Design it with Cineware: Model a Coffee Mug in Cinema 4D

in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to model a coffee mug using polygon modeling techniques in cinema 4d and the first thing that we need is a basic shape to build our mug off of and we'll find the basic shapes here under this blue cube so if you click and hold on the blue cube you'll get a menu of cinema for these basic shapes or primitive objects now a cylinder is a great starting point for creating a mug so just roll over the cylinder and release your mouse and that's going to create a new cylinder here in the scene now you can adjust the size of this cylinder using these orange dots by clicking and dragging on the orange dot and you can see that adjusts the radius and the height here in the attribute models object like a coffee mug it helps to work with the actual real-world dimensions so I grabbed a mug and a ruler and I measured it out and the diameter the distance from one end to the other was 8 centimeters so that means the radius is half of that or 4 centimeters the height is 10 centimeters and now we have a properly sized mug we can dolly the camera in so we can get a closer view on this by hitting the S key and that just frames the selected object now what I want to do is enable the Goro shading with lines mode which shows you the rectangles and triangles that make up of this object all 3d objects are made of these rectangles and triangles which we call polygons and you can see here that this cylinder uses 36 rectangles around the outside in order to make it appear smooth we want to reduce this because it's going to make our modeling process a lot simpler and we're going to smooth the cylinder back out later once we finish modeling so we're gonna set the rotation segments here down to 14 and you can see that that simplified the cylinder made it look a lot more chunky now we want to actually get access to the points edges and polygons of this cylinder and to do that we have to make it editable that means we won't be able to adjust the radius or height with these parameters anymore but we'll have direct access to the individual rectangles triangles to make an object editable you either hit the C key or hit this button in the upper left corner of the interface now if we go into the points edges or polygons mode you'll see that the polygons are outlined in blue and we get a rollover allowing us to select showing that we can select individual elements within this object and we can manipulate these elements freely what you'll notice though is that the sides and top and bottom of this cylinder aren't actually attached by default in order to fix that what we're going to do is run an optimized command so select all of the polygons with control a right click and choose optimize from the context menu you won't see a dialog or anything but what it's done is taken all of the points that sit on top of each other and merge them and so now you can see that this acts as a single object next what we want to do is actually extrude in some of these top polygons so that we can make the lip and bowl of the mug so switch to the live selection tool and select all of the polygons at the top of the cylinder we want to use the extrude inner tool which you can find in the context menu by right-clicking or you can just hit the keyboard shortcut I we're gonna extrude this inward and we do that by clicking and dragging anywhere in the viewport other than on the axes themselves and now you can see that we've got an additional loop of polygons to form the lip of the mug now you can just do this by eye but I'm going to set a specific offset in case you want to keep things consistent with my model so we're gonna use an offset here in the attribute manager of 0.5 next we need to extrude this set of polygons downward to form the bowl and so for that we're going to again go into the context menu and choose the extrude tool the keyboard shortcut for this is d and again we can click anywhere in the viewport not on the axes and drag up or down in order to extrude that set of polygons now if we switch into the four way you and hit s to frame on the right-hand view here maybe dolly out a little bit you'll see that this is creating a bowl and you can see where the bottom of this relates to the bottom of the mug now we obviously want to extrude this down close to the bottom of the mug but not all the way I'm going to go ahead and set an offset of negative nine point five centimeters which is going to give me that same 1/2 centimeter that I'm using on the lip of the mug at the bottom again this is something that you can adjust your own taste or your specific mug now what we need to do is create the handle for the mug and for that we're going to load some reference footage into the right view expand the right viewport by clicking on this viewport icon here and we're gonna go into the File Explorer and grab the mug jpg file that's attached to this tutorial simply drag that over the viewport and you'll see that the viewport turned black that's actually the mug in the background so what we need to do is adjust the size of this back image to do that go to options configure and in the back tab here you'll find the size X&Y for the background so let's go ahead and drop this down to something like 20 and you can see that we're pretty close to the right size that matches the cylinder itself so let's go ahead and increase this a little bit and we're gonna move it over and up and what you might need to do is actually alt click on the arrows in order to go in decimal units and get this lined up just right with the cylinder that we're using as our reference you might find it helpful to increase the transparency value here which is going to dim the back image so it makes it a little bit easier to see your actual object now we need to create some additional edge loops in order to create some polygons that we can pull out in order to create the handle so to do that we're going to use the loop path cut tool you get that here from the context menu or hit KL quickly and succession and as you drag over the object you'll see a preview here of the loop that will be cut into the object we want to create loops here at the points where the handle is entering the mug and now if we switch into the perspective view you'll see that we have all of these additional polygons to work with now make sure you're in polygon mode and select the live selection tool and we want to select these two polygons here on the side of the mug where the blue axis is coming out of the mug and that's just gonna line up this handle with the template that's in the right viewport so what we'll do is extrude these outward we're gonna right click and choose extrude or use the D key and extrude out these polygons and if we switch into the right view you'll see here that we've created these polygons here what we're going to do now is extrude out one more time in order to build out our handle further and now we need to connect these two sides of the handle together to do that we're going to want to first angle the polygons inward so select the edge mode and the live selection tool and select just the edge here at the bottom of the top part of the handle and the top at the bottom part of the handle and click and drag on the blue axis in order to move those back in towards the mug and now you'll see that basically we've created an angle here on these polygons also we can go ahead and select these two edges and use the scale tool in order to move those closer together and that's going to help to begin creating our curve now we're going to go back into the polygon mode and you can see that those two polygons are still selected we need to connect these together so we're going to use the bridge tool that's going to bridge two selected polygons and you just click and drag from one point to the other point you want to make sure to choose the same point on both polygons or the related point on both polygons and now you can see that that creates a connection between the two now if yours got angled just undo and try choosing different points if it's looks correct but it's tinted blue you may have created the polygons inside-out and to fix that you can right click and choose reverse normals in this case ours looks great we'll go back into the side view and you can see that we still have a little bit of work to do to get this handle to match up to the template one thing I want to do is to create one additional loop here right in the middle in order to pull it out and help create that curve so again we'll go into the loop cut tool and create a loop right in the center of this polygon selection now you can see that I just by I got that pretty close to 50% 49.5% if I want to get it exact what I can do is drag this and while I'm dragging hold down the shift key and that's gonna allow me to snapped 50% now I want to move that specific loop outward a little bit so I'm going to switch into the edge mode and I'm going to switch into the move tool now that might deselect the loop and if so we can select it again using the loop selection tool you can get that here in the Select menu or by hitting ul quickly and as you roll over the object in the loop selection tool you'll see all of the various loops that you can select this might be a little bit more obvious here in perspective view you can see how these are various parts of the model where you have a full loop around the model we want to select this loop here that we just created and go back to the move tool and we're just going to move it out a little bit so now we have a basic shape for our coffee mug the handles not great yet but we're going to keep working on it what we want to do now though is go ahead and smooth this mug back out and the way we're going to do that is using a subdivision surface object this takes a rough polygon template and basically create smoothing in order to make it look great so you'll find the subdivision surface object right here in the pallet so just click to create a subdivision surface now this object is a generator in cinema 4d generators have this green tint to their icon and they create new geometry typically using geometry that you put underneath them as a source we want the subdivision surface to use this cylinder shape as a source so we need to click and drag so that the cylinder is a child of the subdivision surface so you want that arrow to be pointing downward now you see the cylinder is a child of the subdivision surface and you can see the mug instantly smooth out let's jump back into the side view and see how the handle matches the template we're closer now just because of the smoothing but we need to do a little bit more work so we'll switch into the scale mode and we'll scale this loop down in order to match the width of the handle next we want to select this loop here so we'll go ul to select the loop selection tool and we want to go ahead and scale this loop down again I'm just going to scale using the green axis so that I don't scale in the other two directions at the same time well switch into the move tool and move that up now we'll go to the next loop using the loop selection tool and again we're going to want to scale down now here our axis is not aligned to the loop and we can fix that by going here into the attribute manager and changing the modeling access orientation to normal that's going to line things up properly so we'll scale this down and then again we'll switch to the move tool and move this edge loop into position we'll keep working our way around go into the loop selection tool and select this loop scale tool and scale it down move tool and move it into position and finally we'll go ahead and do the loop selection tool with this last loop we're going to scale it down and then in the move tool we'll move it into position now we have something that looks like this and matches our template pretty closely now you can add some additional loops or tweak individual points and edges in order to make the handle match your specific mug more closely finally what we need to do is add some more definition here at the lip of the mug as well as the bottom of the mug so they don't come to this sharp point and to do that we just add a few additional edge loops so we'll make sure that the cylinder is selected and again we'll use the loop path cut tool and here what we want to do is simply cut a loop right below the lip on both the outside and the inside and now you can see that we've got a nice still smooth but much more defined lip for this coffee mug we're going to want to do the same thing here at the bottom in order to not have it be quite so rounded so again we'll select the cylinder and create an edge loop right here towards the bottom and we'll go rotate around to view the inside of the mug and we'll create a lip here on the inside of the mug as well and now we have our basic coffee mug shape finally what you'll need to do is name your objects properly so the cylinder here we're gonna want to double click in the object manager and rename this mug and the subdivision surface object here double click and rename that mug underscore SDS for subdivision surface now we'll go ahead and save the file and you've got a basic mug in the next tutorial we'll look at some of the techniques that you need to know for texturing this mug and preparing it to use in cinah warefare Illustrator

Channel: Cineversity

Views: 149,920

Keywords: tutorial, cinema 4d, c4d, cinema4d, cineware, illustrator, adobe, template, plugin, model, modeling, modelling, sds, subdivision, sub-division, polygon, tools

Id: 9-GykynABwg

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018