course you have in cinema a variety of tools to to achieve your goals and I want you to go into the most important ones here well you have to keep in mind there is in the beginning I think it's a little bit difficult to understand when to use what kind of tools so you need a little bit of patience and practice to to get into it but yeah I think a little overview will help you out too to get started so here we go okay we want to start off with the selection tools which you find over sorry which you find over here and let a select tab and let me get rid of the this cylinder first and I want to add a cube and what I want to do is I from the start of increase the segments so the basically the polygons of that object by increasing the value of the segments and what you also probably want to do is to change the display mode and you find it over here and you have a variety of different to choose from what I most the use is the borough training lines and now you see what we get we can now see the different segments polygons surfaces of our cube now the next step is to make that editable so that we get access to our polygons okay now you can see with live selection tool selected this is like the basic selection tool in cinema 4d we can now use that to select the different points for example so it depends in which mode we are in when when I'm in the edge mode cinema let's select me the edges of my cube or if I go to the surface mode I can now select just surfaces so keep in mind that you have to switch the modes and when you're in the in the model and we're in the object mode you have not access to to the different layers of of the polygons so now you can use the model mode to move the whole model around in your scene but whenever you want to go into the modeling itself make sure to go in one of those modes so to the selection tools in a lot of cases we're actually in most of the cases you want to make a selections to your polygons in order to change them or to transform them and they you have a variety of tools to choose from again the most important one or the most frequently used one is probably the loop selection and what the loop selection does it selects for you a loop of connected points or polygons so when I'm in the point mode this looks like something like this I could for example connect all the points and on that direction when I'm the edge mode it looks quite similar I can select a loop of connected edges or when I switch to the polygon mode I can select connected surfaces by the way you can use the Enter key on your keyboard to switch through the different modes from the point to the edge through the surface mode okay that you have also the ring selection which is quite similar and I really don't know all the difference it makes between the loop selection or you can do with it however is for example something like this you could select not connected polygons which are orthogonal to to each other for example so that might be useful in some cases but I rarely use it actually what I use more often though is for example the path selection tool and with the path selection tool you can use a path where you can define a path which you want to select you just click on a point and then hold your mouse and drag your mouse along the edge of their particular thing you want to select now there are a couple of more interesting things to find here in the Select menu so for example let's say I have selected these those surfaces here on the front side and I want to invert the selection and it's pretty easy to do you just go to the Select menu and choose invert or use the combo shortcut of you and I to invert the selection so this is pretty handy in in some cases if you want to invert the selection okay we will go into the most important modeling tools right now and I want to get rid of that cube for now and I had a more simple cube so that we only have six surfaces here on our model now make that editable so that I have access to the different surfaces in the polygons what am I like to mention before hand is that I will only give you a brief overlook over the tools when we do exercise later on you will probably understand a little better what those tools do but I like to introduced them to use so that you have get a proud over you and basic idea of what we're dealing with here okay so I'm in the surface mode and I select this surface and now you right-click again to get access to all the modeling tools and as I said what we do now is we want to have a quick overview of the most important ones and we start off with the bevel the extrude and the inner extrude and let's start with the xq2 because it's I think it's the most simple one to understand so what the extrude tool does is when I click and drag my mouse need copies my surface and then drags it into a certain direction so I can also select this surface for example and do a right click again choose the extrude and extrude it into this direction so it basically gets always extruded to the direction of the the polygon itself so for example let me select this one here if I rotate my polygon a little bit and I now choose the D key on my keyboard for the extrude tool and I extrude it you see it keeps the rotation of my of my polygon and transfers it into the z direction for the modeling tools you have a variety of settings in the attributes manager but we'll come to that in the later part where we like to have to go into it ok so this was the extrude tool now I just go back a couple of steps so that we end up with our basic cube again to illustrative the the other tools so next up the inner execute well the in extrude does it also copies my surface but it only scales it down onto the already existing surface so what I can create with this is a smaller copy of my original surface and then IQ use it for example and move it in a certain direction in or out whatever I want yeah just click and drag your mouse and then you get the result we want okay so the next tool is the bevel tool and in some way it's actually a combination of the extrude tool and the executioner so I choose the pedal now I select now the top for example and what you can do now is you can go to the edge for example click and drag your mouse again this gives you the best result for it now I think and you can move your mouse up to X shoot and this is pretty much the same we saw on the extrude on the on the extra tool but what you also can do is you can move your mouse to the left or to the right to increase the size of your polygon so I think you get now what I meant with that this is kind of like kind of a combination between the extrude and the inner X cubed maybe just one thing right here you can use the attributes manager too to change the settings for example we could increase the steps our to dust right here and what you have to keep in mind though is that whenever those polygons are in yellow color you can use this to change the parameters but when you go for example go to the live selection tool and I select something else another object or another surface this the changes we made with the with a bevel tool are now set we cannot go back into the in 3d settings although if I go to the bevel tool again I cannot change the settings you see that now the bevel options are polite again to our surface so keep that in mind that as long as you want to make changes to your to your extrusion or or to your to your bevel that you you keep keep with it and then click anywhere else on your viewport and otherwise you will end up with something I just show you I can show you again you see if I now change the parameter it's again applied to that surface so I go back a little bit again so that we're back with our basic cube now most of the tools you cannot only use in the surface mode you can also use it in the edge mode for example and now do you loop select go to the Select menu use the loop selection and select the top edge and now again I can go use a combo key M and s for the bevel tool or just use the context menu by right-clicking choose the battle and again I can click and drag my mouse to bevel the edge here we come to the to the battle tool in more detail in the later part of this tutorial but for now that should be enough as if only is in Prato review of the different tools another important tool like to mention is the knife tool you remember before that when we have the parametric cube and just show you quickly and then we have the different segment settings of different values for the segments and if I increase those you see that we get different segments on our cube now when we have a polygon object we cannot do that anymore because it's now an editable object and we have to do that by hand and this is where the knife tool comes into place so I go to the it doesn't really matter but I go to the surface mode and I use the knife tool in the in the lie mode for now and what I can do now is I can click and drag my mouse and I can create a cut so you kind of get the idea what this what this does so if we want to create like the segments we did before I would have I could do do it that way that you would manually go all the way around and add cut off the cut to get the result we're after but there's another mode in the knife too which is called the loop mode and again this is similar to the loop selection and what it does it lets me loop cut through my geometry and you see in the offset well you're right here on the right side the position of my of my loop selection or of my loop cut more likely and if I click the cut is made and now I could just roughly go do something we did with our parameter cube and add detail of the detail this is just like Cooley made but you get the get the idea of the knife tool hopefully okay just a couple of steps back again now now there's a different tool we can use to to create those kind of of those cuts and this is where actually the the ring selection also comes in handy so if we select those edges over here in the ring selection mode we can use a tool called connect points and edges and in the beginning I think it was quite difficult for me also do you understand why why this happens now and what you what you can think of is that the connect points or edges is that it will create a connection for those selected edges by cutting an edge through your geometry so I select the connect points edges and I see I have a new edge or new cut into our cube and I can repeat that and you see we now accurately get the effect we also want it before hand to add more details more cuts into our geometry now let's do that also in this direction for just demonstrating purposes okay so here we are again we have now a more detailed kind of cube so again I just go a little bit back in history here another nice tool is the slide tool with a slide tool you can select a particular edge for example and move it around on your mesh now again I could use the loop select tool to select the whole edge and then use the slide tool to move this cut along my object okay so another example is let's say you have deleted on a certain polygon in your object so but just by hitting the Delete key on your keyboard I can believe a certain mesh now let's say we want to build that up again there are a couple of ways to do it we could go into the context menu again and use the simple closed polygon hole and pretty much similar for the does all the work for us now in some cases it'll it is a little bit more complicated you have a little bit more detailed geometry and the closed polygon hole command will not work so what you can use then is the bridge to and the Bridgeview it works in the end the point mode because you have you need the access to the points and what you do is you click and drag your mouse over to to another point and then you go to the other side or off the particular points you want you to create the polygon and click and drag your mouse again and then you see the polygon is now closed so whenever you want to close a hole in your geometry you want to come to you the bridge tool most probably okay use another scenario and for that I just delete the cube so let's say we have a cylinder right here and I just make it a little bit smaller and I make it editable and now when i zoom in a little bit and I go to the surface mode and I select all the surface here surfaces here on the top and I move them up you see that our polygons are not connected now the reason for that is that the cylinder uses something called caps so in the caps if I deactivate that you see that now the cylinder is have no top and the bottom surface so this is why you can activate the caps to get that however cinema does not connect the geometry of your cylinder and the cap together so to do that there are also a couple of ways and as we're talking now about the polygon modeling thing I only want to show you the polygon modeling way so I make that editable again and it's actually pretty pretty easy the only thing we have to do now to connect those points together is a command called optimize so now click that and now you didn't see anything changed but if I select the polygons again and I move that up you now see the polygons are connected this is also quite useful for example if you want to get rid of unused points so just as for an example let's say we select all the polygons right here and I go ahead and delete all of them if I go back to the point mode you see however that the points are still there and to get rid of those or by the way just they're not connected anymore by any edge or polygon and so I can use the optimized command to get rid of them so when you're facing the problem of an object which has not connected surfaces or you have unused points in your geometry somewhere you can use the optimized command to get rid of them I also delete now the cylinder in my objects manager okay for the next tool I just go ahead and add a cube again and I increase the the values of the of the segment's a little bit I can I make it editable and what I want to show you now is the stitch in SU tool and it's basically a tool used to reduce the details of your geometry so what you can do is you can select a point and move it over to another point and then those point points get merged together and as you can see if I continue to do that over here that the that we actually make out of our four polygons one big polygon so I use it to you in a way clean up my geometry you see it's kind of a little bit of work but well welcome to the world of modeling polygon modeling sometimes well it's just a little bit of work to do to get to the point where you're heading so I started right right here I think you get the idea so if you want to merge two points together you can use the the stitch and Sue tool now come back to my knife tool in the line mode and I purposely will add a cut right here so that we get those two triangles by the way triangles is something which you actually don't want to have when you when it comes to modeling and in the 3d software we learn later in another session why triangles are so bad and why we at all time want to avoid them so for now I just want to show you a method to to merge two surfaces together so switch to the surface mode and a little bit like the stitching Co tool a way to clean up your geometry is to use the dissolve tool the dissolve tool you just all you need to select firstly the both the two polygons or variety of polygons you want to merge together and then do right click and choose the dissolve function and as you can see now the the edge is gone in the middle and we now have a nice and clean polygon again okay the last tool I want to mention is the polygon pen and the polygon pan is kind of a tool to master them all and you can do quite a lot of things with it and just a really quick example would be on the simple cube by holding down the command key for example you can easily deform the cube in each direction you want so you can easily change the size of your cube for example and this is just a really really simple example of the polygon pen and I actually want to refer here to the 2d help file because it would be a little bit too much for this tutorial to go on in the details about the poly pen and at this point I want to refer to the create help cinema4d offers so you can just go to the show help menu open up the polygon pen entry and read a little bit through it and see all the the things the polygon pen can do for you I'll maybe cover the the polygon pen just in a another session where we have a little bit more time at hand yeah but for now if we want to find out a little bit more about the polygon pen just go through the help and and read a little bit through it okay here's a little exercise for you to you make yourself familiar with the different tools that just cheer you open up your cinema and just try to create a few arbitrary objects you see like you see here on the picture by using the bevel extrude in x2 tool and also maybe try to find out by yourself a little bit of the different attributes you can set in the different kind of tools like the preserve group option and the maximum extrude angle and then on the legislation I will cover them but yeah sometimes it's it's quite good to you to find stuff also out by yourself okay one thing though if you have a look at that particular edge maybe you just think about it what makes it look look good especially now if I show you another picture of the same model of that radio over here I kind of see what what makes it look so good in the in the first picture and it's actually that we have a beveled corner right here on the edge so on this picture of a year we have just an plain 90-degree angle and this looks kind of strange and you wouldn't see something like this in real life that would be like a razor sharp sharp edge so to make something which is more appealing to the eye you want to bevel your edges to make them kind of rounded in a way and this is a major thing to to keep in mind if you create good or I want to create good looking 3d models so I'm going to show you a couple of way to do this and yeah just to remind you that if you want to create realistic realistic looking objects you you have to to think of the babble your edges so they're basically three different ways to achieve this so back to cinema I just get rid of that cube and I just start off with a basic cube again now the most simple way to do it whenever you're dealing with a parametric object is to use something called the phillyd your parametric object you can just click the checkbox checkbox activated and by decreasing the radius you can see that the radius of the edge gets smaller and you can go down with the with the subdivisions also depending on how how many details or how good-looking you want your object to be I usually stick with something around three to five that's mostly totally fine so this is like the the most easy way to do it the problem though is now if you turn your object and make it editable you have already quite a lot of polygons in your on your cube now for example let's say we want to do something like this we want to extrude on every sorry one in your extrude a little bit and then excute out and now we want you to bevel those edges again well we can't do that um anymore because the object is of course not parametric anymore so we don't have access to that fill it anymore and we have kind of a problem right now we must do it her hand and we have the kind of the problem that we have already set kind of radius right here and now we we have to do with hand and it could get a little bit messy so actually the better way to do is to you to do the other way around so I just go back to my basic cube again and without the fill it selected I just make it editable and I'll do the kind of trends Meishan I wanted to do something like this and voila we have the kind of object we wanted to create and now we want to add the battle and since I think cinema is 16 we have the bevel deformer so I just add the bevel deformer to my cube and now you see that it actually we actually have kind of the bevel going on I increase a little bit the the amount of subdivisions to 3 again and the offset is is okay for now maybe I just increase it a little bit so that you see a little bit little better now we only have one problem left now this is that we have a bevel going on also in this direction here and if I render it you kind of see it so we want to get rid of this as well and to get rid of this we have to activate the use angle functionality and because we only want the the bevel to to show on on a certain angle basically on the 90 degree angle so I can turn that basically up to the 90 degrees so the bevel is still active you see that if I go to 91 it doesn't bevel the edges anymore so yeah just go to 89 or 90 it's also fine so this is like the a little bit like the little the lazy way but a good way if you have a simple object like this to get battle corners into your object what I want to show you now is the the actually the proper way to do it so you we now do it by hand manually and to do that we have to select the edges we want to bevel and I go to the edge mode for that and I select the loop selection I have to get to activate my cube for now and then go to loop selection and I actually want to select basically everything so just hit command a my keyboard and I select everything so I didn't actually need the the loop selection tool for that and but I want to get rid of those diagonal edges so I hold down the ctrl key and just deselect those patches and now we come back to the battle tool I showed you before so you right-click and then we go to the bevel all right go to your edge again and just click and hold your mouse and move it a little bit around and I see the edges are beveled and then we can go to the attributes manager and decrease or increase the values as you prefer and well this would be kind of the manual way there is actually another method to do that and but we'll cover that in the in the next session and this will be the using the subdivision surface object to get that kind of look we we also have here ok so just a quick wrap up we have had three different ways to to bevel our object we have the parametric objects with the filleted checkbox to to do it really quickly on the parametric object we have used the bevel deformer to get the kind of look and we did the manual way by selecting all the edges we want to bevel and then using the bevel tool to do it now again if you deselect your object and you want to come back to it there's no way to do it so your beveling is now set you cannot change it anymore so keep that in mind if you want to use the the bevel tool so this kind of the kind of the difficulties you will face when you do polygon modeling that if you do something like this there's there's only there's not really way back so you kind of have to think in advance and beforehand before you do something and this is why a little bit of experience it's necessary to do the kind of things you want to do okay here's a again a roundup of the whole session with the today so as I said the polygon modeling is actually one of the most difficult parts of modeling but the good thing is you can create any object you have in mind keep in mind the the two states of the objects you always have to convert your basic object to your polygonal object before you can can edit it and have access to the different polygon modes like the point mode the edge mode the surface mode and yeah to create realistic looking objects you have to bevel your edges keep that also in mind so unless you want to create something maybe for the game industry or for a small game you do by yourself you want to battle those edges yeah we're told that that the three different modes you can work in the point edge and the polygon mode and I also mention it on the side I think they're actually different modeling techniques for example the box modeling or the HD extrude but we'll come to that in another session where I get through building a complete radio step by step and I will mention again the different modeling technique techniques we can use okay thank you for listening have a good day

Channel: Christoph Doe

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Keywords: 3D Modeling (Film Job), Tutorial (Media Genre), c4d, cinema4d, polygon modeling, polygon, mesh, vertices, vertex, Polygonal Modeling, 3d, training

Id: H750iLdEmGE

Length: 44min 36sec (2676 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015