Learn Cylindrical Hard- Surface Modeling in Cinema 4D

hi guys this is Mike in this cinema4d tutorial I'm gonna show you how to do hard surface cylindrical modeling okay first let's go to the primitives and choose a cylinder and go to NBO on your keyboard to bring up garage shading lines let's zoom in a bit and what we want to do in cylindrical modeling is make sure that our lines our vertical lines are spaced perfectly in between each other if you say put in a loop cut using your knife tool it's going to add in a crease and we want to avoid that so we want to make sure that these are perfectly spaced we also want to make sure that there is an even number that's very important when you're doing any type of modeling a cylindrical modeling so I'm going to go to my rotation segments and I'm going to bump this up to 92 [Music] rotation segments and we're gonna keep the height segments fine it one is fine and caps we can leave caps so at this point let's kind of shape our model a little bit and we want to make sure that it's for this model I want to keep it a little bit hot the height more than the radius so I don't want it to be too fat around I want to kind of keep it something like this is fine kind of use your own eye and your own judgement and so what I want to do next is I want to select each individual polygon every other polygon so this would take a long time to do this to go all the way around and select each individual polygon so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use our symmetry to help us out speed up our workflow a little bit so let's press C on the keyboard to make our object editable let's go to our front view so press f4 on your keyboard and let's go to polygon mode let's zoom a bit and let's go to zero on our keyboard to bring up rectangle selection tool and let's go over to our attributes manager I want to make sure that our tolerance selection is checked and make sure only visible elements is unchecked so it's select one side of our model one half of our model so we select right along this centerline and I'm gonna press Delete now let's go to our point mode and optimize clear up any points and now we wouldn't want to do is let's go to our perspective view see how that's how this looks so I'm not finished let's also put in a symmetry for the other side as well so I'm gonna go to our objects and choose symmetry so I'm gonna put my cylinder in our symmetry object but now I want to cut down on this side as well so I'm gonna go to my right side view and I want to select let's make sure I'm in polygon mode let's zoom in a bit and I want to select these polygons on the side or the other side it doesn't matter and I'm gonna delete points optimize actually I don't think I even needed to do that but that's okay as a general rule if you're gonna be deleting any polygons make sure you choose your go to optimize just to clear up any stray points that might be left over so next what I want to do is go to perspective view and let's get another symmetry object put our original symmetry and put this in into our new one now let's select our new symmetry and look experiment with our mirror plane so we want to make sure we're in our XY so now when I go to my cylinder which is this little slice of our object now all I have to do is just select these few polygons which is a lot easier than having to go all the way around and this is to help us out a little bit later too okay so what I want to do next is I'm going to select each individual polygon now make sure you don't select the caps as well we just want to select each individual one so I'm gonna do is hold down shift and just select these polygons here okay great so next what I want to do is I want to extrude these polygons I have selected now what I like to do and this is not always always important but I always like to make a selection tag whenever I'm doing selections I think it's a good idea to have a bunch of selections that you said in your selection tag because you never know if you want to go back to it and do some more adjusting I don't want to have to go back and select all these over again so what I like to do is I like to go to select and then go set selection and what you can do is you can name this if you want just to make sure it's organized so I'm just going to type in rotation you can go rotation sides or polygons something like that now I always want to say this whenever I'm using set selection tags because I've made this mistake before when I first started out always make sure that you deselect that's selection tag and then go back to your model so if you ever are working and doing some cuts and slices and you're making selection tags sometimes if you accidentally have that highlighted and you go to set selection it's going to override what you had already set in your selection tag so that can be kind of annoying because then you're gonna have to go back and redo we select and set that again so just as a general practice just make sure you deselect that and then go back to your model so now if at any point I deselect this these polygons I can just simply double click on the set selection tag and now it has this polygons selected so now what I want to do is extrude and the length of the extrusion of these polygons is sort of kind of subjective but we can keep that if that's okay you don't want to go to too much like say out here and I don't think that would look so great but then again it's really your own aesthetic and that what you're trying to shoot for so I'm gonna keep it somewhat like this okay so next what I would like to do is experiment with these top models here these top polygons and what I like to do at this point is I like to bake down this this symmetry so I can start working on this as a whole and a lot of times that's not always necessary so you can extrude this out but if we're gonna work globally sometimes that's the best way to go because if you extrude if you're doing any type of shaping you kind of get this effect and that might be okay for what you're trying to accomplish but what I want to do is a little bit differently so what I want to do is I want to go back to my symmetry and I want to press seal on the keyboard and that's going to bake down that symmetry so now when I go to this cylinder it's now one whole piece so if you want - if I undo a few times which you can do is you can make a copy of this so command click and drag and that will make a copy and what you can do is you can just kind of put this into its own null option G and you can just name this archive or old or you know something like that and that way you can always go back to that original symmetry if you ever want to do some more adjusting so it's just a way of kind of backing up what you're doing so in my cylinder and I can press C again to make that out edible and I'm just going to delete these nulls what I'm gonna do is go to 9 on the keyboard to bring up my live selection and I'm just gonna select these polygons right at the top now if I'm going to do any type of shaping of this what I would like to do is go to T on the keyboard for scale and just kind of scale this in a bit i extra inner extrusion and it seems like we have a bit of an issue let's find out what's going on here ah so what happened was when I was I baked this down it also included these side polygons so what I did was I selected these top polygons and I just hits a hide selected and so what I want to do is just select these polygons whoops make sure I grab these ones and delete and now what I can do is I can go to select unhide all and now we're back so whatever something happens like that whenever you start working within modeling and you get a weird issue when you're doing any type of extrusion or bevel or inner extrusion I would always suggest kind of selecting that area the top of the surface area what's visible hiding it and see what's going on underneath the surface a lot of times especially this is a good example whenever you're doing symmetry I should have known that beforehand but it's going to add in some polygons on the side so what happens is when you bake it down now you have that those on all sides so it's just a bit of a workaround there so let's select these polygons and we're gonna go to extrude inner so I on the keyboard bring this in a bit now what I want to do is I want to hold down command in this axis and the green axis and drag downward now I'm not going to be using any subdivision I'm not gonna use a subdivision surface for this model so I don't have to worry about keeping these cuts having any loop cuts in order to sharpen the edges so what I'm gonna do and I'm gonna bring this down a little bit just by using the axis just kind of shaping that down extrude inner again and now I want to bring this back up so command click and drag in this axis to pull this back up so what I want to do is zoom in a bit and I want to make sure this isn't over the top of this pure now the reason why I'm doing this is to give the sense when you're doing a render and you have some ambient occlusion on what's gonna happen is you're gonna have this really nice shadow that goes in between here and it's just gonna give it a really nice detail that I really like and so I want to extrude upward again I to extrude excuse me go back t for scale I just want to scale this back a little bit more angled and now I want to go to extrude inner extrude downward again just like I did before and in fact let me um back up a bit and I want a little bit more of thickness in here so undo and just make sure you have a little bit more thickness in this area here now I want to extrude downward T and pull this in a little bit I for inter extrude and now for this section here we don't want to do is something a little bit so similar another interest rude look too much in our extrude again and now let's bring this up T scale inward inner extrude and now let's bring this down and T to scale that in so it's a nice nice angle in the center let's zoom in a bit so it looks pretty good might be a little too deep from when I would I would like so I'm just gonna pull this up okay that looks good now let's move over here to the center area I think I made this loop a little bit too there's too much room here too much space so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to go to UL and make sure i'm in edge mode select this edge and i'm gonna go to t and i'm just going to scale this in you all again for loop selection polygon mode and now i want to grab that selection this loop ii command click and drag i'm just going to pull this in all the way nice and deep so way you get again you get this nice little ridge that will come through so it spoil oops excuse me so let's do something on the bottom here I'm gonna select these polygons make sure I get them all selected and I want to command click and drag pull this down in command click and drag again just a little bit of a ridge and then just kind of scale this in something like this and we could use the bevel tool for this too but I think that will be fine so there's lots of different ways you can do your modeling whatever workflow works for you I kind of like to use you know the scale just because I can flip back and forth but if you want to do something a little bit more precise you can use the bevel tool and you'll find that as you're working what you're going to do is you're going to be bouncing between a lot of different a lot of different tools and that will help you with your with your modeling even even if you can do it all in the same tool it just sometimes you just feel a little bit more comfortable doing a certain area using one tool over the other so what I would like to do now is add in a few different little ridges little little details little surface details just to give it a little bit of interest so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my loop cut tool and I usually like being in the model layout so if you get a model layout you'll have a bunch of tools down here that you could use so if you want to use the loop cut you can grab this tool down here or KL on the keyboard and what you can do is you can add in a cut and this is again one of those situations where you can use a bunch different tools so if you go to edge mode ul and then bevel ms what you can then do is use a subdivision of since we only want to have one line go up we can just go 0 click and drag and now you have this little spacing here that will give you some area where you can do some a little bit of modeling so I can go to polygon mode and what I can do and this is can also you can also do this in symmetry you can slice this again slice this on the side so let's do that because what we can do is real quick I just kind of want to show you what what I'm thinking we can select these polygons and say for polygons and we can select our modeling axis to normal so if I go to if I go to my move tool and I go to modeling axis I can go to say normals and I can extrude inward something like this and then maybe if you want you can also grab these edges and you can pull these in if you want give it kind of a an angled shape on the inside you can do that and I always mess around a little bit with these modeling axis so we can kind of get what I'm kind of thinking of and in terms of where this shape is going to be I tend to use either the world or the normals but what you can do is you can adjust this edge and push it in using these access tools these access handles you can get this sort of like this angled in look for this particular this particular object so let me undo and I'm gonna slice this again zoom in a bit that way I don't have to like I said before you don't have to go all the way around and do everything again we can just use our symmetry so what I'm gonna do is as usual I like to command click and drag that way we have a copy I'm just gonna drag this into my archive again it's always good to back up your models because a lot of times you'll kind of go off into a direction and you realize you kind of painted yourself on a corner in terms of modeling and you want to go back to a couple steps when you're doing your your hard surface any type of hard surface modeling you want to go back and and start where you were before you if you've watched any of my tutorials and you downloaded my project files you'll notice I always have like a one two three just so I know that there's a few steps that I can go back to if I need to I can always go back to that original file happen all the time for me so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do the same procedure as we did before we're gonna go to our front view go to our rectangle selection make sure we're I'm a polygon mode and let's go to our options make sure our attributes are correct and now let's select our polygons let's go to our perspective view I always do this just to make sure everything is lined up nicely delete let's go to point mode and we're good and now let's go to our side view so f3 on your keyboard and we're gonna select these oops make sure I'm polygon mode select these polygons go to our perspective view zoom out a bit and we can delete okay so let's go to symmetry and symmetry one more time and we'll go to XY just like we did before and now let's go to our cylinder polygon mode live selection and now let's add in maybe two of those that I showed you so it's a good idea to kind of count to see how many we have here so if I go to say 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 what I can do is add in a one two three four here whoops let's get rid of that guy and that's count three on this side and shift hold let's get rid of these two top guys so it's really the kind of the design that you want and how you want to space these out is really up to you so it doesn't match up perfectly so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna keep these two so d extrude inwards and again there's really no rules you can do anything you want it's really your own aesthetic and now what I like to do is go to edge mode and just kind of just experiment what we're doing before and just kind of pull these axis handles in a little bit and kind of get the shape that you want and we kind of match these up make sure these look okay so now let's take a look around our model and I think that looks pretty cool so one other thing that I would like to do is I would like to make a cut so KL and I'm just gonna do a little cut right at the top and I want to go to point mode and let's zoom in a bit and maybe I can grab one of these points and let's go to MS and we can do maybe a little loop cut here or a little a whole little opening here now we you can see that we have these end guns so we can close those off let's do this let's go to my edge mode you will or actually let's go to my move tool and I'm gonna double click that's gonna select this loop MS and let's give this a subdivision and pull this out now let's go to our point mode and try that bevel again and I just realized I have that one object set the subdivision I think it'll be alright let's bring this depth down to negative 100 let's zoom in a bit and so now you can see that we have more of a better opening say if we're gonna have an indentation we're gonna make this somewhat circular but we still have these end ons so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my knife tool or you can use your polygon pen that's fine too and we're just going to set up actually a better way to do this you can go to your commands and we can do a end ons and we can do remove and Gon's and that should get rid of our and got yes I should get rid of our n-gons so angles we move and guns and that's not working because I think these are selected again there we go so whenever you have excuse me whenever you have those cyan lines cyan colored lines you can always go up to your tools commands excuse me mesh and guns and then remove end guns instead of using your knife tool to cut through all those so what we can do now is select these polygons and you can do a few of these that go around your object you can pull this down in let's make sure it's not intersecting with our other inner extrusion and we can either bring this in a little bit so we have a little bit of a scale a little bit of an angle now if you zoom out now you can see that we have this that goes on these other sides and what you can do is you can also do this a few more times if you like you can select you know like maybe spaced this out a little bit we can do another one here and another one here ms bring this out zoom in a blue let's zoom in a bit and it's let me undo and just kind of bring this out a little bit there we go polygon mode make sure that's deselected and we'll go mesh and Gon's we move end guns and now we can do the same thing just kind of extrude in scale 9 extrude in and then scale so that's pretty much it using the symmetry object when using cylindrical modeling is always going to be a very handy tool and just the same rules that I said before make sure these rotation segments these vertical lines make sure that those are evenly spaced make sure use even numbers when you're using rotation segments now you can also add in details using the bevel tool and you can continue to bevel as you go around if it when you see fit so if you go to say some of these areas here if you think these edges are a little bit too harsh which you can always do is you can go to e on your keyboard and we'll make sure we're an edge mode double-click ms and maybe we go down a bit in terms of subdivision and what we can do is we can adjust our offset also keep in mind if you use option modifier key and use your down arrow or up arrow you get smaller increments when you're adjusting instead of this large adjustment you can just use option and that will bring that down to a smaller increment so you can do that throughout your you know areas where you like to maybe have a little bit more I mean maybe a little bit more of a softer edge to your instead of this really hard edge you can do that and that's where the bevel tool comes in pretty pretty nicely and we can do this to various edges here and you can also even do that to these little extrusions that we did I kind of like them sharp but that's just you know my own aesthetic so anyway sorry for a bit of a rambling tutorial what I do want to do is just kind of show you so I'm gonna go to my render settings and just go to effect and we'll do an ambient occlusion and that's throw in a cube let's scale this up zoom out and go to my cube go to basic x-ray so I can see what's inside our object and I'm going to go to E and just kind of bring this up T scale this up a little bit and I want to go to C on your keyboard to make this editable and I just want to grab these polygons here delete and adjust this cube a bit a little bit more oops excuse me and let's move this up and at this point we can turn off the x-ray throwing a light and let's see maybe make this an off-white color adele work we'll go to shadowmap soft I think that's fine and what I can do is I can bring another one on the other side down here at the bottom and we'll bring down the intensity to like maybe 50 and what I want to do is just do a actually let's go to our startup and that's just add in and just a bit of a material here and we can bring this on to our cylinder and if we do a render you can kind of see how this will turn out so let's zoom in a bit because I can't really see it all that well it's kind of Center this a little bit and I don't have a camera in here but you can put in a camera if you want and let's give this one last render and as you can see by adding in those little details it kind of you can kind of see this nice little shadow that we have here and let me rotate upwards so we can see our top details a little bit better because that's really where all the action is so I'm going to do another render and you can kind of see these nice little shadows from putting in those details and those little extrusions and and you can see the little nice little highlights from the bevel so experiment with the bevel in order to get these nice little details I put a link in the description to download project files you can also download project files from this tutorial and all the tutorials I made so far at astronomic skills comm also I created a udemy course for beginner 3d modeling in cinema 4d I would value your opinion and if you could take a look at it and review it I would really appreciate it thank you bye

Channel: Michael Balchaitis

Views: 14,345

Keywords: Cinema 4D, C4D, Tutorial, Hard-Surface, Modeling, Hard, Surface, Cylinder, Bevel, Symmetry

Id: f_sxwYC7HSo

Length: 41min 16sec (2476 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018