C4D R25 Beginners Workshop (Part 2)

hey everyone welcome back to our hands-on with max on beginners cinema 4d workshop in version 25. i am joined as always with my good friend matt how's it going matt it's all right thank you very much we actually have some sunshine here in the uk for once so i know yes from sunny old england um so yeah also let us know where you're from guys it's always nice to know um which parts of the globe everyone's joining us from so uh just a little recap in case anyone wasn't here last week or hasn't catch uh caught the recording yet on youtube uh the idea of this hands-on workshop is to get you guys comfortable in cinema 4d in just six weeks so you know we broke this down into uh six main kind of disciplines inside of cinema 4d and we're gonna be spreading this all over the next kind of six weeks so last week if you weren't there it was all to do with getting started inside of cinema 4d so we had a look at the brand new ui and 25 as well as how to make things inside of cinema 4d so we looked at primitives and we looked at deformers and we made our like robot guy and so if you guys haven't seen that let us know because it's actually public on our maxon training team youtube channel so you can check it out there and we've got project files and all that kind of fun stuff so today is a week two or part two which is all to do with modeling so we're going to look at loads different types of modeling like box sds and supply modeling if you don't know what those things are don't worry over the next two hours we'll be uh going through them next week we're going to start to make things really nice looking at lighting and creating our own materials from scratch weeks four and five is when things start to get really kind of like interesting and into kind of like the really cool tools inside of cinema 4d with animation dynamics and mograph and then we're gonna round it all off with uh just a whole whole load on rendering in week six so i just want to say modeling is interesting too modeling is super interesting i'm not very good at it so i'm gonna be kind of uh watching basically watching you because uh if no one knows or if people aren't aware of this matt is basically uh the modeling expert if i'm allowed to say that matt so this is this is definitely your kind of probably one of your favorite things in cinema 4d right yeah this is the this is the thing i enjoy doing the most i'm a modeler as it got to a point when i was when i was much younger that um when like i was doing so much yeah when i was alone so much stuff in cinema 4d and just kind of like really absorbing stuff i kind of look at various different objects and kind of like the equivalent of like this terminator overlay would go over one side and the other and i just basically saw everything in wireframe in real life and i was like this is cool but also i'm probably doing this too much um but this is just the way i see things so modeling for me is is my that's the bit i enjoy the most someone else so we're all like we're in great hands in clearly aren't we um a little look at the kind of things we're going to be doing today so as i said we're going to look at the different types of modeling um box blind sds which is subdivision surface and we're going to learn how to model using splines and what are called generators inside of cinema 4d we're also going to take a look at the great new spline importer in 25. so uh beforehand we were able to bring in adobe illustrator files into cinema 4d if we saved them in a certain way and they came in as splines so if anyone done that before that was kind of the old process now as of 25 we have this amazing new kind of spline or vector importer and then we're going to take a look at that and it just kind of uh it just opens up so many more possibilities and does a lot of the hard work for us and so um that's definitely going to be something we'll get into today we're going to understand what subdivision surface modeling is and how we can actually do that inside of cinema 4d um we've already looked at symmetry last week but we're also going to look at what's called instancing and how we can use it and kind of speed up our workflow in cinema 4d and we're also as you know we do a lot of um sort of like technical and then practical so the practical part is gonna be we're gonna model our own shelf scene uh using kind of all of these tools here and so um as always thanks to everyone who is live with us and who was live with us kind of last week or anyone who's watching this recording um let us know your questions but as you know we want to answer them live and because everyone gets them the most out of this and then we can kind of bring the most of cinema 4d to you guys as well like we want to answer your questions we want it to be as interactive as possible so matt you ready also hi to everyone who's saying hey so i hated jay to jeff we got people from canada we've got um we've got bristol good old bristol we've got uh texas so loads of people on so i hated jerry hater sassy um hater barry ryan nick jerry someone from germany thanks mimo thanks for selling some grease christine montreal montreal oh wow they're coming in thick and fast now lots of people yay it's like to start with it was just like everybody's from north or south america and then we had bristol and i was like yeah [Music] representing from the uk that's it right okay throw me your screen cool let me chuck it over should you do there you go oh we've also got australia oh god what time is it there that must be late that must be like 12 1. that's good commitment from california france all over 11 p.m in australia that's good commitment have you just had an earthquake one of my friends have been here apparently terrifying right okay so can you see my screen and can you see my cinema yes and yes as are right so we are going to look at these things over here called generators now last week we looked at the primitives um and the cubes and how we can slightly adjust those with things called deformers that's all well and good that allows you to create various different shapes and do certain things but you're still kind of limited um by what you start with which is the deforming shape like the primitive object that you have to start with over here in this subdivision surface button is a drop down and we click and hold and we see we've got a lot of different subdivision sorry a lot of different types of generator and these are all generators of some sort i'm not going to go through every single one of them today because we'll be here forever but the ones i'm going to go through are spline generators which are these four and we will eventually get to the subdivision surface one later so the extrude um i was going to say nurbs then which it hasn't been called for a very long time um the extrude generator is quite simple generators exist um [Music] but they don't have anything underlying in them as such so they are a generator and they as generators do in real life electricity generators they require fuel okay so as much as it's fun you know putting petrol in a generator and getting electricity out with this we need to put some form of fuel in our generator and funnily enough the hint is in the word spline so spline generators require some form of splines in order to create shapes now splines exist all the way up here at the top they are the most one of the most simplest shapes in cinema 4d they are basically what you would know as paths in illustrator and things like that um some of them you create yourself um and some have been pre-made for you now i'm just going to move use a very very simple one although i now can't find it because everything's moved around because it's here um you can see i am still getting used to this new layout apologies um the text's flying so this is the only one that's in a slightly different place just because it's under our text objects here so if i create a text spline you can see that i have the word text in the text spline and if i want to change what it says i need to change the word text from the text line in the text box how many more times can i say the word text let's change it to spline it auto updates that's new i like that or did i click off i think i clicked off okay so you can see that i now have the word spline and just like any form of text based thing i can choose its alignment which i know ellie always likes to put in the middle because then it puts the middle of the spline in the middle of the universe um you can change the height uh you can change the horizontal spacing you can change the vertical spacing if i had any you can even turn on kerning and use the gui for a gui for this sort of stuff um you can change the font of course if i just click and hold and let's go titanium yes that one um and i've got a spline now splines don't actually kind of exist in the real world real world or 3d world if i render it just ceases to exist so this is why we need something called a generator now i have my two things i have my spline and i have my extrude now remember this these are generators generators require you to put fuel inside them it's very difficult to put a generator inside a type of petrol it won't do much remember the other way around this is exactly the same you put the fuel in the generator so click and hold with your left mouse button on the fuel on the spline click and hold down until it points down the arrow points down this means you are going to put this inside hence putting it inside box and let go and voila i have my 3d text spline and yes before anybody says why didn't you just create another one it's because i like using the text one and the extrude has some nice features to it so we can choose the auto direction you can choose the depth that this thing actually extrudes to um you know how far it actually goes you can choose caps which is very pretty um so you can choose curving on the edge and then you can increase the size of the curve the beveling and the extended shape or you can go solids or you can load even exciting presets so i can do a stepped one and just double click and then i've got this really cool stepped feature and i can have it both sides or i can just choose to have it one because i can choose end cap start cap or the other way around so it's one side and not the other that's interesting i can even have separate bevel controls so i can control it one way but not the other it's a really um interesting feature to work with and so the extrude is pretty pretty simple um it's got the ability of adding materials to different starts ends caps and things like that which i believe ellie might get to a little bit later on um yeah that's pretty much the extrude to be perfectly honest and of course if i want to have a different shape so let's try a flower i can take the text fly now and i can put that one in there if i wanted to have an exact copy then i can just copy and paste command c command v let's take that one out and let's put the text line back in it so now i've got two and i've got one in front of the other with the words blind i'm going to swap the way these caps work there we go there you go i am now going to do an animation of that render it in polka dots and that will be my nft that's going to win me 94 million any questions let's have a little look um so there's nothing necessarily on the extrude um but i was wondering did you know this um do you need to reinstall the cv toolbox for 25. i haven't got it on this one um probably because you need to put it in the preference in the user preferences for cinema 4d you can't put it in the plugins folder for cinema you need to load up 25 you need to go to edit preferences press the open preferences folder look in there and then put it in this plugins folder in your preferences file not the plugins folder in cinema 4ds installation directory whether everything has been updated to work with r25 yet i do not know cool thanks that's right um so i had a good question here if the font is too skinny for the beveling is there a way to make the original font wider um i don't think so because that's entirely down to the font i mean you can try to see whether or not they've got bold and regular but there's not a way of expanding that out is there no another thing could be if you increase the height of it enough it may then compensate for a bevel so if you're solving if you make it kind of a load bigger then you'll be better but also you can bevel like a 0.1 um like centimeter so you don't have to stick to just um like a whole one centimeter i'm pretty sure you can point one yeah so if i have a look at that so if i try that out as well if i load that stepped preset i mean what i quite like about this is that you can really control how much that goes in and out you know you can control the curvature and it will do its best this is one of the joys of 25. for the presets i use them as sort of like a starting point and then yeah adjust step um just having a little look there's a couple more questions um is there any way to reset the extrude to the original settings without deleting and adding another one no in short um you need to do exactly that you just delete and create a new one well we have one here although you could create yourself a preset couldn't you isn't there a way where you can double click on a setting look this is one of the new things in 25 with the preset you go to default there you go yes as of 25 so if you're not on 25 then no but if you are you can select the default preset that's so useful peter was asking he uh my understanding is that you could import paths from illustrator you are about 45 minutes ahead of us we will be going through a um a lovely new way of doing this but i will also talk about um the way pre-25 uh just just to be sure we've kind of like covered all bases for everyone um here when i select the elements for example um vertices or edges the edit mode uh gizmo i like that word is activated immediately which is why you accidentally execute movements with the graphics tablet can i turn this off so first select the elements and then select activate the edit mode move rotate etc [Music] good question i don't know if it's one of these like mouse move activation let's have a look i'm not 100 sure okay that's something we can yeah look at later on and i just had another quick one uh which is uh which is a good one um at the point you're at now in um in your viewport uh these surfaces aren't polis right correct if i extrude something and need to start editing as a poly surface how do i do that with me to zoom in there with the make editable button which now exists down here so this is a cube and what you can do i can select my extrude here or my let's take the flower one because it's going to be more interesting and i can press this button which you can also use to press c on your keyboard and that converts it to a polygonal mesh converting is a one-way street unless of course you press undo but actually you can't go back from being an extrude to from being a polygonal object to something else afterwards cool thanks yeah and that was uh all the questions for now um anymore i'll let you know sweet okay right let's move on i'm going to press the new button up here remember that's so let's have a look at uh which one are we going to look at we're going to look at the lathe now that's a really interesting new icon for the lathe um so spinning top now so we select that once again the lathe is a generator so it requires some form of fuel and this time we need to create a spline ourselves now for those of you who don't know what a lathe is in real life things do exist in real life um a lathe is a manufacturing piece of equipment um that can be either worked in either metal or wood or anything else basically that you spin but for example if you get a long thin piece of wood it clamps either end and then spins really really fast and you use a chisel or sharp implement to basically draw an outline profile as the thing spins therefore you get the same profile all the way around really good for making banisters and chair legs and out of metal sonic screwdrivers but um in principle in 3d this takes exactly the same idea which is it takes a shape like an outline and it revolves it rotates it spins it lays it 360 degrees so we need to create an outside shape and what i can do over here i can use my spline pen now don't follow along those of you who are following along just watch for the moment and i'm going to create some form of wine glass so i click and hold because splines is like any form of path object i can click and hold to create um curved objects wow that's a thick piece of glass or i can just click to create flat lines and straight lines and once you're done just press escape and it will finish now people don't ever do what i've just done which is to create a spline in the 3d mode because you have absolutely no idea where it's going to put its points cinema 4d will guess and it did it basically tangentially or in actual fact perpendicular to the angle of the camera which is really lovely but it doesn't help me much so i'm going to delete that and we should always use one of our views either the front or the side okay don't use the top because if you use the top you will make a pancake the reason for that is the lathe acts as a revolver around the y-axis so straight up it will go all the way around if you draw on the y-axis you will revolve all the way straight down so you need to use one of these two it doesn't matter which so using my spline pen tool i'm just going to increase the size of this and i'm going to do my best guess of this now you only need to do half of it because this is the whole principle is that it will revolve around the middle so you only need to go up to the thickness so that's the middle of my glass this is the thickness you only need to go up to zero here in order to get it done and then press escape as i said before and then what i can do i select my spline it is gener it is fuel the fuel goes in the generator let go boom there it is there i have my wine glass let's go in there although it's a bit more of an egg cup though holy grail maybe not sure so let's just adjust it which is the fun type of things of generating objects like this is i can go to my move tool on the left i can go to my points mode at the top because i'm about to adjust the points of my spline and go to my move tool and i can select bits of my spline if i can see it and i can move it out i can move it up if it's in my way i can deactivate the lathe by using the little tick there and i can readjust some of these i can change the angles i can move them in i can make it all sorts of different ways that i like i'll turn it back on and have a look or i can edit it whilst it's in this mode and you can see that i've got full potential to completely change what i want from a martini the biggest martini glass in the world possibly a bird bath i'll go go for bird bath oh well that's one hell of a martini um maybe you can maybe it's a martini bird bath no um and it's really easy to just readjust this and click if you want to command click or sorry control click on an extra point you can add them in so you can completely change the shape and add in more points if you wish now one of the things to remember about this is your points need to be actually at zero i didn't so my top point as you can see if i actually have a look i have a hole and the reason for that is the first point that i used is not at zero so the easiest way to do this you can see if i move this further and closer from zero that it's it gets smaller and bigger oh we've got to find one there we'll come back to that in a second um i'm going to zero this out and the easiest way to do that is to select your point load up your coordinates manager using your little hot corner down here it's the x-axis that i need to change so oh i can actually just press the reset transform button can i knock does that not work with the points yeah well no that's disappointing um just zero that out and you now have the fact that that solidifies that underneath you'll find that it's all black now it shouldn't be black really and the reason for that is because i overshot the zero so therefore it is the other way so it's overlapping and going crazy so same issue select that press zero zero that out and i now have um my martini bird bath completely solid all the way around any questions about that um does doesn't look like it at the moment score thanks that's right cool yeah um yeah nothing at the moment but if anyone has any questions then yeah just uh let us know i've just noticed the new weld points icon that's it's a little welding helmet that's cool i like that anyway so i'm very easily distracted by all of the new and how much everything has changed can't help it um someone's saying they can't seem to adjust the tangents on their paths um so you need to be in points mode you need to be on the handles yeah you need to be able to if you press the spacebar it will um it's like a shortcut that takes you from moving them to then moving the handles that's how i that's how i switch between i just go on the move tool so i don't think you need space do you my space sometimes yeah sometimes it if you've just done it um it won't let you change like the handles and so if you hit the space bar it will take you to the option to do so and then you hit them you also need to make sure that you only have the spline selected if you had the lathe selected when you made the spline you'll be able to see the points but all you'll be able to do is move it so this is the issue is because you have the lathe and the spline selected make sure the spline is the only thing you have and you'll always be able to adjust the handles if you want to adjust them separately you can hold down shift so that i can adjust one tangent handle and leave the other one where it was uh i had another question um could you possibly go through um snapping the grid if possible i can uh justin was asking about grid snapping for positioning the point back um oh actually uh to zero zero zero in the viewport yeah the easiest thing to do is just to do zero zero there and there i mean uh right let's see how is snapping snapping exists up here so you enable snap and then you choose the snap settings so what do you want to snap to so i can snap to work plane and snap to guides i think and then in theory i can go and it will allow me to snap this to certain places but definitely the easy thing to do is to zero stuff out find perfectly honest i don't really use snapping it's just a personal preference anything else um i think there was something back yes so this was back relating to the extrude um on a text or other extrusion how how would you make it like round or a bubble [Music] i would i would personally use um i would have like quite a high bevel like a radius and then i'd also use maybe like a displacement deformer set to yeah i mean all black or white and then it will create like that says that's dreadful there must be a rounding that's absolutely not well i suppose it depends on yeah it's there's supposed there is a way of doing it isn't there i think but i can't quite remember boom um oh to make it round on the sides like a marshmallow so i would use a displacement deformer but you need to make sure you up your subdivisions inside of your extra ground but it's it's not really just doable with the extrude tool on its own i don't think no okay anything else we'll have to go back to that one or past yeah if we have if we have time uh later i can i can always run through it um no that's it for now thanks right another new one so let's have a look at the sweep now the icons do give you a rough idea funnily enough that's what they're for of what each spline generator does and you and also how many splines you need so you can see that the extrude has one the lathe has one the sweep here does in actual fact have two and it's got the one at the front and the one at the side so i'm just going to select that so this means that i need two splines so let us create a circle spline and let us also create a star spline of which i am going to shrink down and then i'm going to take all of these by shift selecting or you can draw a box around these two and then i'm going to click and drag and put them in the sweep and i end up with this and what the sweep does is it sweeps one shape around the other and everybody just looks at me marginally blankly until i then do this and everyone goes oh because you can now see that the star is being swept around the circle this is what it does and i can just control that with the end growth here i can even control the start ooh start scale uh start growth where it actually starts but we'll come back to that in a second it also depends on the order that you put these in so if i have the circle first and the star you can see i get a very different shape and the reason for this is because it is it is now sweeping a circle around the star instead so if i go to my end growth you can see that that is a circle being swept around to the star it's an interesting fashion but nonetheless that is what it is doing and that very simply is how to do a sweep um and it's really useful for things like picture frames or skirting or wires and cables anything that follows a certain trail around um even to the point let's create my text and let's create a sweep and let's create a arc let's make the arc there and make it bigger and let's put that in there and in there sweep so i quite actually really like that um you can see how easy it is just to take one shape and sweep it along the other you can see that that just pings out and creates your shape you can as i said you can increase and decrease the scale so it can start larger or smaller or how far it goes around you can even control a rotation so it can twist it's all that's an interesting one you can twist backwards and forwards and start that way um parallel movement's an interesting one that won't work very well for this at all banking will give you what it's doing constant cross section won't change much in this either details however allows you to add a scaling so you can see that it scales it down halfway across actually creates a really interesting one as well as the fact that you can adjust the rotation however where you want to so if i put another one there and i can sweep you doolally there we go it's quite a fun little thing to play with but it's it's really useful for all sorts of things any questions on sweeping um just having a little look um so regarding uh the sweep this is a bit more like maybe your personal take on this one um besides just best practices and experimenting is there any way you can kind of predict or plan what shapes you would need to start with in order to get the result that you want so in your personal kind of experience what do you think it depends on what you want to work with to be perfectly honest i mean one of the things i use it for you know that i used to do in my beginner's training is creating picture frames so i've got a rectangle there's going to be a picture frame of some sort and i'm going to look in here and i'm going to think right if that's my picture frame how big would the frame around it be like the thickness so if i just create a new um [Music] thing you can see i've got one of those fancy picture frames that's got loads of stuff dunk and then i put both of these two in a sweep and i have a fancy picture frame going all the way around the outside um so i suppose it depends on what it is that you think you want to get as to how you start with it i think if that helps cool thanks um so you know when you were adjusting the things in the suite pamela was wondering can those things be keyframed yes uh they can anything with this as changed of course anything with this diamond i miss the button um can be keyframed so you can control so you can indeed click the growth here go to your end of that dunk and don't worry we'll get the key framing later on oh swooshy in short anything with one of these little diamonds can be keyframed yes and it's a lot of different things oh yeah cool so don was wondering uh if you want to adjust the arc in the sweep can you make just the arc editable in order to adjust the points yep yep that because the one is the line so one is the shape this is the the profile and then you have the arc so if you want to change what the arc does you know i can increase the up and and end angle and the start angle or i can make it editable and then i can adjust the individual shapes of that particular arc if i wanted to so let's make it let's add in a point it helps if i've got it selected and i'm on points mode so there's a shape and now i can do that and now you can see hear you can now see that my shape has changed i've got another quick one how do we control which side the tech sweep is facing my sweep is upside down [Music] that depends on just even depend on that really that it shouldn't be so if i create a text and if i create an arc and then i change my arc to x zed and i click and drag both of them i'm going to hold down control and optional control and alt and it means that i can add them both to something at the same time well that's different that isn't even what i created earlier was it interesting maybe maybe how to break cinema day with matt and ellie uh let me try doing that manually sweet oh it's because i've put them in the wrong way around didn't i always check which way round stuff goes you did it on purpose rookie mistake um it shouldn't be upside down i don't quite know how it would be uh unless you've changed the rotation or rotated the text not sure or rotated your viewport try to set everything back to default yeah just go view um frame default oh forgot to change the direction of the arc ah okay um one quick one just uh popped up is the sweep tool limited to two splines or can you have intermediary splines well it depends the the sweep itself is limited to two splines to for have one shape profile another that's exactly what it does it can't do any more than that you can enter a third spline which is what they call a rail spline that rail spline allows me to control the kind of curvature of that um how's the best way to think of it um think of it like a scale electrics track so when you've got a sky electric's track that goes around a corner it doesn't go around flat normally it will curve its way up and this allows you to control that at certain points so that you can control the curvature of certain bits along splines so if i make this spline editable and i select two of my points i can control where it curves up and where it curves down as part of this so that's all the rail spline will do i can't have an intermediary shape changer as shut as such but bear with us for the next one cool yeah and that's all the questions for now cheers awesome right so last but not least then we have the loft now the loft as you can see from the image has three splines this is technically a lie because you can have as many splines in it as you particularly want so let's create a circle there it is let's create a rectangle let's move it back let's create a flower and let's move that further back uh no that's the wrong one and let's create a [Music] star and let's put that actually in the middle and i'm just going to reorder those and let's create a keep going to the wrong place um cog wood and stick that right at the end junk and then i'm going to drag a box around all of those and i'm going to put them in my loft and i'm going to get a really big smooshy mess but what effectively is happening is cinema 4d is treating the splines like a wooden frame and then it is trying to skin it around the outside and you can see that it doesn't do too bad a job that is definitely a circle and if i turn off the circle i've definitely got a rectangle if i turn off the rectangle i've definitely got a star if i turn off the star that's definitely not a flower and neither in any shape or form is that a cog wheel and the reason for this is cinema 4d by default is given a small amount of geometry in the loft to deal with this is a mesh subdivision and you can see that the u subdivision is 16 which means that it's using 16 polygons all the way around the outside to get from one shape to another which from a square to a circle is absolutely fine but from a star to a flower to a cogwheel it doesn't work so i'm just going to grab my slider and increase that and even at 100 it's not right so i'm just going to use the virtual slider click on the number and then drag my mouse to the right and you can see that i'm now getting something that is much more like a cog wheel um even to the point where i can turn off the circle i can turn off the rectangle i can turn off the star and that's definitely a flower interesting artifacting but we'll ignore that for the moment um turn those back on and i can move them around so i can move the whole thing or i can grab the circle and i can move it forward i can move it up i can move the rectangle around or i can go to my rectangle and i can change its proportions if i particularly want so all of this is non-destructive editing and i can do what i want with it um and as odd as that seems it is really a useful tool i've done all sorts of things with it like coffee cups bars chess pieces um those sorts of things are quite useful to be done with this kind of tool and as you can see you've kind of got that intermediary shape in a way you can't that allows you to change these individual items again you want to just be wary of these things as well so the subdivision may enable you to smooth stuff out you can see that whilst the shape from one to the other it got a bit blocky on the edges so i can increase that and you can see if i just go to my display that this is actually what it's doing the number of shapes the number of polygons it allows to get from one shape to another oops and you can see that the less there are the more it struggles to get a definite shape that actually works so create a few more and you'll be fine okay any questions on the loft nothing at the moment you've shown them everything that's it you all know everything now yeah cool yeah no no questions on that wow sweet okay so what's next that would be box modelling then really wouldn't it's modeling and then yeah sds modeling oh one quick question just popped in yeah um how would you do hollow shapes uh with a loft so you've got the loft you've got caps turn off the caps oh that would look cool from the inside that would be wouldn't it that's kind of like some camera freak trippy all looks like it's going to be part of a medical exam and i really don't want to have yeah um i had to deal with medical um files before and it was like someone did an animation of a heart stint going in and i was like yeah i'll help with that why does my chest hurt anyway um oh that's an interesting one from does i'm so excited i was about to say that uh it does because you the more subdivisions you have the more geometry you will have to uv it's that simple there will just be more of it to faff with it may be not necessarily complicated to deal with you know a cube with 100 by 100 segments will still uv map incredibly easily and simply so it does entirely depend on what it is that you are attempting to uv i mean i'm not going to lie this isn't the shape i'd want to attempt to uv but it's not because of the number of subdivisions it's just simply because of the the shape it's more of the shape that's the complicated thing more than the number of subdivisions anything else um can you extrude that tunnel um so i like add thickness in theory there are a couple of ways of doing that if you did not want well you can make it editable and extrude it that's one uh the other one can i cheat i mean improvise i mean cloth surface that's what i'd have done yeah dunk it's not necessarily pretty and it does overlap that way yeah if it's a bit smaller oh it's because it's going that way ah okay right for some bizarre reason i've never quite figured out um the loft reverses the normals for those people who want to know what normals are you have a polygon and a polygon has an out and an in out is facing you in is obviously the other side it's the back face of the object for some reason this always makes them the wrong way round so i need to flip the normal then turn on the cloth surface and then extrude not middle button and extrude that out and i would then get a thickness around the outside look at that so that's completely not part of the beginner's training but nonetheless that's cool anything else because i've got to cover box modelling are you always modeling with the cat one four or another one yeah this one perhaps maybe one of the others but yeah he's always there he follows me around the cat's in charge pretty much he's the genius i just do what he says it's like ratatouille um cool right okay let's crack on with box modeling then so box modeling is funnily enough exactly how that sounds largely because you always start with a box i'm just gonna adjust that because now i can see my screen um and i'm gonna start with the cube funnily enough box now this is the process i talked about earlier we can turn this into a polygonal object so at the moment i can adjust its height i can adjust its width and i can adjust its depth default that's new um at the moment i can go to these different modes but nothing happens because my object is not editable so with my object selected i'm going to press this button here or c on your keyboard make editable converts a parametric object into a polygonal object boom several things happen the cube icon has now changed to a polygon icon the orange yellow handles have now disappeared and i cannot change what it is um how i now however can select my way through these different modes and i can see that i've got a blue outline and i can hover over a polygon or i can hover over an edge or a point and this is really useful so i can select a point down i can completely change the way that works i can select an edge and i can go that way or up and down if i want to break it or i can select faces so this is my ability now of polygonally modeling something inside of cinema 4d i can change the way this works um i used to go up to modeling layout but it's not particularly necessary any more other than the fact that it gives you a smidge more space um purely because you have these dynamic palettes on the left hand side which i can now use so if i select one of these objects i'm going to select the second one down which is extrude and i'm going to select that and i'm not going to press anywhere near my axis i'm going to click and hold in an empty space over here click left mouse button and drag from right to left and i'm extruding now what that is doing that is adding geometry in the shape of the original face forward so you can see that whereas it was just one polygon around i've now got two that way and i can click and drag again and there it is if i was to grab the handles all i'm doing is moving that i'm not actually extruding now if i wanted to do a different type of extrude or if i wanted to be more exact with it my extrude tool has attributes over here so this is now showing me the settings for the tool itself and i can click and drag this and all of a sudden it starts to go up or i can be you know more exact i can say actually i want this to be 250 and then just press tab and it's extruded it like that if i wanted to do it again i'll press new transform and it will do another one if i can select that and i can actually do new transform and it will use the same settings that i have got and it's really useful for adding more geometry out you know giving yourself more mesh to play with so that you can help get your shapes another one of these tools is in inset as previously known as extrude inner um this insets a polygon once again i'm not going to click anywhere on these axes i'm going to click over here in a blank face and from right to left with the left mouse it shrinks if i click and hold from right from left to right i make a bigger cube and then that's then useful because i can extrude and i can stream that out see really helpful and then i can go back to inset and i can shrink that down and then i can press d on my keyboard because that's my shortcut for extrude and click and drag and make another one and let's just have lots of fun by pressing i and doing that and d and doing that again if i want i can use another one of our tools which is called the bevel tool which kind of combines the two so if i click and drag with that you can see that it creates a much it extrudes out but shrinks the polygon inside as well to create some form of bevel or chamfer which is very useful indeed and again be aware that there are loads of tools and loads of attributes to these tools in the bottom right hand corner that you can play with um that may be useful for you so just be aware of that now what if i wanted to affect this this is just one polygon all the way across what if i wanted to make more of them so i wanted to do something in the middle well we have our line cut tools and we have three tools here uh line cut plane cut and loop cut now loop cut i'm going to start with the last one first because it's so easy if i hover over an edge you can see that i can now create some form of loop cut it gives you that ghosting highlighting to let me know where it's going to cut and i can just click once there and it's created this cut now i get this little gizmo at the top and this gizmo allows me to actually choose a percentage where i want this to be so 10 or i can drag it manually if i want to do it i've recently got a plus button here so i can have two cups or three cups or four cuts and then i can manually edit each one of these um to be exactly where i want it which is like incredibly super useful to use because you're always going to need to add more geometry now it does it based on the percentage of distance through a polygon which i'll explain so this polygon on the side is much bigger than this polygon on the edge but if it's 50 here it's 50 all the way around if i do 25 you can see that the the angle is curving up and i'm going to get something that's kind of not flat all the way around but it is nonetheless 20 no 25 it is a quarter of the height of that polygon and of that polygon no matter how big the polygon is that it is trying to work its way around so that's just one of those things to bear in mind when using the loop cut another one is the plane cut now the plane cut allows me to go like that and then if i move around i have a line a white line that is showing me where it will cut and i now have this gizmo and this is my this is my plane cut gizmo which i can now edit so i can move it up and down as you can see stuff changes in my tool i can rotate it around i can change its angle i can move it that way i can move it up and down i can increase the number of cuts if i want to i can increase the cut spacing here i can reset the rotation manually with all of those changing the height that way if i particularly want it looks wonky to me but i might be wrong perhaps i move stuff up um so you can see that i've i've got full capability of adjusting and editing this in any way shape or form before i initialize it just clicking off and press escape and now i have as you can see all of this geometry and last but not least the line cut tool allows me to just draw something on the shape over here boom there you go i can just click clickety click click click click click and it's done i know the next question will be can you do curves the answer is no this is not a path or pen tool it just allows you to do straight geometry so i can select those and then if i want i can press nine to select that and then i can press d and then press shift and press shift click and then press d to extrude and extrude them out and have some really strange symbols of some kind um appear on my strange thing that's box modeling in a nutshell um there is just so much more to it obviously depending on the shapes that you want to make and how you want to do stuff um because you can of course go to my edges mode and i can select edges and i can move them up you can select points if you want to you know be more responsible or you know need to adjust particular points around you know like i can up here and change my shape in any way so these points you know can be shift selected and i can move them over here instead you know there is just so much you can do that it's very difficult to kind of really get into it in a few minutes um but i'm just trying to show you the basics of some of the tools because very quickly um ellie will be showing you how to do cool stuff with all of this anyway any questions on box modelling no there aren't actually um he was saying holy cow i've done c4d for five years and sort of saved me so much time on some projects so glad um that can be helpful absolutely one quick question let's just come in can the knife function be compar combined with snapping for example always on the center of an edge [Music] i have no idea uh to be perfect honest absolutely no idea so if i go to my line cut tool i would need snapping i can snap to edges but i don't think i can snap to the center of an edge so i wouldn't be able to pinpoint the midpoint oh we're all learning today that's it i like that yes yes you can there we go that was easy that's cool um is there a smooth mode function similar to maya that my friend is the next thing to show you so subdivision surface modeling which is what i'm about to show you is basically box modeling with the generator uh it's very quickly yeah let's just do this although it may look dodgy um so we have a cube here and that is a box modeling a subdivision surface generator if i just turn that on and drag and drop that in we have this absolute mess okay but it is a it is a smoothed mess nonetheless and this is what the subdivision surface generator does it smooths stuff yeah yeah that's it maybe i can find the two this is another 64 million just there um to fully demonstrate i'm going to just create a cube and this cube is one by one by one segment so it is the most bog standard cube and i'm going to create myself this subdivision surface i can just click that and i'm going to drag and drop my cube into the subdivision surface and i end up with a rather blocky sphere why would you do that i hear you say well um it's really useful for rounding edges obviously nothing in the world is like this at all points has straight angles and lines at all things some are curved some have roundings some have different edges um some things are organic and what this does it rounds stuff out and it can be useful for creating all sorts of shapes now at the moment i am limited to the original shape of the cube but what i can do i can increase the number of segments that my cube has and you can see that all of a sudden i get a much blockier shape i'm just going to turn on groud shading with lines and you can see that if i go back to one by one by one oops one by one by one right my cube has is one by one by one so one polygon one polygon one polygon subdivision surface is currently set to 2 which means it subdivides twice so if i just turn that to 1 you can now see that it's 2 by 2 by 2. if i go to that it's 4 by 4 by 4. up one more you guessed it eight by eight by eight and the more i do that the smoother my geometry will be if i increase the number of polygons that there are in my cube then it's good subdividing each one so if i go back to you can see that it's two by one by one and this time it's four by two by two and this is going to be eight by two by two and so on and so forth i'm not going to go through the entire times table at you um but you do get a different shape depending on the number of segments that you have and now all of a sudden it's very useful for creating things like sofa cushions or surfboards or bars of soap or i have absolutely no idea what that would be naff mouse mats from the 80s um again yes um so you've got the ability of rounding out edges and changing shapes of things and that's just a super useful thing to be able to try and do and you can see the difference that it makes here with the ability of curving things around but the problem you can see is of course that it curves and rounds everything what if i wanted the edges where it meets here and here to be solid to be a sharp angle well you can do that in cinema 4d and i'm going to use the selection tool of which i don't think is on the screen anymore so i'm going to it's not there at all is it selection selection tools in model mode no ah but it is up there yes it is um loop select and i'm going to make sure i'm on edge mode and i'm going to select that and don't worry about following me along i'm about to do an explanation you can see that very quickly i can sharpen those edges now what i'm going to do on my cube which i'm going to just reset to normal so i have a cube and a subdivision surface i'm going to make sure my cube is selected and i'm going to press c to make it editable not to the subdivision surface do not make the subdivision surface editable that will defeat the point make your cube editable and then what i'm going to do i am going to hold down control on my keyboard and click and drag the red arrow and i get a duplicate and i'm going to do it again and i get another duplicate now these are three separate objects that i'm going to edit individually and i'm going to show you what subdivision surface weighting does which really isn't visible anymore is it that's a shame okay so on point mode i'm going to go to my first cube i'm going to go to my loop selection tool and i'm going to hover over the top and then click you can see which loop it's going to select so that means i've selected all four points at the top and then oh it is there good sorry just checking so there's been so many changes with the icons i am having to try to remember where everything is um weight subdivision surface so i'm going to click that button there now with my point selected and in an empty space i'm going to click and hold with my left mouse button and drag from left to right and you can see that the percentage that the subdivision is having the weight it is having on those points is ranging from 100 percent fully affected to zero percent totally not affected and i can turn off my subdivision surface and you can see the difference in the position of the points at the bottom that i haven't moved and the points at the top which have been now zero weighted but i get a very different shape moving on to my subdivision service number one i'm going to go to my edge mode at the top and then i'm going to go to my loop selection tool and i'm going to select the top loop around there then once again i'm going to go to my subdivision weight tool which is a oh i i don't know why to be honest i thought is that a is that a handbag in a in a thing or a bell but of course it's a weight isn't it anyway um new handbag mode i've shipped was gonna say i was just like what is that sorry um click and hold in an empty space from left to right and i'm now waiting that edge and that edge loop is now being weighted so it returns to the surface of the cube but the edge remains curved but it is brought back to the height of the original cube surface and then last but not least i'm just going to go to polygon mode i'm going to go to my move tool i'm going to select a polygon now a shortcut or a sticky shortcut as they call it because i'm going to hold down full stop or as americans call it period on the keyboard so click and hold uh hold that with your finger and then use your mouse button click and drag from left to right and i am using that tool without having to activate it over there which means it's a very useful shortcut to kind of just nip in and out and as you've noticed i don't have to just do either and or so i don't just have to do one hundred percent or zero percent i can do fifty percent if i really want to or eighteen percent and i can tell that because it tells me in the bottom left hand corner i can do eighty-nine percent um or a hundred percent but the actual cubes underneath junk junk remain the same so i haven't actually affected that geometry whatsoever i have simply affected the way the curvature is created with the subdivision surface okay um have i got time to make the creation uh yeah sure go for it okay i think we're good that's all right we never overrun i have another cat um also jeff was liking you saying full stop by the way oh good yeah it's uh it's full stop for me and it was only because we did it the last time and people were like what's that i was like oh yeah period okay so what we're going to do we are very very very quickly going to do a bit of sds modeling um if you happen to watch this last time you know exactly what i'm about to create if you watch this last time um you'll be fine so i'm going to create a cube first and then i'm going to make my cube editable and then i'm going to create a subdivision surface and i'm going to put the cube in the subdivision surface tada i'm going to select my cube and i'm going to go to polygon mode and i'm going to select that first front polygon then i'm going to go to my extrude tool i'm going to change my offset to 200 and press enter i'm then going to press new transform to do it again so i now have a cylinder three polygons long okay going to my scale tool which is also t on your keyboard i'm going to click and drag to start scaling in an empty space and then i'm going to hold down shift to lock it to 5 increments and get to 30. then i am going to go to the extrude yes i am going fast you may need to watch this back um and then i'm going to click new transform there we go what on earth is he making says everybody then i'm going to select the back one and i'm going to select new transform new transform new transform so i now have a polygon that is one two three four five six seven polygons long okay there is a body of one two three four five there is a middle part one and a head or nose with this one selected i'm going to go to my scale tool and once again i'm going to start to scale by holding my little left mouse button hold down shift click click to get it to five degree increments and i'm going to get to 25 then i'm going to press d on my keyboard which is once again the extrude tool and i'm going to press new transform and then i'm going to press new transform okay can you guess what it is yet then i'm going to select that side and then shift select the other so i have polygons both sides selected okay really helpful then not worrying about an exact offset i'm going to click and drag in an empty space from left to right and i'm going to go out until it's about 300. i say about i don't really care if it's not and then i'm going to grab my blue handle and move them backwards a bit okay odd isn't it okay so with that selected or done rather i'm going to look underneath at the second one back so one two three four fourth one back sorry and i'm going to change the offset to 50 and press enter bump and that gives me this little dip and then i'm going to say not twice then i'm going to stop it there we go i might just need to move my camera and i'm going to shift select the two polygons either side of this little nub and that i've created and i'm going to click and drag and i'm going to extrude them out about 200 and then i'm gonna hop press t on my keyboard to give me the scaling tool i'm gonna grab the blue one and i'm going to squidge it into about thirty percent i'm gonna press e on my keyboard to go to the move tool and then i'm going to grab the blue arrow and move it back a bit and move it down a bit and very quickly i have created an absolutely none anatomically correct dolphin and yes it doesn't look much like a dolphin and there's an awful lot i can do but very quickly you can see i've been able to bring something to shape and after this you can really do some great adjustments so i'm going to go to my edge mode i'm going to grab the front of that head bar and i'm going to move it up on the blue and all of a sudden we've got a lot more shape which is super useful i'm going to go to my polygon mode and i'm going to go to my loop selection and i'm going to select that front loop e to the move tool and move it down using my loop select on an edge mode i'm actually going to select that e and then move it back so that it isn't quite so uniform and very quickly you know i can really adjust the shapes of these things so u l which is the shortcut for u loop select which is you don't move the mouse press l these shortcuts are dual key shortcuts if i move my mouse my dual key will disappear so yeah keep doing that it's going to disappear it's infuriating so press u and this will bring you a whole load of other shortcuts that i can use one of which will be l for loop select so press l for loop select and then i'm going to select that press t and click and drag from right to left to shrink it a bit and you can see that very quickly i have created this well skinnyish dolphin and i can move stuff around you know i can loop select uh all of those polygons if i particularly want to and then maybe all of those press e and then move them down so that it's a bit more shape to it rather than it being quite so uniform and i'm going to do the same here as well so loop select that edge press t click and drag to shrink so that it's a bit more shapely i know he hasn't got a dorsal fin let's do that then so let's go to polygon mode select that one polygon and then i'm going to go to inset i'm going to click and drag it a smidge because it's just going to create that very quickly and then i'm going to go to t grab the red handle and move it that way so that it's about 15 i'm going to show you a really quick trick as well i'm going to hold down i'm going to go to e hold down control and then drag that up that's a very very quick kind of sticky extrude shortcut but it doesn't give you anywhere near as much of the options as it had before then shrinking it with t then e to move it back and there we go there is flippers lesser-known younger brother in all of about 10 minutes that was great but it shows how quickly it can be done as well yeah as i say i mean as long as it's viewed from a distance and no one gets too close you'll be absolutely fine to think it's a dolphin or an extra thought no that's great um i don't think really many questions have come in um oh jeff was wondering could you show the um it without the subdivision surface just oven like this this is like there you go this is why we use the subdivision surface yeah this is um this was this was 3d modelling in the 80s here's 3d modelling now um and obviously you could then actually go to sculpting if you wanted to which is not something we cover in this because time more than anything else but you can see the number of polygons it has to smooth this out if you want you could increase the subdivision so that it's a bit smoother um and you will get a sort of smoother look of it there which i think is quite nice that's great that's cool thank you very much minecrafty yes yeah that's what i was just looking at definitely i like that rick yep i'm i'm with you absolutely on that this is flippers younger brother flopper thank you very much um okay so yeah i'll get into building some stuff with uh those techniques you just showed us time for me to throw the screen at you chuck it over consider it right cool um can can you see my screen we can so so yeah thanks for that matt first of all that was um that was some great stuff um so now we're gonna do we're gonna we're gonna take some of that knowledge and information um mainly the kind of like spline and generator side of things and we're gonna model this shelf scene so this is made up of a whole bunch of different splines and generators inside of cinema 4d along with some of our primitives which we can probably see here in our shelf um so what we're gonna do we're gonna build this up from scratch so if anyone's following along then uh feel free um if not there is project files i've linked in the chat but if you can't see those let us know in the questions and we'll reply with the link to that and dropbox link as well so you can you can grab that actually this actual project file yourselves and then what i'm going to do i'm then going to show so at the end of this i'll show the new spline importer and hopefully if we have time i'll do some bubble text um but you know we don't mind over running so yeah as always let matt know your questions and then he'll they'll basically just stop me uh mid-flow and then we can answer them so oh that was just a little balloon text so right i'm going to open up a whole new scene and we're going to build this from scratch so i'm going to start off by building this actual shelf unit first because this just uses a couple of techniques that we looked at last week with our primitives um but it also uses something called instancing which is a lot of fun cool so first things first let's grab ourselves a cube and we're going to just sort of resize this a bit so i'm going to make it a bit smaller so something like 200 by six by sixty and we get this nice sort of this nice shelf shape and the only other thing i'm gonna do is so if you look at like everything around you everything has sort of like natural rounding or natural beveling and at the moment we have this really sharp edge and so we just want to kind of fill it this edge a little bit so all i'm gonna do is in my cube i'm gonna switch this on and three centimeters is a little bit too big so i'm just gonna bring this back down maybe to like one you know what i'm actually gonna go 0.5 because i don't want anything i don't want to get too crazy just a nice little bit of like rounding on the edge cool right so now we want three of these so i could just duplicate my cube so i could just um hold command and click and drag and then move it up but the problem with this is if i then want to change let's say the kind of the depth of my cubes i'd have to do it on both of them and that's not like a massive problem when we've only got like a couple of objects but imagine we had a whole load of them it can be a little bit irritating to be like oh no i don't know the producer wants it a different size and so what we can take advantage of is um something called instancing so let me just delete this second cube and i'll keep my original so i'm going to do i'm going to select my original cube so it's highlighted and i can tell it's highlighted because it's turned orange and then what i'm going to do i'm going to come into so this menu here um is where all we can find all of our generators you know the ones that match has gone through so subdivision cloth extrude all of those but we also have um what's called instance so if i just let go of my mouse we now have a cube instance and inside of this cube instance so if i select that we have a reference object and our reference object is our original primitive cube and so we can't see at the moment because they're actually on top of one another so let me just grab my cube instance and i'm going to move it up 50 centimeters so i'm holding my shift key and i'm pulling this up 50 centimeters cool now what i can do i can now actually duplicate my cube instance and so i'm just gonna do that normal thing i'm gonna press my command and i'm gonna click and i'm gonna drag and i now have a duplicate which is referencing that same original cube and i'm going to do the same thing i'm just going to pull this up 50 centimeters as well and so the wonder of instancing now if i want to change the size of my cube so if i grab my original cube and let's say i want to change this to 40 centimeters instead of 60 as i press 40 and i hit enter it's going to update all of my cubes including my instances as well so this is like a nice trick when you have duplicate objects um instancing so cool i'm gonna actually put them back on 260 because i quite like that size and i'm gonna leave them like that cool right so now let's do sort of like the back brackets and that again is just another cube and then we're just gonna make this five by 150 by five so these are the settings that we're gonna have for this one and what i'm gonna do i'm just going to pull this up 50 centimeters so it's in the middle and i'm going to pull it back let's say to there and we might need to just come in here then we can sort of pull this right on here just so it's sort of close enough cool so last week we had a look at um symmetry inside of cinema 4d so what we can do is we can come back into our sort of generators menu and we can grab our symmetry and the way that this works is we have to make the object that we want to kind of have the duplicate and do the symmetry on we have to make it a child of our symmetry generator so i need to do because this is the one i want to like duplicate i'm going to just make it a child of my symmetry and then when i pull this out we now have sort of like an exact copy um on the other side so now i can just go position that where i want and we'll leave it like that for now so now super quickly we have built our shelf and so now um let's actually look at how we can build some of the individual elements that we have on that so the first thing we're going to build if we come back to here is going to be this maxon text and so this uses a text blind and our extrude so we can build this super quickly for our scene what i'm going to do as well i'm going to grab all of these elements and i'm going to go to option g and that was how we can group everything and i'm just going to go and call this like shelf just so it's nice and neat and tidy could you super super quickly just show something that you can instance that group yeah yeah this and the fact that we can then create an instance of that move that over another bit and as long as we can continue to add or change stuff to the group we can have an instance of a group so you can you can only an instance is only capable of instancing one thing at a time but that thing could be a group thank you worries uh right let me get rid of it all cool let me get rid of that right cool so let's get to making this this sort of a text block so what i'm going to do i'm going to grab my text blind and so matt's already shown us like all the different stuff inside the text playing so i'm not going to worry about showing this too much let me just kind of move this a little bit out of the way and give myself some more room here so i'm going to write you can write whatever you want here i'm going to you know keep it keep it traditional and write the word max on and i'm gonna just find like a nice bold font so i quite like this one here and i'm gonna set it to black so we have nice sort of like bold old letters and there's another thing happening here so let me just center this to the middle and for now i'm actually just going to hide my uh my shelf because i don't i don't want it to be in the way while i'm building this so what i'm going to do on my shelf null so my group i'm just going to switch both of these to red by clicking them both twice and now it's kind of it's hidden out the way and so i can i can work just on my tech spine so let me just make this a little bit smaller cool um so we can see here that we have a little bit of like intersecting going on between my a and my x um so what i want to do i don't want to adjust my horizontal spacing because then the trouble is every other letter is too far apart and so i'm going to do i'm just going to switch on my kerning and i'm just going to pull my x over just to create that nice gap in between there i'm gonna switch that back off cool and now i have no intersecting so when i turn this into like geometry we're not gonna have any kind of weird like messy polygons happening um which can be a bit annoying cool right now all we have to do is we need to turn this into a geometry um and we know that we can do that by using our extrude generator so i'm going to come in here and i'm going to grab my extrude and now we need to tell cinema 4d that we want them to work together we want the text file and the extrude to kind of be in the same hierarchy so my text spline i'm going to grab that and i'm going to drop it onto my extrude so we can see one my extrude has kind of gone white and we also have this arrow pointing down and so as soon as i let go two things have happened we can now see in my viewport that we have some geometry and we also now have my text blind kind of branching off from my extrude so we can see that that's working exactly how we thought it would and then i'm just going to perfect some of these settings a little bit and so this offset is way too big i mean i'm probably going to end up making this even smaller when we bring our shelf back to make it match but for now i'm just gonna sort of change this offset um to maybe something like 20. cool so we're getting there now we can take advantage of our really cool like bevel tools that matt was showing us and what i ended up going for i ended up doing a um just like a step and then i think i did about size of like one cent maybe maybe two centimeters but then i'm only gonna have one segment and so we create this nice kind of like um blocky extrude which i think that's quite cool and that was pretty much how i created the block text and so what we're going to do we're going to bring our shelf back and now we can see here that it is way too big so what i'm going to do i'm going to come into my tech spline and i'm maybe going to set this to like 30. that's not too bad actually yeah we'll go maybe we'll go with 35. and then now i'm going to adjust my extrude a little bit more let's maybe go an offset of 15. cool and now i just want to place it on this middle shelf here and so we can take advantage of our placement tools which matt went through last week so if i grab my place tool we now have this sort of purple bunch of icons and if i grab my max on text i can actually just place it on here and now it's actually gone exactly on to the shelf and we can even kind of rotate it and it's going to stay on there this is going to be one of my favorite features from the last two to be perfectly honest it's just so helpful it makes things so easy so what you can also see hopefully you can see on the outside there's like light blue lines and so when they're light blue it means it's all good if they turn red it means it's having a problem with placing it properly and so i can see that let me see if i can make them go red there we go okay see there it's sort of like oh this isn't really working properly so it'll give you sort of that color preview cool so i might even now i've sort of shrunk it down a little i'm gonna just change this size to one again cool right so let's have a look at what we're gonna make next so let's make let's make this kind of like um bars thing here and if we grab we can have a look at the original spline if i switch my lathe off and come out of here this is sort of the original spline that i ended up drawing and so let's kind of let's all recreate that um right so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna come into my front view for this and that's because i want my um spline to be to remain on like one single plane i don't want my points to be kind of moving on the z-axis so i'm going to do that in my front view i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to switch my shelf off just so it's like not in the way too much and i'm going to come into the middle here and i'm going to draw i'm gonna draw this right so i apologize now uh because my talents with the slime pen are not exactly fantastic but we'll see how we go so i'm just gonna sort of draw this and just sort of round this round here something like that cool and i can hit escape to get rid of that and then what i'm going to do i see you're going to rival my nft oh do a little poll at the end i'm kidding um right i'm just going to grab actually all of these i'm just going to move them in a little and then this one here i want to make sure i have my spine selected make sure it is on um zero on my x um coordinate my position and otherwise if it's not we'll get that kind of weird um mess of geometry like overlapping uh if it's too far over or if it's not over enough we'll have a weird hole which we don't want cool so we've we've drawn our spline now all we have to do is grab our generator so we're going to grab our lathe and so we can see by the icon and it gives sort of like a nice explanation of what's going to happen and so i'm going to drop my spine into my lathe and now we have of us and i might even we can even still adjust this if we want to do something like that cool so i'm going to bring my shelf back and then i can do the same thing i can go back into model mode and i can place it oh wrong button i have the spline selected not the lathe important thing don't don't move it with the spline selected and make sure it's the lathe that's selected and you can place it on there and that might even make it a little bit bigger so i have a rotation band or i have like a transform cube so if i grab the transform cube it's gonna kind of scale up and it's going to remain placed uh perfectly on the shelf cool any questions before i get on to the next um thing that we're going to model um not as yet someone's asking can you add a drop shadow but that's not not something that works in 3d as such yeah you could turn on um ambient occlusion occlusion in the yeah yeah you just want to turn around so i'll do a little interactive render region so just so we can see it i was going to say you don't even need to do that you can turn it on directly into the viewport not true so there we go uh symbol is equivalent of my drop shadow there we go there's a couple of different ways so you can turn it off there and turn off the interactive render region um which is it's fine for rendering but also if you go to yeah just uh options and ssao and that will just give you a little bit of helps you see stuff a bit better yeah let's leave that on then that's quite cool cool right okay so now we're gonna make let's make this the lava lamp because we're gonna what we're going to do we're actually going to use a reference image for this and so if you're ever modeling things inside of cinema 4d you might find that you might want to use a reference image directly inside of the software and this can help you um when it comes to modeling and that's what we're going to do now we're going to use one and it's just one that i took off google purely for this session so i'm going to do again um i like to work a lot in the front view when i'm sort of doing things like this and inside of any of your views you can come to view and configure or the shortcut is shift v so if i hit configure we have a bunch of different options in here and one of them is um back and back allows us to add an image to the back of kind of this viewport that's what i can do and hit my three dots and as we can see i've got my lava lamp image here so i'm just going to open that and it's going to be super big so let me just pull this down um maybe like that big and then again i'm gonna switch my shelf off just so it's not in the way cool and so what we can do we can use this reference image now and we can create our geometry uh using it and it's kind of a nice little kind of trick and so what i'm gonna do i i know that i'm gonna use um the loft generator for this i'm gonna put a whole bunch of circle splines inside of the loft to create this um this shape and so i'm going to do it in three different parts so i'm going to do the first part slow and then i'll do the rest of it and relatively quickly because it's the same process so what i'm going to do let me just come out i'm going to grab myself a circle spline and it's going to be up here and it's going to be huge and my plane oh so like the orientation of my circle spine is wrong so i actually want it to be xz yeah that's right i also want it to be a load smaller so let's put it on three for now i'll press s to focus on that selected thing i'm just going to put it all the way to the top so i'm going to do this top sort of silver bit first so if i come in what i can do i'm going to position my first circle spline right on the top and i'm going to hold t just to shrink it down and now i'm going to grab my axis handle and i'm going to duplicate a bunch of circle splines and have them match the size of this reference image so i'm going to command click and i'm going to pull this down and i'm going to hold t to scale it up and i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to keep doing this until i have much the whole shape made out of circle splines so let me do this again and i'm not going to go crazy with it i'm just going to sort of leave it maybe like that and so we can see we now have a whole load of circle splines so i've used seven and now if we come in here we can see sort of that these circle splines are making up this shape here and so now i can do i can grab my loft i can grab all my circle splines and i can drop them into my loft and we've now turned those splines into the geometry and that's matching this pretty perfectly and so now all i need to do is the same thing so i'm actually going to duplicate this last circle spline but i'm going to pull it out of the loft and now i'm going to shrink it down a little bit i'm just going to do the same thing so i'm just going to do this bit a little bit quicker so normally i'd be you know a lot more careful and probably have it a lot more detailed but purely for this i just want to do it as quickly as possible for you guys to see how kind of easy it is to build with um the loft and build with a reference image so i'm going to grab my loft again and this time i want to grab this bunch of circles lines and drop that in there and then again i'm going to grab the final one just for this kind of third area down here just pop that in there as i'm doing this matt are there any questions that anyone has no i can't oh i can i can fill that's right i'm very nearly there this is uh doing this as quickly as i possibly can it's probably not going to be as detailed as it probably should be but hey-ho right and for the final time grabbing my loft and i'm dropping those in there now let's have a look at what this looks like lava lamp so now we have our lava lamp and so as you can see it's not kind of like the most detailed but hey i would have normally spent a little bit more time on this and i'm sure you guys can if you're building this from scratch or following along um later so if we switch our shelf back on what we can do we can grab our individual uh loft elements and highlight all of them and then grab our place tool and now we can grab this and we can put this on top of here and i might just shrink this down a little bit it's a bit too big i'm gonna put that there can you quickly re-show the background image please how to do that yeah sure yeah so what you do so come to the specific kind of um view that you want and so for me it was the front view so i've got my front view here and just enlarge that and then you come over to view then configure or shift v and then that will take you to um all your settings for your viewport and there's a tab that's titled back and then you can add an image inside of this thing here and we can always you know switch it on or off if it kind of gets in the way or just clear it out perfecto thank you no worries right so what's next what's next let's build this so we've got 15 minutes so yeah yeah we're good so let's build this bottom little kind of a bit of a neon sign going on um which is going to use our sweep so what we can do first things first we are going to grab sort of like that like that back plate which was just um really simply a cube so let me shrink this down and pull this in i'm just sort of gonna eyeball this maybe wrong one that one there cool right now we need to get ourselves a text spline so again you know you could have it saying whatever you want i just wanted to have the word love cause i thought it looked kind of cute so i'm just repositioning this um right okay so the font i went for so i want you to find like a nice rounded font because if you think of like a neon sign it's sort of like a tube and so the chances are everything is going to be a bit more rounded um anyway and i have this nice one that's called like nanito and i think it's just nice and rounded i'm just going to write the word love cool so i'll make this a little bit smaller just so it fits on this back bit here maybe 25 we'll go for cool so as we know as matt showed us we can use the sweep generator to sweep a spline over or around another spline and so because i want it to look like a neon tube or a neon sign i've got my my love is my first spine and then i'm gonna use a circle spline to kind of sweep around it and it's gonna make it look like a tube so what i'm going to do i'm going to grab a circle spline and i want this to be really really small because my my letters and this kind of hold down sign is very small so i'm going to make this something like 0.2 and then i'm going to grab my sweep and so i want my text spline in my sweep and then i need to also put my circle spline in between them and so now we have our tube and so we could actually make it a little bit bigger should we give it point four cool so you can see how that i saw that i always haven't it's looking a little bit weird at the moment but hey ho i might let me just put that on back on here so it looks like a bit of a sign cool and then i'm just going to make my cube a little bit smaller and then move this back in again let me have a little neon sign i'm going to grab both my sweep and my cube and i'm going to place them again and here i'm just going to rotate it a little bit as well cool so we're getting closer so matt's already modelled our uh dolphin for us so all i did with that was i if i grab my dolphin i can copy it and paste it so all i did was i took the same uh dolphin model that matt made i put it on a cube and a cylinder to make it look like um a bit of an ornament okay cool right so everybody needs a dolphin ornament i mean yeah right so um let's take a look how we can bring illustrator files into cinema 4d so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to show you guys in 25 because we have an all new spline importer and this kind of if anyone has done this previously in some of the older versions um you'll see how kind of different it really is now so illustrator i have the maxon logo i'm gonna do so i have this it's just sort of like one one path that's been filled with this red color and i'm actually gonna add a stroke of two and there's a reason for that because there's a load of different things i want to show you in the spline importer cool so what i'm gonna do so i've got my maxon logo which is like a fill and i've also got my stroke on the outside and i'm just going to save it um let's say maxon logo new because i think i've already got one and i'm going to leave it at illustrator 2020. okay but surely it can't work with that now well matt we finally moved on from illustrator eight um cool right so we've done so we've got our logo now so i'm now in version 25 and i'm just going to drag and drop that file that i just saved which is my illustrator file into cinema 4d and we're going to get this adobe illustrator import and so we normally we used to get this but we didn't get um there's a couple of settings that are a bit different now the main setting is this create vector object we want this to be enabled and now what's going to happen is it's going to come in as um geometry so i'm going to press ok and then now we have our logo as 3d geometry inside of cinema 4d and it even matches the colors for us and so what's happening so we have our maxon logo nude dot ai and this is our vector import generator so we take a look at some of the settings in here so the first thing to mention is we have the file that it's targeting and what is so great about this is i can come into illustrator i can let's say change this to i love the colors that i have change this to a different color put my straight back in and go file save come back into silver 4d and then refresh it and it will refresh your file so i just changed the color because there was nothing else exciting i could change but if you'd made a load of drastic changes to your paths or your fills or anything it's going you're going to be able to just update it inside of cinema 4d which is quite a big deal it's quite um it's quite a cool feature that is cool we um i've got a couple of quick questions on this does this only work with illustrator files i must say i think anything is um pdf as well okay um someone's asked about affinity files which i don't know about this this adobe illustrator importer this is what it is it is ai files svg files and pdf files right perfect thank you very much no worries so we have a couple different settings in here so we have what's called a layer offset um for me it's not going to do anything because i only have one layer but if we had multiple layers it would offset each of those layers from one another we have our extrude depth and this is basically similar to our normal extrude but it's all inside of the vector import tool so i can now extrude and and increase the depth of my extrude directly inside of here which before actually you know what i'll show you what used to do before to show you how different and how great this actually really is so yeah huh my old workflow yes and then we have this sweep strike so this is why i added a sweep um to my ai file otherwise we wouldn't be able to see these options and so we have we can control the depth of our stroke as well as the width so the important thing to note with the width of the stroke 100 is going to be um the size that you selected and so in illustrator because i've only got a stroke weight of two which isn't loads 100 is only gonna go up to two and so i can't go i can't go higher than that it's only ever gonna hit that kind of um that stroke width we can control the rounding which is the rounding of our strokes we can see if we come in here we have some nice rounding going on we can control our growth so if i sort of do this we can have it sort of grow round and we have an offset as well so we can move this back and we could increase our depth we could set that to like 50 as well and then we have it sort of looking like a bit like a casing around the edge and even better all of this stuff as you can probably see has the ability to be key framed as well so what if we wanted to get into the actual information inside of the vector import and we can do that really easily we can just enable hierarchy and as soon as i've enabled that you might have seen we now have this drop down option and so if i drop these down everything's put into a null then everything will be put into it at individual layers inside that have come from illustrator basically so i've only got one layer so i can't show how this shows multiple if i pull that down we then have what we've just been learning which is our normal generators so if i pull these down we have our sweep object or our sweep generator with our maximum spline and our rectangle spline and then we also have our extrude object and an original spline here so if i just switch all these off and just leave this spline you can see this is what we have and this is how things used to come into cinema 4d and they've just been put into all of the things that we could possibly need but it's now all just accessible inside of this vector import so back in the day we used to basically save things out as um illustrator eight so that's what we had to do so if you don't have version 25 oh my god i'm having the worst time with this i don't want a stroke okay okay so if you're on anything pre-25 this is what you would um do so you'd go file you would go save wrong save as and then let's go max on logo and i'm going to call it aih just so i know which one it is and i'm going to save it and i'm going to change my version to illustrator eight and i'm gonna go okay and it's gonna give me a little alert there and that's cool and then s24 so i'm deliberately putting this in the older version i'm going to drag my max on logo illustrator eight and we can see we still get our importer but as you can see we don't have as many options i'm going to press ok and this is how it would come in that's weird this is how it would come in for you guys we can then center it out using our coordinates manager and i'm just going to make it a load bigger and so what we would need to do we can then use this as a normal spline we can grab our extrude and we can drop it into an extrude and then we can do like our normal the normal things that we would do inside of here so that's how you would do it if you don't have version 25 but of course this isn't referencing the original illustrator file so you would need to re-save out the illustrator file and re-import if you made any changes to the original file so i'd like that's awesome like that's such a wonderful forward yeah and i think it's something people have been kind of hoping for since illustrator eight um yes pretty much um yeah so basically all i did was i that was how i created these and these little parts in here was using that setup that we just had a look at i'm very aware it is uh five to three minutes two look at that we've actually done it yes so are there any questions on on anything anything on the swine importer like i know it's uh a lot of information at once lots of people loving it that's for sure there were a few quick questions um i don't think we may know the answer to um oh okay if you were to change the inset of the stroke in illustrator um whether or not it would change but i'm not sure we would know we'd have to ex play with that ourselves to figure out that but to be honest most people are saying that it's really cool and really fun really enjoying it cool good that's good then um right yes i was going to solve oh no you go uh someone has asked how do you set the third point first point when you want to animate the spline but i think we'll have to cover that another time when we do animation in a week or two's time i'm afraid oh yeah we can do that and yeah and then what i'll do i'll save so i've got the balloon i've got a bit of like a balloon text so we'll do this ah lovely we'll have a look at this um another day um but yeah to create that kind of nice like bubbly text um we'll definitely do that either probably animation dynamics maybe um in mograph i mean i've already been thinking about what to do for that so um right let me where is my quick keynote so just so everyone knows the sort of things that we're going through next week um week three so i can't believe that's gonna be week three this always goes way too quickly that is this course i know um so it's gonna be all things to do with lighting and materials and this is gonna be inside of um standard cinema 4d so we're gonna look at creating our own materials from scratch and so if you look on kind of the right hand side you can see that's the shelf we kind of just made and that's what we're going to be lighting and building our materials for um from scratch we're also going to look at sort of like standard verse physical or pbr workflows and what exactly they mean and how we can set things up differently depending on which workflow we're kind of going for uh we look at all things lighting so kind of like area lights omni lights how we can adjust intensity lighting with hdri images and how and why we would maybe do that and then also lighting of luminance and then we're going to look at global illumination because that's going to be a key thing when we're using like our hdri images uh if you have time we might touch on a bit of volumetric lighting um but no promises and as always there will be a project file ready that will be this complete scene on the right hand side um for you guys to break down and use and you know do whatever you want with um and as always um any work that you post i know a couple of people have been doing it already feel free to use the hashtag halmax on and we will you know check that out like tag us in your stuff we always like to see what you do whether it's to do with this course or not it's always interesting what you guys um are creating and kind of being a part of your journey uh as well that's always like super interesting um yeah so and thanks matt as well for all your like technical stuff i feel like i definitely learned a load today as well i'm glad and thank you very much for showing how to make cool stuff out of it all so let's have it again for another week already i know it's crazy and thank you to everyone who's here with us like whether you were here last week or whether this was your first week like it's so great having you guys live as well as anyone who's watching the youtube recording thank you so much um and to all of your questions as well like we love answering them out loud because definitely whoever's watching the recording um i'm sure they'll be having the same questions as you guys so it definitely you know makes it way more kind of interesting and interactive for us as well so we appreciate it right have a good one guys and we will see you all next week yes see you all next week cheers bye bye you

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 2,120

Rating: 4.8499999 out of 5

Keywords: Maxon, Red Giant, C4D, Cinema 4D, Trapcode, Universe, VFX, Post production, tutorial, webinar, Magic Bullet, Redshift

Id: jlOR6R_XlA0

Length: 121min 11sec (7271 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021