Cinema 4D Tutorial for Beginners - How to Create a Low Poly Environment

hey everyone and welcome back to edge CGI in this tutorial we'll be teaching you the basics of cinema 4d by creating a stylish low poly environment some of the topics that we'll be covering will include the fundamentals of shape form lighting in color and we'll also cover how to create the mountains and finally how to render your image we'll be using this version of cinema 4d 18 for this video but as this is a course for beginners most of the features that we'll be using will be available across most versions of the program so we'll get started by loading up some for cinema 4d 2 default layout so it's return to this layout you simply go to window customization layouts and you can select the start up there so the bulk of the screen will be taken up by the viewport which is what we'll be spending most of our time looking at and it will also be where our environment will be seen at the top here we've got our menu bar this is where we'll select our main menu buttons such as the selection tool the move tool the scale tool the rotate tool and we also have the render buttons here and over to the right we have our creation and modify tools over to the right of the screen is where we'll have our list of objects so this will include all the 3d shapes that we'll be creating for our scene so just to give you an example if we select and click on the cube button here to spawn a cube you can see that the cube is in our viewport and it's also appeared in our list here below this you will see a window where we can edit our objects and I'll show you how to use this throughout the video and then to the left of the screen we have our modeling options so this is where we can edit the points the edges and the polygons and then over to the bottom here we've got some animation options and the position options so to navigate the viewport simply hold the Alt key on the keyboard and then press the mouse button to look around your object to pan across keep holding the art button and then click and drag on the middle mouse button click on the middle mouse button again and you'll see that we've got a selection of views that we can choose from so let's go ahead and hide this cube for now so if you click on this circle icon here until it goes red you'll see that it disappears from our viewport and will just spawn a figure here so that it represents the views in a better way so now we've got the perspective view that you can see the top of our figure the front of our figure and the slide of our figure now to select a view to simply hover over the view with your mouse button and click on the middle mouse button or the mouse wheel and then click on the mouse wheel again to bring up the views once again and then you can select any one of those you can also just select the view that you want from the drop down menu here as you can see we've got the list of the views here as well great so now that we're familiar with the basic layout of cinema 4d let's get started with creating some of our low poly environment so we can delete the objects here so let's just select them and delete them for now and we'll begin that by creating the base of our scene so to create most objects you'll have to click on this cue button here and then you can see on some of these buttons we have this black arrow and bottom right corner of it now this indicates that we can actually click and hold the button and then it will bring up a list of other options that we can choose from so in this case we'll want to choose the plane and now with the plane selected we'll want to see the settings here so first of all I just want to go and have a look and see the lines for our polygon so to do this just click on display and click on shading lines option here now we can see the polygons and we wanted to go ahead and change the settings here to suit our environment so because this is the base of our whole environment we want to make it quite big so let's go ahead and select 5000 and you'll see straight away once I hit enter on the keyboard the plane will represent that change and the heights are 5000 as well now just using the mouse wheel to zoom out and we can also change the number of segments in now these represent the polygons on the plane so because this is a low polygon piece we won't want to make this we want what we won't want to increase the number by too much so let's go ahead with something like 50 by 50 maybe that's a little bit too much let's go with 40 by 40 okay now one thing you want to remember when creating anything that is using this low poly look is the font tag here now this is something that smooth smooth things out which is something that we don't want so we want to always delete this from our objects so just go ahead and select that and click on delete in fact let's go ahead and show you what this does I'm gonna hide the plane for now and let's spawn a sphere to the scene and we're just going to use the scale tool here to make this bigger so just to scale anything up just click anywhere on the scene and then drag your mouse or you can use these these little indicators here as well now because this hasn't been made editable yet you won't be able to scale according to these axes or actually scale uniformly but once we make something editable you can see you can see here we'll be able to stretch it like so so let's hit undo ctrl Z to make it so that we can use our our window here and what I want to show you is I want to show you how smooth this circle is the sphere is before deleting the font X so let's go ahead and delete the font tag now and you can see now that it's you can see all the polygons and it's got that sort of low poly look to it so that's why once it's delete the font tag so let's bring our plane back up and let's bring the lines back up as well so once you're happy with the size of the plane we want to make it editable so with the plane selected so make sure that the plane selected either on the list here or just by clicking on the viewport here want to click on this button here to make editable or click press the C on the keyboard great so now we want to start molding and shaping the base so to do this we'll want to select the arrow button the live selection tool here and we have three main we three main ways that we can do this on the left side of the screen here so we can select either points edges or polygons so once you've clicked on the button here for the floor here I just want to select the polygon says I'm just looking to move things around in a general sort of way and you can see that once I've selected that the plane will have changed color to indicate that you can start to manipulate it so now before we select the polygons and start manipulating it just right-click on the plane and we'll want to select one more thing which is the brush tool and with the brush tool selected we'll want to change a few things so want to go to Ford off to constant and we'll wanted to change the mode from smear to surface here we go now this will allow us to draw directly onto the plane and create some sort of movement and mountains extruding from the plane you can see here if I move around the plane you can see what I'm doing and you can experiment with the strength settings of the brush as well so if I undo that and let's bring the strength of the brush down to about 30 you can see now that it's a lot softer and a lot subtler than what we had before when it was at hundred we can also change the radius of the brush over here as well and you can also use the square bracket keys on your keyboard just like Photoshop to make the brush size bigger or smaller like so great so let's go ahead and create some basic structures for our landscape we don't want the floor to be flat like this so I want to try and make sure that we brush over most of the entire plane so let's go ahead and just sort of click around and just create some basic basic shapes just play about with the brush here just move across the whole whole landscape like so and just make the brush bigger and move some of these a little bit more like that great so for this main image I'm going to try and create a main structural point in the middle here which will act as our focal points for our image and then we're going to create some extra hills and mountains to surround it to make things more more interesting so let's also change the strength of the brush from a from 30% and we can also go down to a minus number as well to bring things down so you can bring things down like this you can see if I move to the side here how that affects the plane let's just bring things up again so I want to make the focal point in the middle of our our image a little bit higher like so great so now let's rename this plane and we can double click on this and rename this land and once you're happy with the general landscape look we'll also want to add some water to the scene and the easiest way that we can do this is to repeat the steps that we use to create the plane and rename it water so let's go ahead and create the plane again so to do this just click and holding the Q button click on the plane you'll see now that we've got a new plane here and if we select the move tool and make sure that our new plane is selected let's move this up you can see now that we've got this small little square here and we'll want to create the same sort of size as what we've got here so let's go ahead and click on plane and change the width to 5,000 by 5,000 like we had before and the width segments I think we had 40 by 40 that looks about right and now let's go ahead and bring this down so that it just about penetrates so that our blends sort of penetrates our water like so now again we don't want our water to be completely flat so let's go ahead and delete the Phong tag rename this water and make the plane editable and let's go ahead and select our brush tool again and just gently maybe at 10-15 percent just gently bump up the water a little bit oh I forgot to change the fall-off so let's change the fall-off here so that was constant and surface and you can see that I've accidentally selected one polygon here so let's go ahead and remove that by clicking on the live selection tool and let's bring our brush back again and now you can see that with no polygon selected we can actually select the majority of the plane against this brush over the plane and remember we can go down to minus number as well to bring the water down and let's make a smaller brush to make things a little bit more interesting instead of a flat watery surface and let's bring that up again just to bump things up a little bit bring it up a bit here Thanks so I'm just sort of looking around the plane seeing how this is affected our our landscape great next we'll want to create some Mountain structures so to do this we'll want to go to the cube button again click and hold and then select on the landscape button here so let's bring this landscape up so that we can see it now first things first we want to delete the phone tag and we'll want to edit the size of this so that it suits our our landscape just go ahead and make this a little bit bigger using the scale tool we can also edit the size using the size options and the size values here so let's go ahead and make this a little bit taller using the middle value here and we'll want to make this the sort of focal point of the piece so I want to make it quite large let's go ahead and scare this up a little bit more excellent and we can also delete some of the width segments or decrease the width segments as this is a low poly piece let's go ahead and make this 50 by 50 or even even smaller so let's go ahead and go to 40 by 40 and then we can also use the rotation tool here and just to find a sort of an angle to the structure that we like next thing that we'll want to do is we can go over to see and this is quite interesting as we can randomly generate new structures using the seed option here so you can see that landscape or the mountain is actually changing shape as we click on this button so just find the seed that you like actually quite liked the look of our original mountains I'm just going to go back to to the first one and we can actually scale this a little bit make it a little bit fatter here like so excellent and then from here we'll want to introduce some effectors and deformers so let's go ahead and add polygon reduction so go over to the Bend button here click and hold and then add polygon reduction to our list next we'll want to drag polygon reduction into our landscape and you can see straight away that our landscape has changed so from more polygons to less polygons which is exactly what we want cool now you can also play with the reduction strength here so let's go ahead and make the reduction strength a little bit less or something about 85 and at this point will also be a good idea to create a camera so that we can see exactly what we're creating and at what angle will be seen at so let's go ahead and move our viewport to something that we like so just gonna zoom in here a little bit just wanna create an angle which will be happy with okay so I'm just going to make the landscape a little bit smaller and then move it a little bit to the side here like so and then just maybe rotate it around see if we can find a bit of a better angle for it great and maybe even rotate it in and at an angle as well so we can also rotate it this way and see how that works cool excellent all right so that's kind of working for me so this is the sort of angle that that I want to see to work at so let's go ahead and add the camera here and you can see here that the camera has now been added to our list and if we click on the camera icon here this when the icon this sort of square icon is white that means we're actually viewing our our camera lens through our camera and if it's black that means we can navigate out of our camera and sort of move around our viewport like we have been like we have been originally cool so now that we're out of our camera let's continue with our landscape now in fact I'll want to make our land go in an angle now as well so if we sort of move it and rotate it down like this and let's see I can scale this up a bit sort of manipulate it around like so just going back into the camera here by clicking onto the square there just to see how I'm doing inside the camera cool just moving things around alright so now that we're happy with that the next thing that we can do is I'm just gonna collapse the landscape here I'm gonna rename this mountain and we can also duplicate this mountain by clicking and holding the ctrl button and then clicking and dragging it out of our list like so then we can move that mountain around create a new seed go back into our our camera and then continue creating our landscape so just making something like so we can also make sure that the move at all the selected we can also click hold control button here you can see the cursor has changed we can click and drag to duplicate a new mountain I'm just going to move the camera out here and let's create a new seed just to make things more interesting like so just making a new sort of landscape structures around the main mountain just moving things around changing the seed there's something that we like using the move and rotate tool and then duplicating at the structures again moving things around moving it back in here just and continuing to create all these sort of mountain landscapes until we're happy with the way that it looks it's rotating this one so I'm just trying to create something which is closer to the camera but not too too big so let's bring this down you can see I'm hopping backwards and forth into and outside the camera take this around and just push this down cool so now that once we're happy with the way the landscape is looking let's go ahead and look at how we can color in our image so to create a new material all you need to do is click on the create button here you can see that I've got some materials created here already so let's go ahead and delete these out and I'll show you how to create a new one so create click on the create button click on new material and you can see that we've got a sphere here just double click on the material and the material editor window will appear remove reflectance because we'll only want to deal with color and then let's choose a color that we'll be happy with for the water so some sort of blue and once we're okay with that to apply the material all you need to do is click and drag the material onto the the structure or the object that we want to apply the material to so that's our water and then that we can also duplicate the material so clicking and dragging to duplicate that material and we can also choose a new color for our land so you can choose a color for our land and let's just apply that to the land there and we can duplicate that material again and choose a another color for our mountains and apply them like so we can also apply them via the list so if it's becomes difficult to sort of reach the mountains at the back there we can apply them like this so just applying them to each of the mountains and that's poor the materials the next thing that we'll wants to do is go through a quick lighting setup so under the floor button we can click and hold the floor button and click on physical sky and now with physical sky selected all we need to do is just click on the time and location here and then just scroll through the time until you're happy with a lighting setup so I'm just going to create a lighting setup like so just making that one seems about right so it's about one o'clock and once you're happy with the lighting setup the next thing that we'll want to go through is some render settings so to do this just simply click on the render settings button here and we want to go through each of these settings here so the main ones will be output so I've set the output to 1920 by 1080 the next one we want to do here is save so you can sort of choose a file location to save that the format I've chosen is PNG because I want to keep an alpha channel here so that it can sort of change some change the sky or have access to the sky if I choose to put this through Photoshop and then the next important one that we'll want to include is ambient occlusion and global illumination and the way that we introduced these into our render settings is by going into effect and choosing ambient inclusion from here and global illumination so if I remove these choose ambient occlusion and let's go ahead and find global illumination which is here excellent so that's it for our render settings all you have to do now is hit the Save button and then click on the render picture viewer now all we have to do is wait for the final image to appear and it will automatically be saved in location you specified in the render settings excellent so now that we understand how to create and construct a low poly environment incident 4d you can experiment with different compositions and color options as well the great thing about constructing an environment in 3d is that you can always go back to the scene and make slight adjustments if you think you can make any improvements or even just some additions so for example in the final image here I've decided to add a small boat and a little pier here which also helps add a sense of scale to the image I've also added some birds to the background which also helps sell that sense of scale as well so don't be afraid to take your image to programs like Photoshop to make some adjustments there as well in the final image I've also adjusted the colors and the lighting to help make the image pop and stand out a little bit more so with that we've come to the end of the low-poly landscape tutorial I hope you've learnt a lot in these demos and that you can apply these skills to your own workflows I hope you've learned some new things in 3d that you haven't been able to use before and that you can use them to create your own future illustrations and designs I had a lot of fun creating this landscape so thanks for watching good luck creating your own low poly landscapes and I'll see you next time on the edge CGI

Channel: Edge-CGI 3D Tutorials and more!

Views: 143,797

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tutorial, tutorials, beginner, beginners, howto, how to, create, lowpoly, low poly, environment, low poly environment, cinema 4d beginners, cinema 4d tutorial, free, animation, modeling, cinema 4d modeling, design, designer, 3d, foundamentals, skills, shapes, lighting, rendering, tools, easy

Id: 2j9Fj2kIYFE

Length: 30min 38sec (1838 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018