Modeling in Cinema 4d Lite (2/5)

hello everyone I'm Evan Abrams and welcome to part two of a five-part intro series showing you the basics of Cinema 4D light in this video we focus on creating and modifying geometry I'll be walking you through the techniques methods and tools needed to create this lovely chess set we won't be spending a lot of time fussing over every little piece that would take far too long and be quite redundant in places instead we're going to focus on understanding the principles so you can hopefully make anything you like and not just this particular thing this is the second part of our series that began with a tour of the interface if you haven't watched it I recommend you start there so you have a firm foundation before starting into this video if you have any specific questions about what you see in this video please do let me know in the comments so I can help you out and please subscribe to this channel if you would like to follow this series as it comes out and be notified about new tutorials as they come up around here as we talk more about motion design also I want to say a big thanks to MSI for providing their lovely Hardware you'll see me working on this Creator z17 throughout the series if you're interested in picking one up of your own please use the link in description and see everything they have to offer now that's enough posing for the camera it's time to really get down to modeling in Cinema 4D light [Music] let's start our chess set by creating the most basic of pieces The Humble Pawn in using primitive modeling we're basically going to reach into a toy box of basic shapes move them around size them up and push them into the arrangement that we want to form the thing creating Primitives is easy in Cinema 4D light if you recall from our first video we simply access them over here on the right hand side in the blue buttons these are our parametric objects I'm going to make a cylinder adjust its height and its radius move it to where I think the bottom of the pawn should be and I can refine it using its attributes for example I might go into the Caps Tab and give it a filleted cap each of the Primitives will come with slightly different attributes that we can tweak to our liking you can change the attributes right in the viewport by grabbing these little yellow controls or you might dial them in precisely in the attribute manager by typing sliding the little bar or clicking and sliding on the value itself some will have unique attributes some attrib Roots will be common to every object you see one of the most common of those attributes that make up any object is the segments attribute this is how divided up the object is more segments will make for a smoother object but increasing the geometry can hurt your machine's performance we can see the lines because I've turned my view to garage shading lines from the views top menu I'm going to keep going with adding objects moving them around to create our Pawn maybe I'll use a cone for that tapered part of the piece that makes sense to me how about a sphere for up top and maybe some other cylinders or toroids AKA Donuts that we can add in some detail around the body of the piece and before long with taking those tiny little bits moving them around sizing them up eventually we have something that's starting to look like the thing we want made up of a collection of Primitives adjusting attributes scaling moving rotating all simple all non-destructive parametric operations when you're happy with what you've got go ahead and group those pieces into a null by selecting them and pressing alt G now we can move that object around like it's one whole thing even though it's just a collection of bits you can even change the location of the Anchor Point or axis by going into axis mode with the group selected and now you can see we can move that down and rotate the thing and scale it from that particular Point congratulations you now know everything that you need in order to make this charming little Pawn now you may not be satisfied with The Primitives they are after all quite rigid and if the options you want to change to get something just the way you want aren't in the attributes you're kind of out of luck at least until we add something more to the scene enter the deformer see this cone piece of the pawn it'd be nice if this were more fluted more contoured so I'm going to go ahead and deform it we have a few deformers to choose from but I'm gonna go for the Bulge deformer and place that one inside the cone deformers the purple icons are used to modify other things by placing the deformer inside the cone the deformer will act upon the cone I'm going to click fit to parent so that the area that the Bulge would impact matches with the area of the cone and the alignment of the deformer is positive y meaning it's aligned up and down in our world setting up the deformer to be the right size and direction will make the rest of the changes a lot easier to anticipate now I'm just going to dial in the strengths to be be a negative number and now you can see some pinching happening but it looks a little rough that is because I probably need to add more segments to the cone more segments means more Fidelity so if I go into the cone's attributes and increase those height segments we're going to see a smoother deformation this is a critical point on deforming Geometry always make sure you have enough segments to see the change you want to push through it now I also wanted to show how we can move that deformer around as it goes up and down the place that that pinch is happening is also changing we have lots of options for how much and where and in what way our deformations are applied you may also find that you enter a little dance oh now things are getting too thin so I need to thicken out that part of the piece to accommodate the deformation and back and forth so don't worry if things don't look perfectly right right away a little pull here a little push there and eventually things start to take shape now before we leave deformers I want to show you do two other things first if I want to do something to this entire group maybe bend the entire Pawn then I would place that bend deformer at the same level of the hierarchy in the group because it is the group that will be bent so here I go placing the bend in there getting it to the right size and location I'd like and bending the heck out of the pawn you can see it adds this kind of disney-like magic like this Pawn might sing about the joys of moving forward one space at a time any moment now the second thing I want to share about deformers is that they are impermanent as you've seen here we can move them any way we'd like nothing is set in stone you can always modify them or even animate them but that does mean they can be taking up valuable resources in your scene so if you wanted to bake these things making these changes permanent we're going to want to right click on the thing that we want to make permanent and choose current state to object and as you can see the deformers are gone and The Primitives are even gone all the icons are now these little polygon mesh icons they're no longer procedural parametric platonic Primitives they are now permanently polygons this is a step that you can't really undo but thankfully there is this duplicate of our original pieces saved here in our project if you ever find that your machine is getting bogged down or you're experiencing some crashes because you have a lot of deformers and acting on each other sometimes it is best to bake down the geometry into these polygon meshes there is another way entirely to make geometry and that is with other geometry it sounds strange I know but let's look at creating a rook or Castle as an example the green section of our making stuff toolbar is for generators things that are defined by what we put into them let's look at the simplest example the extrude if I drop a spline from that top group of 2D splines maybe a rectangle and I place it in the extrude you can see that the line is then extruded based on the properties of the extrude and if I modify that rectangle path you can see that that changes the resultant shape the end result is a combination of the things we've put inside the generator and the instructions of that generator that say what should we be doing with these lines I want to make a rook so I'm going to use a different generator called the lathe that will revolve a profile around a central axis I'm entering into the side view using that pen tool or spline tool to create our desired Rook profile one half of what that profile would look like since this is going to be revolved 360 Degrees around you're doing a pretty simple job just clicking about sometimes clicking and dragging to pull out bezier handles sometimes I'm holding shift to separate those handles but I'm not so worried about doing a great job because I can always come back and change these points when I'm finished when I'm done and hit escape to cancel out and then I will place this spline into a lathe object now do you see a problem don't worry like we said we can always come back and edit that original spline and we'll get to better results we we can toggle that generator on and off with the checkbox if you like and that can give you a better view of those internal parts or we might just use point mode and make sure you've got that spline selected and just go to town with your selection tools moving rotating scaling getting things exactly how we want them before we leave The Rook I wanted to show that the generators not only make geometry from splines they can also create large groupings of geometry or duplicates this little castle object obviously needs those little crenellations up at the top it would be a poor use of our time if I had to do those manually so I'm going to make a cube size it down to how large one of those little blocks should be I'm going to drop it into an array and right away you can see we have something happening the array makes as the name suggests a radial array of things based on that original and right now it's pushing them around so let's bring that radius in and they're in the totally wrong spot but this does illustrate something really important about the array and in part about many generators where the thing is where that new geometry is located is where the generator is doesn't really matter that the cube was already up in a certain position once it's inside the generator the resultant object is just using the information from the cube to create this new thing in a new location when working with generators it's often best to be fastidious about where things are located and then place them into the generator and then move the resultant geometry to the place you want it to live for example with our Rook spline here for the lathe we made sure that we were drawing it out from the center the origin of the entire coordinate system we're jumping around a bit but another powerful generator in our list that I want to show off is the sweep I'm going to use it to make the edge of our chessboard this generator would like a rail and a profile so I'm going to drop in a rectangle and set it to be pointing up or flat down on the ground instead of sideways and I'll draw a little curve for the type of shape that I want to see swept along this rail then I'm going to place both of those in in a sweep and just like me you might initially be confronted with disappointment this is because generators do very specific things with what we give them the rectangle is assumed to have an up Vector a way that it's pointing and that means that the spline we're going to sweep along it will also be assumed to be in a specific orientation to get this working the way I want we select our profiles flying we enter axis mode and then we rotate that axis with the rotation tool in this case by negative 90 degrees don't you look at that now things are looking correct and good normally when we want to draw our profiles for sweeps we do it in the front view so their axis is lined up as the sweep expects I did it this other way mostly because I forget most of the time and also because I know this is a really common pain point so maybe it's good to show common issues let me know in the comments if this is a helpful way of teaching just as a bit more abstracted example let's look at this circle which I will then use as the rail to sweep an n-sided over this won't help us make a chessboard in any way but it's good to see these things in the abstract now the Fidelity of the sweep is determined by the points along the rail so if I wanted a smoother sweep I need to go into that rail spline access the intermediate points attribute and put that number up or maybe use a different method to get where I want with this level of density we might also decide that we don't want the whole rail to be swept so we can dial in the start and end growth we can also dial in the end scale and the end rotation for twisting or distorting the sweeps and if you're not satisfied there we can come in and modify in more detail by messing with these curves down here simply hold down control click on the line and you'll be adding points and you can move them around to make it even more wacky and interesting this is a very powerful generator that can be confusing at times so take your exploration slow one attribute at a time and remember how much the axis and the up vectors are important to this not satisfied with sweeps maybe I could interest you with a loft The Loft is the ideal generator to try to make this kind of complex Queen's Crown shape this is a very tricky shape to make because it needs to be a circle at the bottom and then come out to points or kind of Nubs at the top I think that's kind of tricky enter The Loft object a generator that will try to stretch geometry across splines I'll show you what I mean really quickly with these alternating circles and rectangles circle square circle square circle if we place them into a loft you can see how it tries to stretch material between all of these different Gates so if I wanted a crown that is a circle on the bottom but becomes an eight-pointed star towards the top I only need to make those things and make them part of the Loft it looks a little rough for my taste but we can smooth things out by using what's called a subdivision surface so I'm going to drop this entire generator into one of those a subdivision surface is going to add more lines subdividing what we put into it the result is that you'll have more geometry but it's going to average out some of the sharper Parts which means we get this kind of sophisticated soft edged type thing I can crank up the Lofts subdivisions to make this more rigidly conforming to the shape because if we started with more lines then subdividing them doesn't stray as far from that original shape and we certainly have other options within the Loft like caps that might help get it exactly right but we're very close with just this I think we've really nailed it for the crown shape I'm going to just quickly move this all to be at the top of the queen that I've worked up already using Primitives and deformers like we've already seen no need to retread all of those Concepts in detail getting the Hat on right is just a matter of scaling rotating and positioning and then working up and adjusting the other geometry to be a little bit in proportion if you really want to pick apart any of the chess pieces in detail they will be available for download in the description now what if all these deformers and generators just are aren't quite getting you exactly where you want to be you need to be more precise this is when we make things editable any bit of geometry can be made editable with this little button at the bottom of the stack of tools so I'm going to deploy this when making the bishop here everything's looking great I've used primitive modeling techniques to arrange all these little shapes I've made a pretty excellent Bishop except for the top Bishops I'm told require a pointy hat so I will simply make the sphere editable which will allow me to push and pull its points around you'll want to make sure that you put the segments or subdivisions as high as you need before you hit this button because there's no going back once clicked the thing is what it is but now when I enter point mode and select some points I can move them around very granularly using the rectangular selection I can grab groups of points give them a push making that hat shape nice and pointy we also have the capacity to Loop and ring select that will help get you to the points you want quicker and you can also access things by polygon you can access them by Edge there are many ways to manipulate the geometry around anytime you see something as a little polygon icon like this over in your object manager you know you can grab the points and push them around however this is one of the big limitations we are missing many of the options that we would hope to have when it comes to this kind of model manipulation in fact the entire category of box modeling or subdivision modeling that you would find in the full version of Cinema 4D is not really available to us but don't worry we're going to take the core of those methods and apply them to tools that we do have access to one object that's used a lot in this method that you've already seen is the subdivision surface this is our best friend when we want to take something rough and clunky and make it smoother more refined that's exactly what we're going to do for our Knight object here for the methodology it's taking something simple pushing the points around and working it up to the final piece I'll start with the profile of the Knight that will extrude it and because I want to push the points around as an editable object I'm going to bring up the segments on the height and we should make sure that we're in garage shading with lines so that we can see all of the lines and geometry that I'm adding I should also make sure that the Topography of the Caps are full of detail as well not just one big and gone this is going to give me more points to move and to have control over so I can manipulate the surface later on regular grid is a great option to give you lots of points to move around since this geometry is all being generated from that initial spline we may also want to go in and change the way that spline is being considered to have points so we can pick a different interpolation here of those intermediate points and up the number by either reducing the degrees or changing the minimal value depending on the method that you're going with you have many many ways of making more or fewer points in your model at this stage before I go ahead and make it editable I want to drop this into a subdivision surface so you can see what happens with higher and lower levels of detail because we're subdividing the existing points an uneven distribution of the points is going to make for clumpy strange results so we always want to be aware of that with whatever direction we're going to be taking and with that in mind you can see that actually starting with fewer even points can make for a better end result that's one of the tenets of our box modeling the denser the points are the less they're going to get smoothed out by the subdivision surface but that also means it's going to require much less work from me to push around a smaller cloud of points so there's a balance when we're using this technique it's hard for us to add more points later in Cinema 4D light so we need enough but not too many it's admittedly a tricky balance and you'll sort of Discover it as you work we might even add some more geometry by turning on caps even just a simple cap can give us just a little bit of flared topography before we start pushing everything around for now I'll make that object edible and then I'll start using the selection tool in the movement tools to push the points around until I have the approximate shape that I'm after using the magic of time lapse in this case pushing some here clumping others there some are coming in some are coming out making the thing more horsey like I'll often push the points around with the subdivision surface turned on so we can see the final result that will come from all of our Point mushing around I'm using scale to widen groupings out or to pinch them together and I'm trying to be very gestural and loose working in large groups and then down to smaller ones I hope you can see the little blue mesh that kind of rides under or over the white one the blue points are really the true points that are actually being affected by elephant movement they in turn generate the white mesh that is the subdivision surface so we're using a few clunky points to make the final more organic piece that kind of hangs off of them when all is said and done here is the final rough mesh and final cross dissolve into the final piece a little primitive bass under it and I think we got to a pretty nice horsey with this minimal set of tools another General technique week of modeling uses booleans a Bool is when two objects intersect with each other and then we use a logical operator to say what we do with the result of that intersection we're back looking at the bishop again and classically Bishop pieces have Little Slice cut into their hat so I'm going to make a cube size it down and move it right into where that cut should be now I want to Bool these two things together so I make the Bool object and place these two things into it right away we can see something's happening to understand what let's look at the bool's attributes the type is currently set to a subtract B so the first among these nested children in the hierarchy is a and we are subtracting B from it if we change which one is on top in the stack you can see that that changes what is subtracted from which but we might also get their Union we might get their exclusion or their intersection just as we might with any other Bool operators in other programs you can see that the geometry is a little bit wacky around that cut and many of the options of the Bool are about managing how the Topography is intersecting of course the topography itself plays a big role in how these lines are going to be cut so just be aware that some strangeness will occur especially with lower polygon counts of intersecting objects one unfortunate drawback of the Bool it's only about two things intersecting but as an introduction to the concept I think this is a great place to start if only because it gets us thinking about objects in Geometry not just as one thing but how they can be created by combining or subtracting one thing into the other to make more complex forms from our earlier civil Primitives one more method open to us is using fields and deformers to Art direct changes to surfaces this is a newer idea in modeling and we can show it best using two effectors that double as deformers called the plane and random effectors so if I have this plane as in the geometric flat thing p-l-a-n-e and I've got it really subdivided and what I want to do is add some hills or maybe a big dent or just somewhere that we can place our cool chess board I want to sculpt this surface to do that I will apply an effector called the plane plain but it won't deform anything until I turn on deform by points in the attributes tab now we can start to see some kind of changes unfortunately it's moving all of the points at the same time as you can see in the parameters attributes here and I'm going to set it to only move on the z-axis but still right now all of the points are being moved so it's not particularly helpful however we can limit where any deformer or effector is being applied with Fields here in the fields tab I'm going to apply a cylindrical field and you can see right away the deformation only happens where the field is that's wonderful because now we can fine tune that field however we like I'll make the Contour a little bit smoother so it's a nice smooth roll off up and down the hill and I'm going to shrink that inner offset so we have a nice Rolling Hill I think that's great you can see how when we place this wherever we want it to be that little bump is wherever the field is interacting with that deformer I can add some more Fields you can see how they interact and that they combine using blending modes here so we could use this to Art direct a nice little scene if we just kept at it another effector deformer is the random and you can see that it's not that nice when we apply it I think to get good use out of it we need to again limit the changes to only the z-axis in this case and change the mode to noise now we have a wavy look to it that we can scale up and down and even animate I'm going to bring the animation down to zero because we just want to make some nice undulating Hills but this too can be limited with Fields I'll just go into the attributes of this new cylindrical field and invert it so now we have a patch of calm in an otherwise chaotic landscape this is great for gaining a kind of sculptural control over things even though it isn't real sculpting just as a tangent I want to quickly show a technique that's outside of our scope here the full version of Cinema 4D does have sculpting tools and these work really well if a pressure sensitive device like this MSI pen working in conjunction with the Creator z17 a pressure sensitive touch screen if all the methods we've talked about so far feel really abstract and rigid you might prefer this more gestural sculpting interface I'm creating a similar landscape by subdividing the surface and using the sculpting tools to push pull pucker smooth pinch lift drag all the things that we might physically do to a clay surface and some that are physically impossible to do but we can do them anyway because it's all digital even though I'm not great at these methods myself I hope you can see how my movements and there's over 4000 levels of pressure are translating to a very smooth input on the landscape surface if this seems like a more intuitive way to work I hope you explore sculpting methods and software and find the ones that will really fit with your desired style of creating and definitely consider Hardware that will support the way you want to work now we've looked at one way to make many things with the array but we have another powerful duplication tool that we really should talk about obviously if I had to make every chess piece in the set by hand that would be bad even copying and pasting isn't exactly the most efficient way here is our lovely Pawn from earlier we absolutely nailed it but I need more of them 16 in fact and for that I'm going to use something called an instance it's green so we know that it's a generator but what kind of input does it want I mean right now it's red so something must be terribly wrong but we need to give it some information we will choose the reference object down here by clicking little eyedropper and picking the group called Pawn now look at this we have a new pawn and if I modify that original Pawn group or some part of that group The instance will update as well that's what a good instance does really it's not truly a thing it is just a projection of the original so now you can make all of the pieces is that we might need with instances creating an instance referencing the first thing moving them around and this is just in case I want to break all of these apart and animate them individually which spoiler alerts we will definitely be doing in the next tutorial and since we're talking about the next tutorial that's a good place to end this lesson in the interest of time and avoiding too much duplication of techniques we won't be looking at each of the chess pieces individually we have however covered a lot of tools and techniques that I hope you can apply to creating all the objects your heart desires make them from Primitives make them out of generators and make them with deformers and Fields and duplicate them with arrays and instances the world is your oyster now if you want to get your hands on the specific chess set that I've been working on here it is available via Link in the description and pay what you like pricing please enjoy dissecting that to see how the techniques and tools we covered here can be brought together to create that you'll also see these assets again in our next tutorial of the series animating objects and groups where we'll be putting all of these things so I hope you join me for that I'm Evan Abrams thank you so much for watching stay creative be kind to each other and I'll see you all around the internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 17,419

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, c4d lite, cinema 4d lite, 3d, 3d modelling, modelling, geometry, geo, topography, basics, intro, lesson, course, learning, motion design, motion graphics, Mograph, VFX tutorial, intro to c4d lite, beginner, basic, how to

Id: DZ_lfQRyo5E

Length: 27min 5sec (1625 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022