C4D TUTORIAL | Low Poly Apartment & Shop (Beginner)

hey what is up guys this is Eli in today's tutorial we are going to make a low poly house or building inside of cinema 4d so stay tuned to start off I would like to give you a side note I will not go into too much detail about all the basics about cinema 4d so if this is the first time you're using cinema 4d I would recommend checking out a basic tutorial so you know the basics and you can just follow along so to start off I would like to give you a quick tip on using the viewport camera many people use these small buttons on top of the viewports and they work perfectly fine but they're a little bit small to reach and it's not very practical to use in the long run instead some people use the one two and three keys on the numpad but I prefer to use the Alt key on my keyboard or option on the Mac just hold down the left mouse button to rotate the middle mouse button to pan and the right mouse button to zoom in or out also for this tutorial we are going to adjust some of the project settings you can do this by hitting command or ctrl + D on the keyboard and down here at the right side of the screen you can scroll down and change the color to 80% gray this will give objects a default color of this gray and it's a little bit easier to work with in my opinion it just looks better overall up next I also like to adjust the display settings so if you go up here at display you can pick the second one garage shading lines so now when you look at the cubes you can see the lines of the edges so you have a better view about what is going on inside of your project in the long run so with our cube selected let's go into this details panel again and let's add some segments to the cube let's make tree at each side and just make it five at the Z segments now when you drag and drop one of these yellow knobs you can stretch the cube in any way you like let's make it something like this at all and slightly squeeze then cube alright so up next you need to make the object editable in order to manipulate the power guns and all the edges and points you can do this by clicking this button at the top or just hitting C on the keyboard now go into polygons mode and now you can select any polygon you want we are going to select the middle row at the top you can simply do this by clicking and holding shift and now drag up the green arrow to raise these polygons this will be our basic shape for the roof now if we zoom and you can see a little bit of weird shading on top of the roof this is because cinema 4d by default kind of rounds all the edges for you but we are working with very straight edges so it gets a little bit weird you can easily fix this by selecting the font tag at the side here and just deleting it now all the shapes will be exactly hard like we drew great so now we want to pick our live selection tool and make sure only select the visible elements is check down here and let's drag all over our roof and hold shift if you need to add more polygons now you can right click and select extrude or just simply hit D on the keyboard it's a little bit easier and drag on top of your roof until you see it get a little bit thicker down here at the right you can see the number about how thick the extrusion is let's make it about 5 centimeters in this case now let's pick our move tool again by hitting a on the keyboard and click on the edges of the roof while holding shift pick the extrude tool again and extend by 5 centimeters again great now for the last part of the roof let's extend these sides by selecting them holding shift and then extrude them five centimeters again also let's rename our cube to building by double-clicking or clicking and hitting Enter up next we want to make a chimney for our roof we can do this by creating a new cube and scaling it down a lot until it fits something like this now make the shape editable again select our top polygon and select the scale to and while holding command or control on the keyboard drag the shape outputs but make sure you're not dragging on top of the shape just outside of the shape with this polygon still selected go into your move tool again and drag the upper arrow while holding the command/ctrl key again now on the keyboard we can press the i key for in extrusion or just right click and select inner extrusion and drag the shape inwards and now with the command or control key selected again let's drag the shape inwards also let's rename this to chimney for the next step we want to make some kind of edges at the sides of the building to do this start by clicking on the building and select the edge mode now when we press K on our keyboard a small tooltip pops up and let's select the loop or path cut by hitting L now when you hover on an edge you can see the shape kind of transitions when you move to the upper part of the screen this is because it automatically calculates something in between of the two edges to fix this we can select the offset mode and set it to edge distance now you can see it just behaves like we wanted to click somewhere around about here and you can see at the side the distance is somewhere near 10 centimeters and we want it to be 10 centimeters and let's do the same with this one as well so now back into our polygons mode let's hit you and then L on the keyboard to select the loop selection tool and now we can select a whole ring around the building with these polygons hold shift to select the second ring and now on the keyboard press D to select the extrude tool again and drag outwards about five centimeters again now we're going to add some windows to our building very necessary of course to do this create a new cube and scale it down roughly position it at the side of the building and scale it until it looks something like a window and just duplicate the shape while holding ctrl or command on keyboards and drag it upwards now duplicate it again and rotate the shape so we can add two more windows at this side for the upper portion of the building we are going to add different windows but first we're going to make the indents on the building where these placeholder windows are right now so up here click and hold and you can select bool basically this is like in Illustrator where two shapes overlap each other and they intersect so now select the building and drag it inside of this blue object you'll see it gets a child of the blue parent and now select all the cubes and drag them in as well and you see nothing really happened this is because abû only intersects between two objects but there are five inside right now so now we need to select all the cubes and group them you can simply do this by pressing Alt + G not command on G Alt + G now make sure the building is at the top of the hierarchy and you'll see it cuts out perfectly up next let's open this group again with the windows and select one cube we're going to duplicate a sub copy and paste it make sure it's outside of the boo and we're going to use this to make some shapes around two windows so scale it down squeeze it down and make it a little bit wider so it kind of looks like a windowsill duplicate it rotate it duplicate it to the top again so for the upper portion of the building we want to create different windows we want to make windows with a round top to do this go into this menu and select the rectangle and now we want to change views so we can have an exact view of the side of this rectangle to do this go up here at this little icon or hit the middle mouse button and let's go into the front mode make sure the object is editable select the point mode now when we right click on top of the edge at the top we can select create point so let's zoom in a little bit and click right side of the middle of this edge now with the move tool we can drag it up and right click again and select soft interpolation this rounds this point now with these black knobs we can just drag these outwards try to stay horizontal when doing this and keep adjusting until you're satisfied now scale this down until it fits some of our previous windows let's go back into our perspective mode you can see the shape is not filled if it's just a couple of lines to make this a real solid shape we need to extrude these lines you can do this by selecting extrude up here and dragging the rectangle inside of the extrude object when we select the extrude subject we can go into the object properties and you see extrusion is at the right side right now so let's rotate the shape and put it right at the top of the building duplicate it for a second window and let's just add them inside of this group of the ball great so this is the basic shape of our building already well let's move on and go to the bottom of the building make sure the building is selected go into polygon mode and select all the bottom polygons and let's extrude these a little bit like 20 centimeters this can be done easily by holding shift when you hold shift everything goes in increments of 10 centimeters now press U and L on the keyboard again to select it loop selection tool and let's select this ring of patterns with the extrude tool we can extend these again by 5 centimeters right up next we want to add a hole for our door it looks good when it also has a round top so let's just pick one of these previous extrusions and duplicate it to the bottom and now you can scale it up so it looks more like a door instead of a window when you're not satisfied about the shape you can select the rectangle and go into point mode and adjust according to your needs also we want to add some kind of attic windows so let's start off with a round one at the side you can do this by creating a cylinder rotate and scale it until it fits something like this and just drag inside of the windows inside of the ghoul now for a window that sticks outside of the roof let's select one of these rounded extrusions copy and paste it so it's outside of the boo and drag it up now let's make less tall so it kind of looks realistic and change the extrusion so Italy sinks inside of the roof to make further adjustments on this window we need to make it editable again by hitting this button or pressing C on the keyboard and now go inside of this group and select the front cap when you're into the polygon mode you can make an inner extrusion again and then drag in the shape a little bit while holding ctrl or command so it gets a little bit of an indent now you see a little bit of glitchy shading going on here this can be fixed by deleting the form tag again so keep this as a reminder if there is some kind of weird shading going on you might need to delete the font tag now select the main extrusion again let's pick our life selection tool again and just drag over the top of the window and extrude it again so we get a little bit of a roof feeling also select these sides and extrude this as well so we have an overhang now we want to select the front of this roof also if you see you selected too much of it you can simply hold command or ctrl on keyboards and select the polygon that isn't necessary to be selected now extrude the shape so we have an overhang the next step it would be nice to add some gutters on the roof to do this let's create a tube shape and scale and rotate it until it sweet fits under the roof now select the tube and go into the sly step and just select slice you can see the tubes now sliced enough it's not starting and ending at the right point let's make it from 90 to 270 degrees great enough for the drain part you can just pick a regular cylinder and just make it really thin now position it until it fits don't really worry about the length we can adjust this later and now let's make this object editable again now zoom in at the bottom portion of the cylinder and let's select all the bottom polygons let's extrude these move this a little bit forward and rotate this and repeat so we get a little bit of a curve at the end of the drain now right here we can see the objects are overlapping this is obviously not something we want so let's hit K and L again for the loop cut too and just make a cut right on top of the overlapping part now go into our move tool and select this ring with the you and L key for the loop selection tool make sure you are in the edge mode you might need to zoom in a little bit to select this and just drag this ring outwards you can also reposition this a little bit so it looks more wonky it gives the building a little bit more of character now repeat this step on the other overlapping parts now you can see the gutter ends are still open so this wouldn't work in real life so to fix this we can delete the second gutter I made so we can fix this and then duplicate it again so with this one duplicated then scale it down horizontally and move it right to the side now when we change the inner radius to zero we can make the full shape again duplicate this to the other side of the gutter and then duplicate the whole gutter to the other side of the building it might also be a good time to rename our objects that haven't been renamed already so this starting to look like something so we went down here we can see a door with no steps to reach the door so let's make those steps start off by selecting the building and go into polygon mode select this middle polygon at the front and scale it up horizontally so it's wider than the actual door we want to separate this polygon into three equal polygons this can be done by right clicking and selecting the loop or path cut make sure we're strict to selection is selected and now just click somewhere inside of this polygon and then down here you can change the number of cuts to two so that adds up to three separate polygons divided by two edges or cuts so now when you deselect everything you can see the cuts only reached inside of the single polygon because we check that check mark so let's select these three polygons and extrude them while holding shift so it's just ten centimeters then select the bottom two polygons and exclude these ten centimeters and finally only the bottom one so these are our stairs now this look a little bit lost so let's make some sites for these staircases just create a new cube and rescale it until it looks something like this make the cube editable and go inside of the edge mode then select this edge now you can see the edge axes are kind of in a weird rotation you can fix this by resetting the axis rotation to do this go up here and select enable axis and then down in these fields you can see the rotation values of this axis let's put zeros instead and hit apply and now the axis aren't perfectly straight make sure you deselect the enable axis mode and now you can move the axis like we wanted to you might need to repeat this on the other side so you can make nice sites for our staircase when you're done duplicate the shape at the other side and you're completely done next up let's add some kind of balconies only top windows let's start off with a disk roughly position it on the center of the windows edge and make sure it kind of overlaps the sides down here let's add some more rotation segments something around 53 would be a good option just make sure it's not an even number also let's add some disk segments so outer ring has some kind of square shapes let's make this disk editable and go into our polar mode and let's select every other polygon starting from the walls with you select just extrude these upwards or now let's undo this and before we are going to extrude these let's duplicate our object and then go to the bottom one and extrude them now let's take a look at the bottom of the balcony and select our second object we just duplicate it make sure all the polygons are selected now we can extrude this to make the bottom a little bit thicker now let's duplicate the so shape and of 0 and drag it upwards you might need to rotate it to make it look like a filled shape now get a little bit of a look at the top we need to delete the whole center of this balcony part so select all the unnecessary polygons and just delete them now let's group locate them to the other window so that is basically it for this part of the building for the next part which is the Shabbat aside I will be going a little bit faster because it's mostly the same techniques so bear at me when I'm going a little bit fast I start off with creating a new cube and roughly scaling it until it fits the kind of dimensions of the previous building also make sure there are two segments at each side just to make things a little bit easier and now when the object is editable select the upper edges and drag them apart to make a slanted roof make sure the fan tag is delete it in the polygons mode select the upper portion of the roof extrude these do the same on the sides here at the front I want to make a window in the door let's raise these edges a little bit so we have more room to work with these polygons select the right one and duplicate it put the scale tool so it's just as white as the door would be selecting the upper edge we need to reset the axes again and now we can move it down like we wanted to let's make it a little bit wider select the polygon drag it inwards duplicate with the scale tool again and also drag this inwards so we have a little bit of an indent like there are two doors for a doorknob select this polygon and inner extrude it let's scale it down a little bit and just place it to this side of the door and then extrude it outwards so it's a little bit thicker at this side of the front we want to have a nice big window so make an inner extrusion again exclude it inwards and then for the windows say like this bottom polygon extrude it just a little bit and then select this newly created polygon and drag it outwards so now we have a nice little window zoom up next let's add some kind of sign above the window also duplicate the shape to make some second sign we can put above the door and we want to add some kind of text on top of this we can simply do this by clicking here and selecting text inside of the object properties we can manually add the words we want to show in this case I'll go for flowers let's scale it and position it until it fits design we can see the sine is a little bit wider than our text so let's go into the horizontal spacing here and let's stretch the text a little bit once again we can see the text is just that bunch of lines and another real shape so we need to extrude it again make sure you're extruding at the right side a duplicate this and position it on the other side and we might need to reduce the letter spacing again it would also be nice to have some kind of lamp at the side of this building so to do this I create a cone and the cylinder let's drag this upwards so we can focus on these and just rescale everything until it kind of fits like a lamp remove the caps of the cone we don't need these and also duplicate a cylinder make it editable and let's do this trick we did on the drain by extruding rotating and moving slices we just created group this name and lamp and now we can scale it down and position it where we want it to also let's make some room for some plants by starting with a cube with an inner extrusion and make it sink inside of the building so it feels like it's connected to the walls then make a second cube can make it really small this will be the base for our bushes make the object editable again scale down the top and polygons a little bit and then extrude it again drag it over a little bit to the left in this case make some more extrusions that will serve like branches and now on top of this let's add a tall cube and then the object properties let's select fill it or fillet if you want to act French and add a bunch of segments to the cube so we can easily manipulate the shape of this now here comes the fun part when we make the object editable again and select the polygons mode right click a select the brush make sure it's not too big you can resize this by holding the middle mouse button and dragging and now you can drag-and-drop to reshape the bushes now duplicate this and rotate them a little bit to make a little bit of variation in the view also let's add a cube down here at the entrance to make it look a little bit more inviting now we're really finishing things up so let's add some more details by duplicating some of these windowsills and dragging them up here like it's a window frame you might want to do this at this round window as well and finally appear at the attic window so that's basically our building as you can notice there is no floor for a building so let's make something for this we are going to use a cylinder for this make it really large and down here at the object properties select the caps tab and select Philips adjust the radius until you're satisfied something about 8 centimeters looks fine then go into the top view so you can perfectly Center it with the building then make sure it kind of connects with the actual building so it's not floating and this is our final model now if we click on the render button it doesn't look very pleasing at all but don't worry this can easily be fixed up here we can hit edit render settings and click on the effect button we get a whole list of effects which we just want the first one ambient occlusion this is something you use in mostly every project that needs to look a little bit realistic you don't need to fiddle around with these settings just go outside of this window and hit render again and you can see nice shading to enhance this look let's add a light source the best one for beginners is the physical sky inside of cinema 4d when you render you can see something is happening it's like the sun is shining but not something that looks pleasing right now out of the box to fix this go inside of time and location and now you can start playing around personally I am a big fan of using the month of May for this project let's set the time to something about 90 hours 45 minutes something about that let's render this and you'll see everything is orange we don't want this but this is happening because the only light source right now is some and discern at this time of day only shed some kind of orange light obviously but it's not bouncing of clouds it's not bouncing of a trick I usually like to apply to a project using physical sky is adding a second manual light which we can manipulate more easily you can do this by clicking on this light bulb and selecting area light now when we rotate the camera we can see the light source of the physical sky where we send this and let's drag the area light somewhat in front of this so the light comes from the same direction let's make the color some kind of orange as well now down here make sure the shadow is set to area this is somewhat the most realistic shadow option but also one of the slower ones and now when we hit render we can see it adds a little bit more of a dimension to the whole building the details pop out a little bit more now we want to get rid of this orange look to it we can save this by adding a white light so click on the slide bulb to create a regular light make sure it's an omni light keep the shadow to none and then down here is the magic button ambient illumination when you click this it will light the whole scene on its own regardless of the position of your light bulb you can instantly see everything turns more white but now it would be too bright so let's turn down the intensity to something like 80 or 83 and hit render and now you can see the original colors of the object are coming back to life now let's not forget the lamp at the side of the building we also need some kind of light source for this one and we can do this with a spotlight when you create this you can already see in what direction the spot would cast light so let's rotate it and put it in place and drag the bottom circle a little bit upwards because it doesn't need to extend all the way down there you can also resize the radius of the fall-off now in the light properties let's make it a little bit of a warmer tone because most light isn't really white make sure the shadow is set to area and then the second option is to set the visibility to volumetric this will make sure you can see some kind of age around the light so when we render this you can see the light falling off so this is basically our lighting feel free to adjust this to anything you like it's really up to you what you like next up let's make sure we have some kind of nice composition a nice angle we're viewing the building you can do this by creating a camera up here make sure you're selecting this little black square so it turns white and now in the object properties change the focal length to 200 this is some kind of trick where you zoom in so much that the perspective is kind of crunched together it's basically the opposite of a fisheye lens where everything looks really tall and big this makes it look like a miniature building so when you're satisfied with the position we might want to lock the camera position so we don't accidentally move it around when we're working on the project itself to do this right-click on the camera and go into the cinema 4d tags and select the protection tag now you can't move the camera again until you delete this tag so now as a finishing touch we can add some colors and textures to our model to make it look like a finalized project to create a color or material to put on top of an object you can simply double click down here in this field double-click to open it and most of the times for this kind of low poly style we can deselect the reflectance because it makes everything look really plasticky and cheap we just want to have some nice pure colors so when we click on color we can adjust the color for the balls we are going to make some kind of off-white kind of beige tint you can drag and drop this on top of the building object and also on top of the second building now for your window sills and all these edges on and all these edges around the building we want to have something a little bit brighter so let's create a new color and make it some lighter beige or almost gray look and select your building and pick the polygon mode and with the loop selection tool we can select all the polygons we want to give this color once we selected what we want you can simply drag and drop the colors on top of it let's also add this color on the chimney and all the window sill details it's easier to put it on top of the group now you might have noticed we have some kind of weird gradient in the back this is the physical sky we are seeing we want to hide this so select the physical sky and right click and go into cinema 4d tags and select the compositing tag and down here we can uncheck scene by camera and now it's completely gone we will replace it by a background we manually select it and create it for the roof we want to have some kind of really dark brownish color so like all the problems we need to color and apply the material do the same thing with the second building now down here at the side we want to add the accents color to the cube and then create a new material for the dirt that is inside of the cube this will be some kind of really dark brown color something that looks like dirt to give a little bit more character to this material we can add a texture to this which is noise and set the mix mode to multiply and we might want to make the noise really thin so it doesn't look like big chunks so click on this image and set the global scale to something like 3% it's really small now select the polygon which will be the dirt and drag the material on top of it next up is another kind of brown for the branches and some kind of green you like for the bushes itself for the lab material we are not going to deselect the reflectance just add some kind of rusty gold look to it maybe bronze up here at the front let's make these letters red to make them stand out a little bit for all the metal parts we are also keeping the reflectance channel checked and make the color some kind of gray of course apply them to the gutter the drained balcony everything that's metal also make sure the Attic roof is also red in this case I forgot to make the rest of the shape this kind of off beige so let's drag this material on top of it but you can see it overrides all the other materials if you look at the side you can see this material is set at the last position in the row just drag and drop it in front of all the other materials so the hierarchy is restored again so when we render we can see it's starting to look like something but the background is pure black and it doesn't really fit in the whole scene so let's create a new background you can do this right here and create a new material for disk let's add a texture to it which will be a gradient click on the image of the gradient and set the type to 2d circular let's make it from Y to something slightly gray and set the mode to multiply now set the main color to something beige yellow and apply it to the background and it doesn't really look that nice so let's so let's play around with the mix mode let's just keep it at normal and set the mix strength to something about 40 that looks kind of nicer maybe add a little bit more of contrast to the gradient now for the windows we need to add a special material that looks kind of transparent kind of reflective but doesn't really make it see true because we have no objects inside of our building so start off with creating a new material setting the color to some kind of medium dark grey and go into the reflectance channel appear click on the Add button and add a Beckmann reflection now check transparency and here at refraction put 2.2 this makes it look kind of light in glass and also reduce the brightness so it's less see-through apply this material on the extrusions and all the window parts except for the Attic ones because we want to make them look a little bit more dark for those let's duplicate this glassy material and make the color a little bit more bright and blue and reduce the brightness of the transparency so it's less see-through then apply the material to these upper windows also apply that same material to the bottom window of the shop and the doors for the door handle we can reuse the same material we used for the drain and all the metal objects so that's basically it now it's just up to you to fine-tune everything you want the lighting the camera position and the colors until it looks good to your taste I have one final bonus trick for you if you select all the objects that create this building and group them together you can go up here and select any of these let's take paper and drag them inside of the group now when we resize this purple frame so it fits around our building and adjust the strength you can see it gets kind of inflated or deflated like you can see in cartoons so this might be a nice little detail to make a little bit more cartoony or playful if you like that so that is it for this kind of lengthy tutorial I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned a lot and with all the techniques we learn today you can make all kinds of buildings create cities all kinds of creative things with this kind of simple and low-poly style if you have any kind of comments or questions about this video just put them down below leave a like if you liked this video and I'll catch you next time [Music]

Channel: Twistereli

Views: 118,849

Keywords: C4D, cinema 4D, tutorial, tut, lesson, guide, beginner, starter, easy, low poly, amateur, 3d, modelling, modeling, model, render, settings, lighting, materials, texturing, textures, coloring, miniature, cute, house, building, shop, city, village, street, twistereli, town, apartment, architecture, game, dribbble, graphic design, free download, how to

Id: Ix_E0JC_n1U

Length: 40min 0sec (2400 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2017