Intro to Modeling in Cinema 4D - Box Modeling Basics

[Music] EJ here and in this short video I'm going to show you a few simple tools you can use to start modeling almost anything you want inside of cinema 4d [Music] cinema4d is the industry standard 3d software in motion design and being able to use it is a massive advantage in your career in cinema 4d Basecamp we take you from total beginner to confident c4d artists in 12 weeks so check that out if you really want to learn this amazing tool also you can download the project files I'm using in this video plus a modeling hotkeys cheat sheet to follow on with me or to practice with after you're done watching details are in the description in 2d you only really need to know how to use the pen tool to create whatever your heart desires you're only limited by your illustration skills and 3d the berry to creating what you have in your head is a little bit steeper it requires you to learn how to model and sculpt in 3d space and honestly modeling is one of the hardest skills to learn in 3d now we're just gonna model something very simple were gonna model my little pigeon here that I actually sketched out and the thing you're gonna learn is the basic principles of box modeling which is 3d modeling that begins with you guessed it a box so I have this sketch here and it's very important when you model something that you have something to reference to look at so you can build your model based off of those images so here's my very poorly drawn sketches of my little pigeon that I'm hoping that we can go ahead and model in cinema 4d all right so here we are in cinema 4d and we're gonna use that a horribly drawn sketch of mine and we're gonna bring it in here to use it as a guide to be able to model from it's always important to you know base your models off of sketches so you can get the correct kind of form that you want or you know if you're trying to model a stapler get an image of a stapler all that good stuff so what I'm gonna do is go ahead and click this top right button to bring up my four up view and what I want to do is load up the side view in my right view and the front view of my pigeon in the front window here so what I'm gonna do is select this right view and go to options configure and in the viewport attributes here I'm gonna go to the back tab and here's the image option where I can click these three dots here and go ahead and load up my pigeon side and then we can do the same thing for the front view by going to options configure in going and loading up the pigeon front okay in each of these options I can adjust the size or the offset and adjust the transparency so I want to bring down the transparency fairly low so I can still see you know the geometry on top of them when I start modeling I'll go and click on the right view and bring the transparency down here as well so just faint enough that I can see it and I can start modeling to this so everything starts from a box begins with a box and what we're gonna do is basically just kind of bring up the size of this rectangle or this cube scale this down hitting the T key for scale basically just block out this shape hitting the e key to move okay and it's always important to use these shortcut keys Efram move T for scale and just kind of making this cube as tall as the base body of our pigeon body here okay now what I'm gonna do you it's not looking like a pigeon so far so the other parts of box modeling is throwing your box into a subdivision surface and you can see here's our subdivision surface right here we throw the cube in that subdivision surface is gonna smooth everything out and make it a lot more organic okay so right now we just have like this long tall blob and the key to how to subdivision works is if you add more second to your geometry like say segments in the Y you can see that we're getting more of a defined shape it's mucking more like a pill it's actually looking a lot more like the actual shape of our pigeon here just by adding those little segments now we're not actually seeing the segment's in our perspective view if you want to see them go to our display mode and go to garage hitting lines and you can see the result of all the extra subdivisions that's coming from our subdivision surface if I click on that little checkbox it's going to deactivate that subdivision surface you can see the cube with just those three segments you can see just it's just a block and you can see what the subdivision surface is actually doing there an easy way to enable and disable subdivision surfaces is by hitting the Q key okay so I've hit the Q key and you can see the before and after there so with these added segments what I want to do is start extruding and shooting is one of the most common types of modeling functions that you can do to build the posterior end of our pigeon so to be able to access the points edges and polygons of my cube I need to make this editable because right now I can only control the size here and the segments so what I need to do for that is to click on my cube and I can either click this button here that's gonna convert this to an object that I can then edit the points edges and polygons or I can just hit the C key okay so it's always again important to know the shortcut keys I'm just gonna hit C and then I'm gonna go ahead and go and go to my polygon mode here and I can actually select polygons and move them around now one of the important things you do not want to select polygons or points or edges and move them around in your perspective view you can see when I move that polygon around it actually moved it and pushed it back to the side so I'm going to go ahead and undo that so you always want to move your points edges or polygons in either your top front or right views here because you can actually just move this along a set 3d plane and not have those weird you know movements of your polygons all over the place so what I'm going to do is just extrude this little polygon out here to make the back end of my pigeon so I'm gonna hit em to bring up my modeling shortcut keys and you can see if I hit T it's gonna bring up the extrude and if I just click and drag here you can see there is my added geometry there now I can hit the e key to bring out my move tool and just move this into place I can hit T for scale and just scale this down and while I got like the little back end of my pigeon just like that so you can see that I basically just blocked off the basic shape of my pigeon but you can see that if I want to make this you know if I look at my character here the sketch it kind of has the bulge of the belly now I don't have enough geometry enough definition of my geometry to be able to make all those kind of fine-tune details so to add more detail to this mesh I'm just gonna go ahead and subdivide all these polygons cuz again really we're only working with this really boxy shape right now so what I'm gonna do is with a polygon selected I'm just gonna hit command a to select all those polygons and what I'm gonna do is right click and go all the way down to subdivide now you'll notice there's this gear we're gonna select that gear and we're gonna bring up the subdivide command and what this allows you to do is subdivide and create more polygons based on the polygons that you currently have so if I have a subdivision of one we're basically gonna subdivide all the polygons we currently have and basically multiplies we're gonna have double the amount of polygons now if we check on this smooth subdivision it's gonna subdivide and also smooth it out as well and that's exactly what we want so I'm gonna check on that smooth subdivision hit OK and you can see that we have doubled the amount of polygons here we have way more definition on our geometry and if we turn back on our subdivision surface you can see we still have the basis of our figure here the only thing that's changed so if we go to our cube object here which actually we should double click and rename pigeon body we can go and kind of select these points go into point mode and start pushing them out and creating our little belly here okay now the only problem with this is is I'm only selecting and moving points on one end which means that I have to you know try to mimic the point movement on the other side and I'm just gonna go ahead and undo all that because there's actually an easier way to do this since I know my body is gonna be symmetrical I can actually just go ahead hit the zero key to bring up my rectangular selection or just go up here and just select all the points on this left side here and make sure that my only select visible elements is checked off if that's on and I select these points you're gonna see that I only select the front so make sure that's checked off select all the points on the left and just go ahead and delete them now before you freak out we're gonna bring them back really quickly and that is using the cemetery tool so right where we had the subdivision surface let's grab the cemetery tool and place the cemetery tool underneath the subdivision surface and place that Pigeon body underneath the symmetry object as a child and you'll see that we now have our polygons and edges and points mirrored on the other side so this means that if we select a point over here and move it it's going to mirror on the other side okay so now we can more easily shape the body we want again we want that nice belly bulge or pigeons been eating a lot of trash he's nice and full the one thing you don't want to do is select these center points if I move that you were gonna see a gaping hole in our pigeon which is not good so how the cemetery object works is you need all those center points aligned right smack dab on the center of your composition so if you select this point you can see that that points actually living on the 32 centimeters and the X I just need to go ahead and zero that out hit enter and that'll make my point aligned all over again so again we've got our nice little belly bulge going on there looking good and now what we can do is go and make our legs so for that I'm gonna go to my polygon mode and just go ahead and let's select let's select this polygon here okay now this is the the whole reason why we subdivided everything is so we have these extra polygons we can build other geometry on now we don't want to just extrude we're actually going to use another very common modeling function which is inter extrude and what inert shoe does if I go and hit em to bring up my shortcut-keys up again you can see W is inner extrude so I'm gonna hit W and if I click and drag you can see them actually inner extruding that polygons to a smaller polygon here in from this polygon I can now extrude out my feet now the one thing I'm going to do those you can see that my geometry this polygon is a little bit warped so what I can do is whip that polygon selected just go ahead and enter 0 for the y scale and just flatten out that polygon ok so now it's nice and flat and so what I can do now is hit M and T to get my extrude tool and just click in drag ok now one thing you're gonna see is that my legs are more of a oval shape so I'm gonna go ahead and undo that and I'm gonna go and hit T for scale and make sure our top view is gonna be handy here that our polygon is actually a nice square because this is gonna create a really nice smooth kind of cylinder just like we had with our head so now I can go ahead and hit MT and bring my extrude tool and just go ahead and extrude a few times let's make sure we have our leg about as tall as our drawing here so I can always hit the e key and move that polygon up and again I want to make sure that this polygon this front polygon here is a nice square because I'm gonna go ahead and click that polygon and extrude here for the middle toe so I can either hit MT to bring up my extrude tool again or hit the command key and you're gonna see the cursor with these two boxes two squares and if I click and drag while hovering over that blue arrow I can actually extrude out every time I click and drag so there's one of the middle toes there now what I'm gonna do is select both these side polygons here and hit MT and extrude this out and what I want to do is make sure I have a nice square so I'm gonna hit T and just move that out and now I can select both these polygons hit MT and extrude these out a couple times so now we got our toes looking good you can see there are a little bit oblong shape so I can maybe scale these down and what you're gonna see is that her feet look more like a fork so what I can do is go to my edge mode and select both of these edges by holding the shift key down and just remove them and you don't want to hit the Delete key cuz that's gonna delete the polygon so I'm gonna command Z to undo that and I'm just gonna right click and go to dissolve and I'll actually move those edges and kind of round that toe out okay so what we can do now is maybe this big toe a little bit too big so what I'm gonna do is get my loop selection by hitting U and this will bring up all of your selection shortcut keys so just like we hit the M key bring our modeling commands these are your selection commands so you and then L is gonna get our loop selection so I can select this leap and hold the shift key down and grab this loop and one thing we can do to kind of scale all this down is right-clicking and going to normal move and this will just kind of shrink down that middle toe there okay so this is looking pretty good I can just go ahead hit the zero key for rectangle selection select all of these polygons and just scale this down maybe rotate these to the side and get something like that now we can actually smooth out all the foot polygons here by right-clicking and using the iron tool and you can see this is actually gonna just smooth everything out really nicely and I can go ahead and select the points get my rectangular selection select all these points and zero out the Y so all these points live on the same plane and that foot is nice and flat now what you're gonna notice is that we have some weird kind of polygons going on right here so what I can do is add more definition if I hit the Q key you can see exactly what's going on I can actually add a cut here to add more definition to the base of our foot here so we don't have these stretch polygons so I'm gonna do is hit the M key and then L for the loop cut and just go ahead and you can see we have this little loop here if I just click it's gonna add that loop cut and you're gonna see that we have much nicer definition at the base of our foot we don't have those really Jinky edges right there okay so this is looking really nice let's go ahead and let's just quickly use some other box modeling techniques to build the beak in the wing so let's go ahead and do that really quickly let's grab our cube let's move this into place let's use our for up view here use our sketch and shrink this down and what I'm going to do is make a segment in the Z you can see that added segment there I'm gonna hit the C key to make that editable let's grab this polygon here and just shrink it down let's place this in a subdivision surface here rename this beak and just kind of move this on up there's our beak so now what we can do is go ahead and create the wings so I'll grab yet another cube scale this down again we're gonna block out this basic shape using our for up view here just getting this basic shape and for this I'm gonna go ahead and add a segment in the XY and Z so we got two by two by to make this editable by hitting the C key rename this wing and what I'm gonna do is grab my polygon selection tool select one of the polygons command ctrl a to select all those polygons right click in grab that iron tool again you're gonna see this is gonna like round out these polygons which is really nice and I'm just gonna throw this into a subdivision surface and now we can go and hit zero and get our rectangular selection tool in our point tool hit the e key and move these around scale it up scale it up on the Y at least and grab a rectangular selection tool again hit T for scale and just scale up in the Y again matching the shape of our drawing here and then just hitting the keep moving scaling this down something like this and basically just trying to follow the form of our sketch here of our wing so rectangular select to hit the zero key a key to move zero rectangular selection IDI to move again zero all building all that muscle memory you can really start moving these points around really quickly and we've got something like that okay so now we've got our wing we can make this kind of conform to the shape of our body by just moving this over rotating this moving this then zero rotating this a little bit as well okay we can also scale this to thicken it up if we want and move this around rotate and just move that into place now just like we use the symmetry tool to mirror the body we can actually do the same thing with our wing grab the symmetry tool place the wing in the symmetry tool and let's just finish this off in add our eyes move this into place and what I'm going to do is shrink this in the X to flatten out the eye a little bit and add some more subdivisions here to smooth out the geometry there and grab yet another symmetry through the eye in there let's rename this eye and there we go we got the basis of our pigeon so I'm just gonna go ahead and fast forward making this pigeon tail because we already know how we did this we just extrude doing those loop selections moving stuff around modeling basics objects is actually pretty easy and fun and it's an incredibly useful skill now here we go we got our nice little handsome looking pigeon all fully lit and textured here so I hope you learned a ton and feel way more confident about getting started modeling in cinema 4d it's not that hard right hit subscribe if you want more tips like this one and make sure to check the description so you can download the handsome little pigeon project file from this video to see how I lit and textured it plus a modeling hotkeys cheat sheet for you to go ahead and practice with before I become very proficient in cinema 4d with the help of industry pros and fun real world challenges check out cinema 4d base camp from school motion thank you for watching

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 322,410

Rating: 4.9575486 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, cinema 4d, modeling, 3d modeling, c4d modeling, c4d

Id: hyZb7RT2AAU

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020