Cinema 4D Tutorial - Intro to Subdivision Surface Modeling

hey everybody its EJ from iodine calm and today we're going to learn a little bit about subdivision surface modeling and how we can create some fun models inside of cinema 4d what for a house alright so today we're going to be learning about sub D modeling or subdivision modeling or if you have an older version of cinema 4d hypernurbs modelling and to do that we're going to actually use these two little fun guys a little Super Mario mushroom in our Lego head because my mantra is if you're learning anything especially modeling you always want to be creating something that you enjoy or something you like you want to make it fun for yourself and what is more fun than Super Mario and Legos I mean that's just two of the most fun things ever so let's actually go over and actually understand a little bit about subdivision surfaces now you can find the subdivision surface up in this menu right here our generator menu and I can bring that into our scene and if you have an older version of cinema 4d I believe before our 16 this is actually called a hypernurb or hypernurbs so what NURBS stand for and this is actually going to reveal what subdivision surface actually does is it's non-uniform rational b-spline and all this is kind of gibberish except for the b-spline b-spline may be familiar to you if you use splines a lot in cinema 4d because every time you make a spline and you click on the spline object we have this type and you can actually change the type of spline interpolation from bezzie a to linear or cubic and then you can see we have this B spline here so basically B spline is the type of smoothing going on on points and points that actually make up polygons and in geometry so subdivision surface or hypernurbs is a method of smoothing out geometry to making more organic forms so let's go ahead and demonstrate this what the subdivision surface actually does and give a little more into this B spline and how that kind of translates let's get into a new scene I'm going to demonstrate with Paul so I'm going to get a plane and let's just make this face forward and then I'm also going to demonstrate with a spline again so let's go ahead and I'm going to go and grab my pen tool and just going to change the type from bezzie a to linear and I'm just going to create a point here a point here and a point here so basically trying to match the curve or the edge of the plane here and what I'm going to do is go back to my perspective view I'm going to actually go in into a different display mode called Gouraud shading so I can actually see all the subdivisions here because my plane by default has 20 segments in the width and the height and you don't see that unless we go into a mode that actually shows all those edges and you can now see that we have all those segments now so I'm going to do is just bring this the width and height segments to two on each side you see we have a plane with four polygons alright so we also have our spline here as well and what I'm going to do is to demonstrate I'm going to change this type of spline to be spline and if I change this plane and go into x-ray modes we can actually see here and see through to our spline here you can see that that basically rounded out the points of my object here let me actually move this over which changes to y 0 and Y and you can see that we basically round it out between these what are called control points and depending on where we move this this point it's actually tightening up whatever side you're going to so if I undo that and I create if by holding down command and create two points and then fi0 this out see this is a 200 and the X I'll change this to 200 in the X as well and then this is will do 200 and the Y and we'll make this 200 the why basically we want to just line up all these points and you can see what's happening here is as I move these points closer to this edge control point who are actually sharpening that edge and if I move this move these points away it's actually rounding it out so it's bit it's almost like a Chomper but it's actually using b-spline interpolation or b-spline smoothing so that's where the b-spline comes from in the NURBS and basically this is what happens when you throw a piece of geometry or polygon into a subdivision surface so you can see that as I throw this subdivision sir or this plane underneath as a child of the subdivision surface we actually divided or multiplied our original four polygons into more polygons and that in turn smooth that out so it's the same kind of smoothing that you can see with these spline points here because it's all the same kind of b-spline smoothing and you can see as I if I go to my subdivision surface by default our editor subdivision which is different from subdivision renderer subdivision renderer is actually the subdivision that happens when you actually render the viewport so this is basically just to optimize your viewport so always keep your editor with a lower poly but actually this is going to render like this when we render it's a picture viewer but you can see that as I go and up my subdivisions through my subdivision surface you can see that I just went from no subdivision so we have our original four polygons and then it basically duplicated or multiplied it by two so now we have four in each polygon so by the power of one now we even multiplied it even more so now we have sixteen in each individual polygon here in all the while this is smoothing out our edges or the original edges here of our original polygon to smooth it out in that beast my own kind of interpolation that beasts b-spline smoothing so hopefully that gives you a little bit of idea of what's going on here and the most important thing to understand and be able to manipulate B splines is one understanding what's going on so if you get the B spline smoothing but also understanding that when you add more points or more subdivisions in either direction you see that it's tightening up our edges here as I'm increasing the subdivisions so this is very important and once you understand the basics of what's going on behind the scene you can basically manipulate geometry do what you want and tighten up edges too to make things look the way that you want them to be so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make that plain editable and again I'm just going to go and I'm going to go to some shortcut keys that are very important when using when doing some modeling and those shortcut keys are going to be m and that is going to bring up a menu of all the different kind of things you can do and I'm going to be using the knife tool lot in this tutorial so I'm going to just hit K can see that K is a shortcut for the knife tool so minute k and now I can actually go and make some cuts either with a line or a loop or a plane I'm going to keep it aligned and I'm going to uncheck this for stick restrict to selection and uncheck visible only and I'm just going to go ahead and holding the shift key down so I get a straight line I'm just going to make a cut and you can see what happens when I do that it actually sharpens the curve between these two points and if I actually do this again and just cut here you can see this sharpened the edge between these two points we got this like smaller sharpened curve versus the original curves here so I can actually go and just like we could with the points adjust these to actually adjust the smoothness of that curved edge here so very important to learn how to kind of tighten up the edges and stuff like that so that's demonstrating with a plane and some splines let's actually go ahead and get some 3d geometry here so I'm going to get a cube and we just have subdivisions of one one and one and I'm going to throw this underneath a subdivision surface and you can see this is where also another important distinction is knowing that if you put in a cube into a subdivision surface it's going to try to make a sphere you can see as I round this out it's going to basically create a sphere but if I start say upping the segments in Y you can see that it's kind of making more of a barrel so by adding more segments in the Y we're actually sharpening this edge in the Y so let's go ahead and make this cube editable and go into edge mode you can actually see all those original edges on my subdivision on my cube before the subdivision surface actually does its thing so you can see that if I go ahead and say select this edge right here and then move this down you can see that that's actually making the curve bigger because we're making more distance between the edges there and softening that and if I move this up to the top you can see that's sharpening that edge and actually I only selected the one edge here and this is very important to is when you're working in 3d always make sure that you're selecting the right thing so by default only select visible elements is turned on so I only selected this front edge here it did not select the back edge so what I'm going to do is undo I did all that stuff and this is very important to catch because you could be working a lot and totally forget you're not actually affecting any of the points on the back so it's good too I screwed that up because I'm sure you're going to screw that up too so unselect only select visible elements and now I'll select this edge and now you can see I have all of my edges selected so also helps to work in all this for up view here so you can see as I move this up it's really tightening up that edge and this is looking more like you know coffee cup or something like that especially if I select this other edge and move this down so that is like the basics of if you move points and edges close together on the Thunderer under a subdivision surface is going to tighten all that stuff up so let's go ahead and get on and do that let's start messing around with this cube that's subdivided here and remake that that little Lego face head guy thing so let's go ahead let's just shrink this a little bit and what I'm going to do is select this top face here I want to make that little to be thing that connects to like where you put the hat on the Lego head right so what we're going to do is I'm going to use the modeling shortcut key again of M and what I want to do is actually do an extrude enter or an inner extrude and that is W as you can see all the way down at the bottom W inner extrude and what's going to happen when I do that this is actually going to extrude on the inside and therefore it's adding that extra cut and you can see that if that's sharpening out our top edge there so again using the B spline interpolation and what I'm going to do is let's do that again and you can see what happens when I add that extra cut how it sharpens out that edge alright so I'm going to move this in and I'm going to bring this into a point where I'm going to start figuring out K is that a good size for me to extrude out that little Lego hole and I think that's that's pretty good right there I'm going to go to my modeling key again so hit M and then I'm going to hit T for extrude and just going to extrude upwards you can see now we've got this little like nubby for the top of his head and then what I'm going to do is extrude inside again so we got we have that hole to then snap like the helmet on or whatever kind of other Lego piece we want so I'm going to go m and T and extrude downwards and basically what I want to do is I want to have that sharp edge so just like those little holes that Lego snap into we actually want to make that a sharp edge so what I'm going to do is I'm going to extrude twice so one so making that tiny little edge there that tiny cut and then again you're going to see that by doing that it makes this nice little sharp edge at the top and then I'm just going to extrude one more time you can see that's going to sharpen out that bit on the bottom too another thing to also see just like when we through just a regular cube into our subdivision surface it made it a sphere when you just have a polygon it's going to make that kind of like a circular bit there so we're looking pretty good with our Lego head here the only thing I see is we need to sharpen up this bit right here and another cute school shortcut key to turn off and toggle the subdivision surface on off is Q so I'm hitting Q and toggling on and off the subdivision surface we can always see what's happening on our original geometry and then what happens when we smooth everything out with that subdivision surface so what we need to do is make another cut a loop cut to be able to sharpen and tighten up this bit because this is too much smoothing between the top of the head and wear this little Lego whole thing is we also need another cut up here as well to sharpen this edge so we sharpen the inner bit but we need to sharpen the outer bit so let's go ahead and again I'm going to get my knife tool so I'm going to hit M K and M is going to be very important to just be toggling through all this stuff so M K and we're going to go from line mode to loop mode and what that's going to do is you can see this is going to make like a loop cut around our geometry here so I'm going to add a cut here and you're going to see boom we just sharpened up that edge right up at the top so you can see that new edge right there I'm going to do the same thing here at the bottom and I'm toggling with Q on and off the subdivision surface and now watch what happens boom we just tightened up that bottom as well so again all understanding what happens when you add another cut and then understanding if I do if I hit you and you is another shortcut key that you're going to want to do for like selections and stuff like that so I'm going to do ul for loop selection and I'm going to go to edge mode here and I'm doing a loop selection so I can grab that new cut that we just made and again I'm doing demonstrate what happens when I move this up and down is that when the points are further apart that curve is greater when I move them closer that curve is lesser more sharp so we can now start manipulating some other of these points I'm going to go hit u the U key and then L again for loop selection and I'll just grab both this a loop here and I'm going to hold shift and select this loop as well and I'm just going to hit T and this is going to be my scale and I can scale up these two edges and try to sharpen this top and bottom of this little cylindrical face here so this is looking pretty good let's actually think what I want to do is just select all of these bits up here at the top probably just scale this up a little bit and notice when I scale this up that it's actually scaling downwards too so I need to make sure I move this up so these points are straight so we don't have this indent here I'm just going to move this up like so and that looks a little bit more like it and I think our face is actually a little bit too long so what I'll do is just grab these and scale Smoove this up but I guess just do that we can just grab this little edge right here you can see it there's our little face you probably go up here again as well and maybe move all this stuff down so just by using loop cuts and some edge selections and moving around loop at looped edges we can tighten up our model to look more like our little Lego head and again it looks kind of chunky in the viewport here but again when we render this out it's actually going to render out at this subdivision renderer of three so you can see with three we really smooth this out we have a little jaggedness right here too so maybe we might have to render it at four at the end of the day so we can work in two but render out in four so I'll just set this at two and four for now and let's actually texture this and you know the other important thing is when you make things with subdivision surface you also need to know how to actually text your things and so we need to actually put the yellow texture on this whole entire thing so something like this and then we actually need to put the face on this guy so I already made a face in Photoshop so what I'm going to do is just select blacks for the color and then use the Alpha Channel turn it on and load in my little Lego face here you can see there's my face when it's right click this little viewport window and just make this a plane so we can actually see what that looks like so it's more so it's all flat and so this alpha channel is cutting through our color Channel now I can just go ahead and place the face on my cube but you can see that we have all these faces and this little stuff happening up here and this is due to the default projection which is UVW mapping now I'm not I don't claim to be a good texture or anything like that but one important thing to understand is how all these different projection modes work you know how to try to manipulate each of these to get close to what you want without needing the know about UVW unwrapping and all that stuff because that's a whole another bag of frogs and whatever that I don't really get into that much but if you understand what all these things do and try to manipulate them to get close to what you want you'll do fine 80% of the time 68% of the time you'll do it every time so let's just go for I think flat is actually going to be just fine for this model right here and basically what this is going to do is just project this flat onto your object and you can see that if I move this too much in this offset that actually it's going to start not working for us so again trying out each of these things and seeing what works but actually when we just position this position the face where we need it to be right here you actually can see that we have the face on the back as well because it's tiled and we also have this on both sides so what I'm going to do is just say for the just be on the front so you can see that's no longer on the back but it's on the front of the face when I actually render that so that's perfect so we're getting close what we need to do is just adjust the length just like scale this down a little bit so maybe 65 and 65 and then we're just going to adjust these offsets here and you can see that we're going to have to adjust this a little bit more because we need some perfect circles for the eyes just move this down and I think that's pretty good so just by kind of messing around with the offsets here and the offset scale and what I can actually do is hit the option key hold the option key and actually go more fine-tuned in the offsets here so it actually goes down to the tenth decimal place there and just get more precise there and boom we got our Lego head so that's just a little bit of subdivision modeling and some manipulation of some texturing for the projections and stuff like that and we got our nice little Lego head and again if I turn off the subdivision surface this is really just a block head it's just a block head so again just the power and the understanding of knowing what happens with subdivision surfaces can turn a block head into a Caligula so let's go ahead I'm just going to do one more demonstration to create the Super Mario mushroom and what I'm going to do is get another cube again and get subdivision surface and just throw the subdivision surface in here and again I'm going to go to display and go to garage shading so I can see all my subdivisions here and you can see that as I hit Q to toggle the subdivision surface on and off we have a cube but once the subdivision surface acts on it smooths everything out it looks more like a cube now if I go ahead and up the segments one in each of the dimensions XY and Z I have basically four by four by four and what I'm going to do and you can see that this is just like a rounded cube now because it's kind of sharpening everything up so it's going from a sphere to more of a cube rounded cube and you can see again as I up the segments in either direction it's kind of smoothing out or sharpening the edges of some of these just to demonstrate again what's going on what I'm going to do is hit C to make this editable and I can go to my edge mode now and I'm going to hit you and L to do a loop selection again so again the mk4 knife tool and the UL is going to be used a lot in this tutorial so UL loop selection and what I'm going to do is I want these extra subdivisions but I also want to scale this up scale up these edges and what I'm going to do is hold down shift to be able to quantize this to tens so one hundred and twenty percent I'm also going to do the same thing for this as well so each of these oops I'm going to hit T for scale hold down shift and go 120 there as well so you see that we're more rounding this out it's not so much of a rounded cube but what I want to do at this point is demonstrate that for for like a mushroom head it's more round than anything else so we can actually create something very similar to what we have mouths where we kind of have our mushroom head shape but what I'm going to do is grab a sphere move this off to the side and what I want to demonstrate is if I turn off this subdivision surface and we just have the underlying geometry unsmooth and I go to my sphere and I go to the different type of stuff from just default standard to hexahedron and bring down the segment's you're going to see we got basically the same exact shape only this sphere is actually way more accurate you can see that I didn't actually scale out as much as I really should to get a perfectly round shape but actually basing my rounder model off of a sphere and then throwing this sphere in a subdivision surface you can see though this is actually much more round so it's less guesswork when actually Moot using a cube so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use the sphere instead so I'm going to delete the cube zero out the coordinates on this sphere here and I'm just going to make this editable and I'm going to go to my edge mode here and you can see exactly what happened basically I'm just using this sphere to get to this point and not use the cube because this is way more rounded much nicer and now what I can do is go ul4 loop selection select this bottom loop and basically I just want to scale this down I want to make this flat now I can do this two ways I can just hit T and scale this down in the in the Y or I can just scale it down and just enter zero in the y scale and hit enter it's going to do the same thing so what I want to do is also select this rogue point down here and move this up and basically make this go right there so we have like a flat bottom and again you can see how that kind of distorts our shape you can see that this we're actually getting kind of close to what a mushroom looks like little top part of the Mario mushroom so I'm going to do is go to rectangle selection I'm just going to move this up and again need to make sure I turn off only select visible almonds because I want to select all the points at the bottom and what I'm going to do to make the little inner part that actually has like the mushroom part with the eyes on it is I'm going to make a little a little cut here and actually do an interest rude to tighten up the bottom here and I also push up into the bottom of the mush so I'm going to do is select all of these polygons on the bottom here and do an inner extrude which is M W and inter extrude you can see that we're tightening up to that bottom edge but actually what I want to do is just like we just with the top of the Lego head where we wanted that little top section that connects other Legos into I'm gonna do the same thing on the bottom here just we get it low like a indent where we can put the other piece of the Mario mushroom head in there and I'm going to do a mt4 extrude and I'm just going to extrude up inside here and you can see that we're making that nice little indent on the bottom of the mushroom head there and what I can do now is you can see we got let's look in like the top of the mushroom top of the Mario mushroom and what I'm going to do is just grab a cube and I'm just going to throw that cube and subdivision surface move this down scale this a little bit and what I'm going to do on the cube is just make one segment in the Y so basically if I pull this cube out you can see it's basically just a long gated rounded cube and you can see that as I put that up in the mushroom you can see that the bottom part looks like the actual face of our little Mario mushroom guy so this is looking really good the only thing I got to do to make this look even better is just grabbing this sphere the top part of our mushroom I'm just going to rotate it back a little bit and then move this cube forward and just scale this down to the point where just kind of flush underneath as I move this out you can see hey that looks that's looking like our little Mario mushroom guy right so we can mess around with the the Mario the actual top of the mushroom if we want and actually a good thing to do is actually undo that rotation but say we actually want to make this shorter so what I'll do is just grab all the bottom parts and just move this up a little bit and maybe I want to grab this loop here move this up and again I can actually scale this to make this really fat make a really fat mushroom here something like that so there's like that super mega mushroom thing that's like new right in the new mario so you can do something like that I'm just going to undo all this stuff but I mean when you do the loop loop selections and all this stuff you can see how you're moving these edges and seeing how you can manipulate your geometry to again mold mold view of mold your polygons to the kind of shapes that you want right so very important I'm just going to go ahead and say I'm done with that I'm just going to rotate that this whole bit back with this down a little bit something like that and now we can texture this as well let's actually get our eyeballs in here so we can do let's actually let's just keep using some cubes I'm just going to bring this down and make this right I here let's go ahead and throw that cube in a subdivision surface and you can see that routed it out and I'll actually make this a little taller and let's just see what happens when I add a segment so you can see that where we're sharpening just the y-direction so you can see that we now is this is way more control than like a cylinder or you know anything else up here like a capsule we have way more control if we just manipulate a cube with the subdivision surface and get this right kind of eye curvature that we want I think that's good something like that and then we can one thing we can do and this is another thing with modeling and stuff like that is using symmetry objects as often as you can to save you some work so again this is our I so I subdivision surface or STS and this is just our I basic geometry and then which throws this under a symmetry you can see that that just duplicated it and we got two eyes now so use symmetry objects when you can just going to mirror your on your geometry so you don't have to create another eye or anything like that so now if I adjust this further you can see that I don't have to adjust two objects I just need to adjust that one and voila so let's a texture or mushroom you make this just slightly longer go and create some materials so we got the we'll make this a red mushroom I should actually name this so I'm throwing these on the right thing so this is the top and top to the vision surface top and this is the face face cube so face sub using the surface and let's create the like tan so the mushrooms face and we'll just create black for the eyeballs there we go now the thing is and again with this bottom part you can see how chunky that is so we're going to have to make sure that we can subdivide this as much as we need this to be so even at 3 you can see that still chunky so let's see if 4 is good I think for smooth that out so again we'll work with the editor subdivision of 2 but we'll render with 4 and yeah and then with the eye we might need to do the same thing let's see if that's pretty smooth at 3 you can still see a little jagged us there so maybe we'll do the same thing editor at to render at 4 and we'll do the same exact thing for the top here - this is the bigger object will have this render out it Forks you can see that's much smoother at 4 so again very important to set your subdivision editor and renderer just to optimize your viewport to have all your geometry nice and smooth by the time you render so what's up just like we textured the the Lego head in the with a face on the Lego guy we're going to go ahead and use some of the material projection methods to get the little circles on the top of our mushroom so what I'm going to do to create circles is going to my alpha and just like we load it up the face the Photoshop face so I'm just going to create a gradient and I'm just going to create a circular gradient and what we're going to do is on this gradient I'm going to change the interpolation between these two knots right now it's smooth I'm going to change this to none so it's just very sharp and I'm just going to move this chip this black chip over here you can see we created a circle and what I'm going to do is just right click on this and just change this to plain so we can actually see yep that's a circle and just bring this all the way to white and I think this is good let's go ahead and apply this just do circle and we'll just apply this to the top of our mushroom here I'm going to see that with the default UVW mapping we actually have our circle looking good our dots looking good but if you look at the top it's actually looking good too but here's the thing you can see that it's a little squashed right so what you would think is that all right if I just up the length here and then adjust this it will be okay but you can see all the distortion happening you can see how the dot on the top is actually all wrong and not looking very good at all so this default method of projection is actually not going to help us out at all I'm just going to right click on all these and reset the default and let's try a different message here so I think what I want to do is maybe try spherical and we'll turn off tile so we just have one dot to manipulate and let's go ahead and adjust this we'll shrink this down shrink this down as well and use these offsets look scale this down offset so I think uh we do like 25 like to 2 1 to 25 to 50 that should give us a nice circle and that's looking good so there's our first circle there and what I can do is duplicate this and then just offset this to the side metal be our side dot duplicate this again and adjust the offset so it's on the other side let's just see this is a 85 so we'll do 45 on this side see if that that's not right to do something like that 40 I think that matches up pretty good so then what we need to do is get the dot on the back so I'll just duplicate this dot over here just the offset make sure this is all lined up again holding option and getting more fine-tuned in there so we get the 10th decimal in there and that's looking pretty good so just eyeball on it a little bit meagan if we want to make these dots bigger just go into our circle texture and adjust this gradient move this black chip so we got much bigger dots and that's looking pretty dang good let's go ahead and turn on some ambient occlusion here so we're going to have some nice shading on our guy there we go maybe make the length Lester so it's less like blurred out or feather it out nice and we can add a light area lights right up here absence fall off add some juice some soft shadow and see what we got add a another light and we'll make this an ambient light just to try to fill in some of those dark so our shadows aren't so dang harsh like that I think that's looking pretty nice and pretty cartoony so let's go ahead and just to demonstrate let's go and change our anti-aliasing the best and we'll go to thing because we want some nice sharp edges and what I'm going to do is just demonstrate the difference between these the renderer subdivision in the editor so again in the editor we've got chunky edges but if we render this to picture viewer when the picture viewer here you can see that it's using that higher subdivision and we have really nice smooth edges here no more of those jaggies alright so there's your little intro to subdivision surface modeling or hypernurb modeling inside of Simha 4d created a fun little Lego head and our super Mario mushroom to get you a little idea of how subdivision surface works and hopefully that equips you enough to go out and try and experiment on your own you have any questions about subdivision surface modeling please ask them in the comment section I'll try to get to them as fast as I can and if you make anything if you model anything using subdivision surface modeling techniques be sure to share them with me I'd love to see what you guys are making out there and if you like this tutorial be sure to hit the like button I'd really appreciate that and as always really appreciate all of you out there watching my tutorials and I'll see you in the next one alright everybody bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 86,940

Rating: 4.942029 out of 5

Keywords: cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, maxon, learn c4d, eyedesyn, c4d tut, mograph, subdivision surface, subdivision surface modeling, cinema 4d subdivision surface tutorial, cinema 4d hypernurbs tutorial, cinema 4d modeling, cinema 4d modeling tutorial, modeling in cinema 4d, c4d modeling tutorial, 3d modeling, cinema 4d sub-d modeling, sub-d modeling, cinema 4d texture, cinema 4d model, c4d modeling, how to model in cinema 4d, cinema 4d beginner tutorial

Id: UPGypXolnhg

Length: 41min 31sec (2491 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2017