How to Model & Animate a Low Poly Tree - Cinema 4D Tutorial

hey this is Eli for mow box graphics calm in this tutorial we are going to model a low poly tree in cinema 4d and add some animation to it low poly stands for a low polygon and the polygon is a flat shape built out of straight lines and all those polygons combined create a three-dimensional object so with this technique we use as less of these as possible which will make it look more abstract and simple if you want to call it like that but it is also easier on the computer and also a great way to start off with 3d modeling if this is the first time you're using cinema 4d I recommend quickly looking into the basics first but assuming you know these already let's jump straight into cinema 4d so let's start off with creating a cylinder let's also set our display settings to constant shading lines so that's easier to see where the power tones are appear let's also delete the font tag this tag automatically smooths out the polygons edges but it kind of looks weird when you're really modeling in a low poly style so let's delete it for now now let's decrease our rotation segments of the cylinder down here and eight is a great number for a tree trunk working with four sides which is a cube is easier but it doesn't look as good so let's give it at 8 now make this object editable by pressing C on the keyboard and when we are in the polygon mode select the ones on the top and when we press D on the keyboard now we can extrude the polygons by clicking and dragging let's also move these to the side a little bit because real trees are rarely perfectly straight here now if we rotate this we can start extruding again in a nice angle and it's basically repeating those steps until you get a nice drunk obviously you rarely get the perfect result at your first try so when you select the rectangle selection tool with the only select visible elements option D selected and then go in the point mode you can select every segment and move it around until you're satisfied to create branches we will need to add power don't store trunk to do this go in the polygon mode and press K on the keyboard to select the knife tool and then press L to make it a loop cut if we make a cut somewhere about here we have some nice new polygons to extrude into a branch select one of these new polygons and press K again but this time press K once more to make it a line cut now you can make cuts at the corners until we get an octagonal shape again so a shape with 8 sides when we select this newly created polygon again we can start extruding it like we did for the trunk for the first extrusion I usually like to make it really short and scale it down a little bit so it kind of makes the connection to the tree softer and let's repeat those steps to create a couple more branches and don't forget to keep on zooming out every so often so you can check if the tree looks realistic in proportions the long and heavy branches are always at the bottom and the smaller branches usually branch off at the end of a bigger branch so that kind of gives you an idea of how you can make this tree but it all really depends on what kind of tree you're trying to make most of the times it looks better when you slightly exaggerate the overall feel of a real tree so I think about how you would describe the tree is a strong and lively tree or is it slanted and dynamic once you're somewhat satisfied with your tree trunk we can start adding the tree crowns these are also very important to describe the overall feel of your tree but for the sake of this tutorial we are going to stick with a more regular tree that could fit in most of your scenes so to do this let's create a new Platonic object and set the type to buggy skeleton and move it roughly so it fits at the top of the tree and then make the object editable again by pressing C and now you can scale it down vertically so it isn't that's around anymore it's kind of squished together now to modify this shape some more let's add a melt object to it let's drag it on top of the platonic object and you'll see it really melted a lot right now when we change the strength to something like 4% you'll get most of the shape back again from here it's mostly playing around by moving the MELD object up or down and scaling it until you get a nice shape after that we can start duplicating the Platonic shape again which will also duplicate the melt object which is inside of it and make some random adjustments to the scaling the rotation and the position itself don't hesitate to further adjust the tree trunk as well so it nicely connects to the Crown's up here you see the branches a little bit too simple and straight so let's make a loop cut on it and move it down a little bit so we have a nice curve in the branch as a next step we are going to add a floor to the scene position it so it slightly overlaps the bottom of the tree and on the tree we are going to create a new loop cut so we can put the roots in an angle if we select the bottom polygons and scale them you will notice they are not connected to the tree itself so instead of selecting these polygons let's go into the point mode and select all the bottom points and now when you scale these they will stay connected to the whole tree to enhance the look of the roots you can select one of these polygons and extrude it and just move them under the floor next step let's spice up our seam with some little details like rocks and grass for the rocks we are going to create a new platonic object and set it to two segments this is so we have more points to manipulate the shape move the object so it sinks in the ground and make it editable again now the fun part kind of starts when we are in either our polygon or point mode right click in the viewport and select the brush you can adjust the brush size holding your middle mouse button and now gently start brushing over the shape don't overdo it because you'll get some nasty pointy edges and doesn't look as good but to add some more variation let's also add a second Platonic object and set it to the type octa with two segments again repeat the same steps as with the previous rock but try making look a little different that looks good as a smaller rock in this case great so now let's add a little poly version of grass there are some ways to get more realistic looking grass in cinema 4d but it is also very slow to render and it takes a lot of skill to make it look good and wouldn't even fit the scene overall because we are working in this low poly style so instead create a new pyramid shape and make it really tall and pointy and then scale it down so it's the size of grass you can duplicate this object by just copy and pasting it or you can move the object while holding ctrl or command on the keyboard and it will automatically duplicate for you to that position let's scale this one down a little bit more for variations sake we are going to add a third one which is just between those sizes okay so now we've got our base models of the smile details but we would like to create more of these but are all scattered over the floor personally I'm one of the guys that likes to do this manually so I have a perfect control over how it looks but it can get quite time-consuming if you need many of these so let's clone these instead by going up here to the mograph menu and picking the cloner object then drag all these rocks and pyramids inside of the cloner and down here in the Kelowna properties set the mode to object this means the object will be distributed over another object we picked for it but we don't have this object already so let's create a new plane and move it just under the floor so we can't see it now let's scale it up so it covers the area where we would like to see some grass and rocks and I'll go back into the clutter properties and drag the plane object on top of the object field of our cloner now we can set the distribution to surface and we also want to deselect the align clone option so that grass isn't laying flat down here you can enter how many objects you want there to be you could also adjust the seat number to replace the objects randomly but you have more control over this we want to add a random effector which you can find under the mograph tab again if we scroll down we can also turn on the scale and rotation options and from here it's mostly playing with the values until we get something nice looking but for the scale make sure to check uniform scale so it scales evenly and for the rocks and grass we also only want them to rotate on H axis so it doesn't go upside down or something also with this technique it's really easy to adjust our base models and cinema 4d will automatically update all those clones for us so this is a huge time-saver compared to the manual method now let's also play around with the cloner seat so we get something nice looking but there are a little bit too many rocks for my liking so you can fix this by adding more pyramids in the cloner group so let's duplicate some of these and play around with the seat number again until it looks just fine obviously you can also combine this Kelowna method with the manually placed objects so let's duplicate some of the rocks and place them outside of the cloner so you can place them exactly where you want them too now we have a 3d model that looks pretty good and we can start finishing things up with the light and textures first off let's press ctrl or command + D to open the project settings and down here you set the default object color to 80% gray so we can have a better view when testing or lighting setup it will basically get us close to one of those colorless clay renders to seal up next up a first thing to do is going in your endler settings and adding an ambient occlusion effect this will give us a more realistic shading but to take full effect of this we need to add lights to cast the shadows let's start off with an area light and roughly scale it up to the size of the tree and then move it to the left side where we can rotate and angle it into position also make sure to go in the light settings and add an area shadow and it's probably a good idea to give the light a warm but soft color something Orange when we render this you can see adding the light in this position gives us some dramatic long shadows at the right side of the objects which makes things look more interesting in my opinion next up let's duplicate this area light that make it smaller and position it somewhere at the right side of the tree but also somewhat behind it this will be our edge light which optically separates the tree from the background for this one we can disable the shadows because it will look strange having shadows coming from two different directions and also set the color to something more blueish by having this orange and blue light coming from two different directions we are basically applying lighting techniques used in photography studios and on tear stages originally they started doing this because white light didn't exist it had to be created by adding multiple colors of light which mixed into a white light obviously we don't need to worry about it here but we are just using this because it gives us a nice contrast which might remind you of a nice sunset where you have the combination of warm light from the Sun and cold white bouncing of the moon but when we render this again there are still many parts which are completely dark right now so create a new area light and adjust it so it becomes one big overhead light floating above tree this one can stay almost white and we are going to give it some shadows as well why we render you can see we are getting some of our details back again but overall scene is still pretty dark a great way to light up your scene without cranking up the brightness of your lights and over exposing the whole shot it's adding what we call a global light basically this is a regular Omni light where we check the ambient illumination option this means it will light up the whole scene regardless of its position now you can control the brightness with the intensity slider now let's keep it somewhere around 80% for now when we run the list you can see everything receives enough light right now also something I would like to point out is how the shadows behave depending on where you place your lights when the light is close to your object these shadows get larger and softer and when we move it further away the shadows get darker and sharper in the runner you can see everything is nicely lit right now but the background is still black and we want this infinite floor look so a first step to do this is adding a background now let's move the floor object closer to the background object in the hierarchy so we can see what we are doing and now create a new material down here by double clicking and you can just leave the settings at default right now so close this window and then apply this material to both the floor and the background and when we render this you would expect it to be smoothly merging into each other but it doesn't to fix this you need to right-click on the floor and go into cinema 4d Tex a select the compositing tag now simply check the compositing background option and you're done so now when we render you can see it works fine but the shadows down your on the floor are a little bit too much for my liking and this is because the line is too far away so if we move it further away it gets even worse that we want it really close to the tree so it gets really soft but we can adjust this later on but first we are going to set up a nice composition for our camera and we can do this by creating a camera and checking this flex square so it turns white and this means you're currently viewing through the camera lens and now we are going to apply a trick that turns everything in something that looks like a miniature object this can be done by setting the focal length to something like 200 what this does assume again so much that the perspective gets straightened out and now let's also reposition this view so the tree is nicely centered when you're satisfied it's a good idea to lock the view so you don't accidentally ruin it by moving the camera to do this you need to right-click on the camera and go into cinema 4d tags again and there you can find the protection tag and this means you can't edit the object you can't move it around it stays there exactly like you left it now as a final step is a good idea to add some colors our first material will be the Three Crowns give it some bright green color with a hint of yellow and maybe and down here we are going to add a texture to it which will be a gradient in this case when you've done that click on the gradient image and set the type to 2d circular and up here we want to right click on this gradient and invert amounts so it gets darker around the edges and bright in the center also replace the black with some medium gray so and is in this harsh let me go back to our color settings reduce the mixed strings a lot so something about 10% would work because we only need a little hint of it and now after we apply to material to the objects you can see the center of every polygon is slightly brighter than the edges and this is a good technique to use a low poly objects that are kind of round because the edges usually don't look as crisp on these next up let's create a new material for our grass this will be a darker green apply it to some of our pyramids in the cloner but also create a new material with a different shade of green for the remaining pyramids so we get a little bit of variation for the rocks let's choose a grayish color with a hint of orange in it and you can also create a second material again for the other Brooks our final texture will be the trunk which will be brown of course and down here add a new texture again but this time we are going to pick noise we can already decrease the mix strength again to 10% and then click on the noise image to change the type of noise you need to click this tiny error right here and it isn't the most obvious thing so try remembering this one and for our trunk a nice texture would be depends on one right here after that you can close the window now and apply it to your trunk alright so that is basically it for our modeling portion of this tutorial obviously you can keep adjusting everything until it looks great don't be afraid to experiment with it and as a reference most of the times 50% of my time goes into adjusting and experimenting with elides colors textures and so on so don't be afraid to do this alright our first step is adding our two key components that will create the animation which are the band and D twist objects make sure your tree is grouped together already and place it together with the band and twist object into a new group now with both the band and twist objects selected let's adjust the size so it roughly fits around the tree but one thing to pay attention to is that the bottom of these are kind of line up with the bottom of our tree great when that is done we can start playing around with the values and let's take a look what happens when we increase the strength of our band objects as expected advanced rather than an expressive and funny way and that's not exactly what we are looking for so check this keep y-axis length option and that will prevent the tree from stretching in this unrealistic manner the twist object also does what you would expect it to do and it seems to work perfectly fine so to start animating these go back to our bend object and set the strength to something like -5 degrees and the angle to something like 36 degrees in order to keyframe those values we need to hold ctrl or command and click the circle next to each value so it turns red next up let's move the playhead to 60 frames which will be at the middle of our animation that will be 120 frames in total and change the values to 5 and 17 degrees and create new keyframes again next up let's go to our twist object and make sure the playhead is on frame zero again and also set it to -5 degrees and create a new keyframe now move the playhead to 60 frames again and change the value to 8 degrees it is a good idea to not pick exactly 5 degrees again because it would make the animation look too symmetrical and artificial also if your timeline only goes up to 90 frames you can enter the 120 frames down here and make sure this preview area reaches all the way to the end so now when we play this we can see the animation but it doesn't repeat itself seamlessly like we intended to to get a better view of our animations let's go up here to window and select the timeline F curve right now this looks clean because we have just one simple animation button larger projects it can get very overwhelming to make our animation repeat click on one of those objects at the left here and you will see a menu pops up in the background now when we set the before and after to oscillate it will automatically repeat the animation and reverse and also next to the after option make sure to set the repetitions to a very large number like this so it infinitely repeats itself now also do the same thing with the other object and you'll see the curves smoothly repeat themselves appear so when we close this and play the animation again you can see it looks nicely and the animation is basically done [Music] you [Music] [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

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Keywords: cinema 4d low poly, How to Model & Animate a Low Poly Tree, low poly cinema 4d animation, low poly cinema 4d tutorial, low poly, how to model, cinema4d low poly tutorial, low poly cinema 4d, low poly character modeling cinema 4d, cinema4d model tutorial, mobox, cinema 4d low poly landscape, c4d beginner tutorial, mograph, cinema4d beginner tutorial, motion graphics, beginner tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, Cinema 4D Tutorial, c4d, cinema

Id: OZ4wos3VYTo

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2017