C4D Fundamentals | 04 - Introduction to Subdivision Surface Modeling

okay hey again to this session of c4d fundamentals we're going to have another look into modeling this time and we want to have a look into something which is called subdivision surface modeling let's have a quick look though at what we what we have learned so far so in the first session we talked a little bit about parametric modeling using the given objects of cinema 4d to build something very very simple we don't go one step further and how to look into the spline modeling and we use that to build or to give us the ability to build a little more detailed non-uniform objects and last but not least in the last session we talked about the polygon modeling added a brief introduction into it and now in this session we want to complete this part of polygon modeling more or less by talking about the subdivision surface modeling and with the subdivision surface modeling we can use it to build high detail and very realistic looking objects and the subdivision surface modeling is pretty much like an add-on of the polygon modeling you can use it also with the spline modeling and with the parametric modeling but in combination with the polygon modeling it is really useful and also very powerful you've seen it right the complexity and difficulty is still rising here a little bit so actually the subdivision surface modeling takes a little bit of experience pretty much like drawing or sketching you need to build a few objects after you really understand and master it I think so well let's go into it so that we we understand it so why is it subdivision surface modeling used for so as I said if you want to build realistic high detail option like for example a car there's actually no way around the subdivision surface you have rounded shapes in here but also hard edges for example right here or right here and it's pretty much a combination of of different angles or different curves of surfaces and also in this much simpler object this radio you have like here big radius on that edge but on the other edge here on the front you have a like an hard edge so when we talk about subdivision surface we we pretty much use it to well you use the ability of it to make objects with a different kind of angles or different kind of edge radians or edge angles so to sum it up this subdivision surface is actually one of the most powerful modeling tools not only cinema 4d but in 3d modeling in general it's used to create smooth and high poly objects while still keeping the number of the control points on a very low level and the subdivision surface object uses an specific algorithm to subdivide and round the object interactively and the algorithm which is used for that is called the Catmull clock algorithm it was invented in 1978 so it's quite old and we still use it today and maybe a few variations to have something like this well let me show you in cinema 4d what the subdivision surface actually does / just giving you a very short example so let's say we have a cube and then we just add the subdivision surface and actually by hitting the Alt key on your keyboard you automatically place the subdivision surface as a parent of your selected object and now you can see we get something like a sphere you're on the outline you see we still have that car of cube form but actually what the SATA vision surface object does here is making our cube into a sphere now you might wonder why it is that way and we have a look into it just in a sec just one important thing though to keep an in mind if is when you're working with subdivision surface you can use the Q key on your keyboard to switch the subdivision surface on and off and it's really important when the new model that you come back to the do this to the initial state of the object and then just use the activated subdivision surface object to quickly check how your object looks like in the subdivided state so let's come back to to the slides here and in this introduction to spline modeling session I already talked about the importance of understanding B splines so make sure to check that out before you continue here as I said also the non-uniform rational part of that word isn't so important to understand it has something to do with this three-dimensional shape and the weighting and that the this whole shape uses the method of the B spline to define the shape so yeah make sure to to check out the the B spline part of the spline modeling tutorial and we don't want to have a look in how the B splines work here on that kind of shape in the three-dimensional space so let me actually get rid of or deactivate the subdivision surface for now and I make the cube editable I go to the surface mode and I just want to delete a few faces right here so that I can show you a little better of what the subdivision surface is all right we'll also do you ate the crit for now we don't need that I do a quick optimize just to make sure that every point is deleted and then I go to the edge mode and I just select those edges and extrude them out let's say two times like that so that we have this kind of shape now if i activate my subdivision surface again you see that we have this nice and clean rounded shape and now again I told you that the it's all about edges and if you want to make realistic looking model you have to battle your edges or make sure that you don't have this kind of 90-degree edges but you have more more like of a rounded edge and I might say okay this edge is a little bit too round for me so let's try to to harden that edge up a little bit and the idea behind this is exactly the same as I showed you with the B spline in the 2d space in the - in the spline introduction spline modeling introduction and now I go to the knife tool - to show you this exact same thing now we want to be in the loop mode of the of the knife - so that we we can make this cuts along the shape and I want to add to control cuts - to harden that edge I will add one cut here and one cut here and as you can see already that the edge is now hardened a little bit if I want to select the this this one edge I have to go to the loop selection again this is U and L on your keyboard or you go to the menu and select the loop selection over here and what you have to do is you have to select the stop at boundary edge checkbox so that you just select this one kind of cut here and I can use this and I queued E for example the slide function to slide this back and forth and as you can see when I move those edges further away from this defining edge right here that you will see now that the the corner gets a little bit more rounded again so same thing as with a 2d spline the more we move the control edges to the defining edge right here the harder the edge will be so there's actually another method on how to define the the angle or the the hardness of the edge and this is by using the weighting I was talking about in the slide so again with the loop selection activated I select this edge here now and when you hold down the point key on your keyboard and then just click and drag your mouse from left to right you can see that the edge gets harder the more I move the mouse to the right and it smooth and stout the more I move the mouse to the left and this is called weighting and you see this as soon as you release your mouse button that you have now a weighting tag in your object hierarchy next to the cube and if you select that you actually see in your viewport that in this red area this edge is weighted in a certain amount and the higher the weight the harder the edge will be so you can use both methods methods of either using more control points or using the weighting tool to define the amount of how hard an edge should look like the good thing is it's pretty easy to go or redo it afterwards as soon as you have done it and it could be a little bit more hard to do the same thing when you have a lot of geometry a lot of phases in your mesh however I have to say that in let me deactivate that for now when it comes to modeling in most cases I don't make use of the weight - that much so mostly I just get what I want to do with the control points and the control edges on my mesh okay so another important thing to keep in mind when working with the subdivision surface is to avoid the use of triangles in your mesh so you see right now that we only have four-sided polygons in here but I want to show you why why triangles are not that good and when it comes to the subdivision surface modeling so I just purposely add a bunch of triangles right here to mess up the geometry of my mesh so this is something when you see something like this in your mesh you probably want to rethink or we consider the your mesh and rebuild it or try to find a way to get rid of those kind of triangles so you have to look pretty really closely and maybe if I increase the subdivisions a little bit right here you can see I think this angle you see I mean you don't see that much but still it's an invisible artifact and this is one of the reasons why you don't want to use triangles in your mesh so if I render that out now it's even not that visible anymore because I have only three subdivisions right here but still also if you look from this side maybe you kind of see this little curve going on here so your meshes it's definitely broken at this point and if you want to really build a detailed match you don't want to have this kind of artifacts in your mesh so I just go back a couple of steps and now you see that this edge is gone well this this kind of bulkier bump here is gone and if I go back again you see how this edge moves to the outside and we now have this kind of pimple here coming out of our mesh okay I want to show you a little bit more on how we could build something out of this this mesh right here and let's say we want to extrude out here from from the lower part of this match a hard edge kind of rectangular shape so I go back to them to my knife tool and the loop mode again and I just add another cut right here so the next thing I want to do yes I select those three faces here and I switch off actually the subdivision surface for now while I'm modeling and I used the D key to select the extrude tool and then I just extrude that out so we want to actually have something like this in the end but we want to have nice clean rounded edges right here what with a with a like tight radius but we want to keep the the radius over here which is nice and smooth and you can see right now that we kind of get this well pretty rounded shape coming out of our other shape and to harden the edges here again we have to add details to our mesh and again we will using the knife tool for that and we actually want to add the detail on every axis right here to get the kind of shape we want so we start off by using another cut right here as to define this this edge over here so add a cut here so you can see it's a little bit more some more more heart and we also want to do that in the lower part now it's not about accuracy right it's just to show you the idea or the yeah the idea and theory behind the subdivision surface modeling okay so this looks okay on this edge right now so we want to add another cut on the extrusion itself actually so right here I know you see it kind of takes shape you're already on the on that kind of edge and we are now left with all the the other axis so we we go here and the idea is actually that if you want to make a loop cut all along your surface you go to the outer edge of your mesh to to get the whole loop so I can either do that on the top here on the bottom whenever I select and polygon or edge which is in between the loop will not go through all the in the mesh so make sure you go to the outer part of your mesh to add a cut and I will add it just very closely to the to the outside right here and also on the other side like this so now you see we actually have nice clean edges already here but only in this mmm is that direction we we have this rounding going on so do you get rid of this we just add another cut or right here and out this actually looks quite okay for now but there's still one cut missing and this is when you look from this side you still can see there's this kind of rounding going on so we need another cut right here on the on the Y X X is small s so I headed here I want one on the bottom so if I switch back to the object model mode you see we still have the nice round corner over here but where we wanted to be hard we have this kind of nice hardik okay so we learned that we can use the weighting to define the edge but we can also use the control points on a mesh to also define the rounding of certain edge now again back to to the main idea behind this subdivision surface modeling and why it is so useful so as I said it is used because we want to have a low amount of control points when we are modeling but we want to have as many points as necessary to get a clean and nice although King rounded object so let me show you that also just pretty quickly in cinema again so I just get rid of that object I had to cube again and put that into your subdivision surface object make the cube editable and here we go so we never see if as soon as I'm in one of those modeling motes point head your surface mode you can see the outer shape of the original object and I just want to add a few cuts again just the same principle that I used before and it's not about a grocery again just to give you an idea so now we have an Ice Cube and we only have this many kind of control points so this is actually something we can work with but in the end if I turn that subdivision surface on again we have an ice cube and I can even increase the amount of subdivisions we want to have so in the editor because it's faster for the other two to display it we only have to set the regions right now but I can increase that to for example for and the more I have actually show you the more I the more subdivisions I have the or detail the mesh lease I can decrease that to show you again so now every every surface is now set / a factor of two and if I increase that for example for every surface right here will be subdivided by four so we get a detailed mash with a lot of polygons but still if we want to adjust something we still or we only have a few polygons to deal with and this really is the benefit of working with the subdivision surface object so use a quick roundup of today's session as I said the subdivision object hips UT to create high polygon objects while keeping the number of your control points on your mesh at a very low level sub D modeling is all complex and also pretty difficult to understand and it will take a while to learn it you just have to to model a few objects start simple and then increase the difficulty over time to learn different methods there's actually no way around it when you want to create realistic looking objects so if you're interested in modeling then you have to to go into the subdivision modeling definitely also I said that you should try to avoid triangles in your mesh appley leads to problems and also try to keep your polygon count as low as possible the difficulty of the subdivision surface modeling is that you kind of have to think ahead sometimes the things can't be undone later so if we add a lot of cuts into your object and then you move on and add more cards on a different area or whatever then at some point you can't go back anymore and this is why it's important when you do subdivision surface modeling to either use the safe incremental function of cinema 4d or just create backups of your object in your object hierarchy okay let me get back to cinema 4d at this point quickly because I want to give you another quick example on how the the workflow would be when using the subdivision surface object so let's say we want to build something like a helmet so the first thing we want to use certainly would be the subdivision surface object and now we want to think of what base object could be used to start off with so we could use a cube and to make it a little bit more like a sphere because we want to have a nice rounded shape we could go ahead add a couple of segments make it editable and then well select an edge mode a few of them scale this up a little bit select another one scale this in this direction and then select this one and scale this in this direction so you kind of get the idea so that there would be a nice kind of sphere which we could use so if I drop that into the subdivision surface object you see it's not perfect because I didn't pay attention to to accuracy right here but we we would get a nice kind of sphere which we could use to to build our helmet but there's a quicker way to do it when we would use the sphere from the start off but the problem of the sphere right now is that we have already a lot of polygons and as I mentioned we only want to have as few polygons as possible so we go over the attributes manager and I have a look what we can do here we can decrease the amount of segments so what I know from experience that something like seven would be good but we we could also use something else and now we have another problem we have a lot of triangles on the top right here so we can use another option right here on the type to see what other shapes we get so for example we have a tetrahedron that's all triangles so that's no good idea at all and here we have the hexerin and the hexahedron sorry and I see this is kind of the shape we had before when we did it by hand so this is a good to start off with so I make that editable and put it into my subdivision surface object and now we have her nice and perfect sphere to start editing it okay then next thing I want to do is I want to get rid of a few of those polygons so I select the Elife selection tool in the surface mode and I just delete those polygons so that we have something where our hat could fit in and that we have something where we can look out of so actually like a helmet is mate and I delete that now you actually get kind of that helmet shape already and just make sure by using the optimize function again so that all unused points are deleted as well and now the next thing we want to do is we want to don't want to have this like paper-thin helmet then would be pretty dangerous we want to add a little bit well next want to extrude it a little bit to the outside so I select everything and I use the extrude and I want to make sure that the create caps is activated because actually if I want to extrude it and you see that we get like this empty inner shape so create caps is on and then if I extrude it to the outside this looks quite good now if you have a closer look you see that this our helmet is pretty rounded so we don't want to have that so I go back again and as before with the the example we need a little bit more of details and control points and we can use this fairly simple in this example so if I just extrude a little bit and I turn off the subdivision surface for a second so we see we only have a super tiny extrusion right here and then I do it again but this time a little further now again just a tiny extrusion again and I turned that subdivision surface object back on and now you see if I have a closer look that we have a nice hard edge on the front but the overall spherical look of our helmet is still looking good okay just just a was just a very quick example of the idea and the workflow behind the subdivision surface of course there's still a lot of work to do but we'll do another exercise session where we'll go into all the modeling methods in a little bit more detail so my everyday work I actually only have to do modelling on very simple objects or rarely do do any modeling right now so I'm still also learning a lot in the area of sub D modeling and a great tutorial series has been done by Shane Benson over ahead Vimeo so if you want to dive deep deeper into the modeling techniques in the sub D modeling then you should check out this series definitely another create serious is or great tutorial it's been done by Grant Warwick on hard surface essentials it's not he's not doing it in cinema 4d but still the techniques he is showing are easily adaptable to cinema 4d so let's have another look at different modeling techniques so you can use for example the Box modeling where you start off with a simple base object like a box or any other simple geometrical object then you use that as a base and then you go ahead and add detail step-by-step or you could use the spline modeling you define a spline put that into one of the NURBS generators in cinema 4d and you will get a 3d object in cinema 4d actually it's not real spline modeling when you compare to you see ad software for example it's a little different and it's not a spline modeling software actually and in cinema 4d but here the spline modeling tools are quite easy to understand and pretty useful in in everyday work so make sure to to check them up you can also use the point or edge modeling methods and this is basically you use a 2d template of a car off a face for example and then you just go ahead and add point after point or hf3 edge and well transform each point on or each edge in your mesh to get the result you want also what you can do in cinema 4d is sculpting you will start off with a quite high poly mesh I can also be subdivided by a subdivision surface and then you use several tools like knives brushes or deformers to deform your object and it's much likely like modeling with clay and the real watch now all of these method methods and especially the box modeling and the point modeling and also the spline modeling can be used in combination with the subdivision surface object and especially when it comes to the to the box modeling you will definitely make use of the subdivision surface object okay thank you for this rather short session I hope you liked it make sure to subscribe this channel if you liked it and see you in the next session

Channel: Christoph Doe

Views: 68,045

Keywords: C4D, cinema4d, tutorial, training, Subdivisions (Composition), subdivision surface, sub-d, modeling, modelling, 3d, hard surface modeling, polygon modeling, maxon, 3D Modeling (Film Job), modeling techniques, nurbs, hypernurbs, hyper nurbs, basics

Id: IQGMbGTT__c

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 15 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Im_Here_To_Fuck]

YES ! was waiting for this one :)