Low Poly Town 3D Modeling - Cinema 4D Tutorial

hey what is up guys this is Eli for mobiles graphics comm this time we are going to keep it sweet and simple we are going to model this low poly town in cinema 4d if you don't feel like watching the whole video and you just want to take a look at the project file you can find it on the patreon page but for everyone else we will just get started with the tutorial so a first thing we can do is creating this base or the floor so that will be a cube object and it all depends on your taste but I'm going to make this the rough size of something like 900 by 25 centimeters so that's the thickness and 600 centimeters on the z-axis so that gives us something like this I'm also going to add a filler to this to make it just a bit softer but right now it's a bit too soft so let's decrease the radius of this I think something like 5 looks fine okay so a next thing we can do is creating the roads inside of this cube so the easiest way to get the best result for my liking is creating yet another cube objects and I'm going to make this something like 40 centimeters I think that's a good size for our road so let's just drag this somewhere where I want the main road to be so I think that's here the easiest way to build some roads now is actually making this editable already that we are going in the polygon mode so we can select one side and I'm just going to stretch this to the point where I want to have an intersection with another road so let's go to something like this and here I want an intersection so what I will do now is creating a duplicate so you can do that by holding command or ctrl and dragging it to the side and I'm also going to hold shift so I can move it by increments of 10 centimeters and I'm going to stop at 40 centimeters so I have a perfect square at this spot so let's make yet another duplicate all the way to the end also make sure it overlaps so it covers the whole cube at the bottom and I'm going to do the same thing at the other side okay so now we have these two squares right here so what I'm going to do now is selecting these two polygons at the side and duplicating these to the back something like this will do now we need to create yet another duplicate of 40 centimeters and that way we should be able to connect these two polygons so you can do that by selecting both of them and right click and select the bridge tool now you can click and drag from one point or corner to the other and release and that should give you a nice connection of the polygons so now these are very square at the corners so maybe we want some rounding on this what we can do is going in the edge mode and I'm going to select these edges at the corner and when you've got all of them selected you can right click and select the bevel tool and we are going to make a battle by clicking and dragging so I think something like a 30 centimeters looks fine but we're also going to up the subdivisions so it is 300 I think something like 5 subdivisions it does the job that we're also going to check limits so we don't have this intersection right here ok so that looks nice now but you can see the road is actually floating above the floor but we want it to be engraved in the floor so what we need to do now is creating a pool object and dragging both of these cubes inside of it right now you can see there is some strange stuff going on but it is because we need to make sure the order of the cubes is correct so let's drag the bottom one above the upper one and now you can see the cut is made so one more thing we need to do is raising this road so it isn't going all the way through the floor something like this will do in my case this looks pretty clean except for all the lines that you should just ignore that for a visual model like this one if this was for a game this would be very problematic but the free render you can see there is nothing of these lines visible so let's just ignore it but as I said if you have some glitches or stuff maybe at this point you should go in the booth settings and disable the high quality option that way it should be fixed but also if it works fine you can keep the high quality turned on and also select height new edges that way it looks just a bit cleaner on your scene ok great said this is a good point to get started with creating a house we are going to make four variations but I'm not going into detail on all four of them I'm just going to show you how one house can be built and all the other ones will use just the same techniques so let's get started with the most simple house and that's by creating yet another cube and this ice can be anything you like but I found a good size is somewhere between the 60 and the 40 centimeters so that's close to the size of the road actually so I think this is good for one house so now what we are going to do is making sure we are in the garage shading lines mode on the display setting that way you can see all the lines at the edges and that is because I want to create one more segment at the middle of this cube so let's take a look at what direction we want this it appears to be on the z axis for this one and we're doing this because now we can make this editable and select this upper edge and raise it up so that way we have some kind of roof shape okay next up we can create the door and the windows so this will be just some other cubes again we need to scale this down of course so let's get started with the door and you can already think of this in a way where we will be using the bool object again so when we have this door you can see it is inside of this house so we need to move it back a bit so it only cuts out this portion you can see very slightly so this will be the door let's create some windows it's just the same thing you can even copy and paste these cubes and let's also add these on the other sites okay so when you're done with placing the windows you can group all of these windows together by selecting them and pressing Alt + G and now we're going to create yet another bull object so we can drag both of these inside of it and also make sure the order is correct together this way you should have something that looks like this so now I would like to have some more detail on this roof because it's just a bit too simple right now we're going to select the house of course let's go in the polygon mode so we can select both of these pieces and usually I would start making exclusions on this so we get a nice shape but for this one I think it's easier if we split these polygons from the object so it's easier to apply the materials on this later on because we will be having a separate object where we can drag the material on instead of having to select all the separate polygons on this building and making sure all the textures are not intersecting with each other if that's not clear to you you will see what I mean when we are going to apply the materials but for now let's split these polygons from the actual house so with these polygons selected right-click and somewhere at the bottom there should be the option split when you click this you can see we have a new object but the one that is highlighted is still the original object so in this case what we can do is just hitting delete or backspace and that way we get rid of the selection at the top here which was the roof so that way we only keep the bottom part of the house so the other object is the one with the roof but right now you can't see it because we have the bool object still selected so let's make sure that is disabled you may be wondering why we need to disable the Google object because bool object only makes a cut between the two first objects and then it's ignoring all these windows and cubes inside of this group so what we can do already to fix this and selecting these two top cubes so that's the building and the roof that let's group these together again by pressing Alt + G I made this extrusion just to show you it is there I'm just going to then do this quickly so now with that bottom object selected so we have the roof and making sure the polygons are also selected we're going to press I on the keyboard to get the inner X through to that you're going to make a small extrusion something like 2 centimeters will be good enough also make sure you add this - before it because otherwise it won't go inside of the roof instead of outside now we can press D on the keyboard for the extrude tool that make a small extrusion to give it some more thickness so I think something like 1.5 centimeters looks just fine for this so that's the roof one more thing I would like to add to this is a window at the top here so let's get started with yet another cube and scale is down and basically we are going to repeat just the same steps as we did with the shape of the house so what we need to do now is selecting this cube and adding a segment on the x-axis in this case so we have a cut straight through it make it editable select this metal edge and raise it up also make sure it connects with the actual roof at this part now we're going to split this roof and hit delete to get rid of the duplicates select the bottom cube and select the polygons as well and we're going to make a small extrusion this one can be a bit smaller than the actual roof because it's also a smaller object and then make an extrusion upwards you may see this growing outside of the actual roof so let's just adjust the position of this so one more thing we need to do now is dragging this under the group of the house so that's this group and now we can just duplicate one of these cubes we had originally and make a cut at the window so that is one simple house so we can call this house number one this is the basic technique for creating these because it's a very simple style I'm going to create three different houses now you can still follow along with the time-lapse I'm going to show you but I think it's a good thing to get creative so it makes something nice of it okay I hope you managed to come up with something nice-looking so now as a next step we would like to create more of these which are scattered around the floor you could do this by just making duplicates of all these four houses we'd create it but that is not the best option because when we do this and we want to create an adjustment to one of the houses it would not copy to all the other ones so we would manually need to do this on every copy of that house so a better way to do this is creating an instance so that's at the same menu as the bool objects and just below it and with the selected you have this reference object field so what you need to do now is just dragging the house inside of it and you're done so let's create three more of these instances to start with so we can drag the house and each one of them in this way we can also move these houses below the floor so they are hidden we only need the instances what we are going to do now is select all of them and making sure they hit the floor and now we can start moving these around to see [Music] okay when that is done we can start with adding some details to this I think a nice thing to do is adding some fences between the houses so it's more separated from each other so that are just some cubes which are very small and thin and also with a small filler to it so it is a bit more rounded and playful great so that looks better already we're also going to add some driveways to this to give it a bit more detail again these are just some cubes again but you're going to try to make sure it just lines up with the side of the road and there's also just above the level of the floor [Music] when that is done it's also a good idea to actually make sure we are grouping all of this together so defences together and team driveways together maybe I should have done that before creating the driveways because now it's just a bunch of cubes okay next up let's great yet another detail which will be some simplified trees there is another video on this topic on the channel where we model a low poly tree so if you want some more advanced trees and you're seen you can go to that tutorial and place it inside of this scene but for this tutorial we will just create something very simple which will be a pyramid shape so let's scale it down of course and you can also stretch this up so it is a bit more appropriate as a tree or a bush and now it's just a matter of duplicating and scaling these to spice up your scene you may be noticing I've kept this place empty and that is because I want to create a lake on this place so what we can do is going up here and pick the sketch tool let's go to the top view by clicking the mouse wheel button or checking this corner icon so go in the top view and you can just draw a random shape don't worry about these connections not being connected because when you click on the spline you should be able to enable this closed spline option and that way it's connected but it is a bit sharp so what we can do next is going up here and select this points mood tool and now you can click and drag over this to give it a more smoother look but maybe it's a bit too smooth it so let's undo that and make sure the strength is set to a lower value so it isn't as intense let's go back to the perspective mode and make sure the spline is above the floor but now this is just a line and it's not a solid object so we need to make this solid by going up here and creating a loft object and drag the spline inside of it that way it's a solid object so one more thing I would like to do now to finish off this model is creating some fluffy clouds above it I think the easiest way to do this to match the look of this all is creating some spheres so let's just ignore the size of this and I'm going to create a duplicate on this side and make this like half the size of it and make sure it's close to it and we're going to try to line up the bottom of the spheres let's also make a duplicate to the other side and we're going to make this just a bit bigger so like 2/3 of the original sphere okay so when you have these we're going to create a metaball object and drag these spheres inside of it so you can see that there's something close to a cloud shape but it's a bit rough so let's go to the Matabele settings and we're going to lower these editor subdivisions you should be able to see something like 10 centimeters is just fine to get a smooth look also notice you can still adjust these spheres to get a different look of course we can scale this down now and before making duplicates of this I'm going to create a new camera object so I can see where these will be in our vision let's click on this button so we can see through the camera and for this you could use the isometric perspective but that will give you this angle and you cannot rotate the camera so I actually prefer to use the parallel perspective this way you can still rotate the view so let's line this up so it fits the viewport and now we can start creating some more clouds so we can see where they actually are also this is a good time to show you this if you're outside of the camera view you can see this box which is representing the few boards where we are looking from so what we can see when looking through the camera so we need to make sure everything is inside of this box so these clouds if they are above this you cannot see them but if you move them inside of the box you should be able to see them so that's a good and easy way to make sure everything is inside of the view [Music] okay so by doing that I think we are finished with the actual modeling part of this tutorial let's move on to the colors for this of course it's up to you what you do with this but I will be quickly going over the colors I picked for this so you can get the exact same result let's start off with the grass you can see this is a green color of course but it is not very saturated and that will be a recurring thing on all the other colors because I like to keep everything a little more downtown because that way we can go in the post-processing and photoshop for example instead of having something way too bright in this scene so let's drag that on the base shape like this now we can create a second material for the road so this will be some kind of gray maybe add a hint of orange in it that we're going to drag this on the object that represents the road instead of dragging it on the whole base shape let's create the material for the lake this will be a very soft blue really you shouldn't make it too saturated for this one because it will look a bit too dramatic next up let's create a material for the trees this is actually the same shade as the grass but a bit darker also because we grouped this all together we can just drag the material on the group of the trees let's create a material for the fences this will be some kind of light brown color of course which represents wood and of course I also need to add the material of the roads to the driveways okay so now we're at the point where it will be very useful that we used instances for these houses instead of making duplicates of it so let's go to the original houses and we are able to create a new material for the windows for example and we can just drag this on the group of cubes that are being cut out but of course you can also see this is being applied to the door so we need to make sure we find the door also I'm not looking at the correct object it should be below the surface so let's select the door object and we're going to create a new material for this which will also be for some roofs we're also going to create a material for the actual house drag that on the object and now you can see we can drag the material of the door for example on this roof object so that is one house let's create some alternative variations of these colors so we have a bit more variation in the scene as well let's also create another color for the roof maybe something blue will look nice for this one [Music] and I'm just going to repeat these steps for the other houses as well so now we can go above the floor again and take a look at the result so one more thing and notice is that we need a material for the clouds which will be some kind of very light gray but with a hint of blue in it let's take a look when we render this how this looks so that's really the basic way of showing this because we still don't have any lighting on this and of course that's a very necessary thing to do actually this isn't something very hard to do so what we're going to do is creating a physical sky and in here at the time at location tab you can select anything you like but for my preference I use something in the morning so something like ten fifty or ten forty and that way if you render you should be able to see where the shadows are going and that is in the back direction so it's all hidden behind the trees and behind the houses and that's a bit of a shame so what you can do is rotating the physical sky that way the shadows will also be rotated now you saw it was not very impressive just yet so what we're going to do is going in the render settings and add an ambient occlusion effect and also a global illumination effect you can keep everything at default so let's render once more to see what this looks like now so now you can see this looks a lot better I think it's still looking a bit dirty or maybe more something like the fall or autumn then a spring scene so let's go ahead and create a light object and we're going to the bottom here in the settings and select the Ament illumination option this way we have a bit more light in the whole scene but at a hundred percent intensity it is a bit too strong so let's decrease this to something like 50% also you noticed how the clouds are casting shadows on the floor and in this case I think that it's not looking very interesting so let's go ahead and right click on the clouds group go to cinema 4d tags and create a compositing tag and this way we can deselect the cast shadows option we're also going to apply the same thing on this lake object because you could see there was a very small shadow below the lake and that is not very realistic of course so let's do that and let's try to make one last render to see if this looks all right now and there you have it of course this was a quick version of what I actually made before recording this video so if you want to download that one it's also on the patreon page I hope you learned something new today and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 95,882

Keywords: mobox, tutorial, vfx, motion graphics, motion graphics tutorial, Cinema 4d tutorial, cinema4d, c4d, c4d low poly, low poly tutorial, low poly city, low poly town, low poly modeling, cinema 4d modeling, modeling tutorial, c4d modeling, best 3d software, visual effects, how to, how to model, cinema 4d r19, 3d modeling for beginners, beginner tutorial, eary, beginner, c4d modeling basics

Id: Bwkajqnt4yM

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/krysc4d]

I am not sure is quite right in terms of good topology to use Boolean for simple shapes like windows...

[u/Communism_is_bae]

Hey man I’m studying games design and was wondering are there any programmes that you suggest using?