Modelling Essentials for Cinema 4D - Fan

in this video we're gonna look at how to make this fan we'll start with the actual mesh itself and I'm going to use a disc and I'm going to put this into the plus C axis like so and I'll do everything there and we'll leave the radius at 104 now even though that's possibly a bit big for a real world fan meter wide it's a good starting place and nice for us to get going now what I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the disc segments here in the attributes manager you can see disc segments and I'm going to increase that up to the amount of rings that I want for my grill and I think 10 is probably about right for rotation segments 36 is probably about right as well I'm going to leave this on 30 slice and foam you can leave as are and now all you need to do is hit C to make this into an editable mesh what I want to do is I want to select all of the Rings so first of all just going to make a copy of this disc just by control clicking and dragging and that's just so that I've got a copy there just in case I need it in the future ok so I'm going to go into edge mode and hit ul for loop selection and I'm just going to select all of these loops just going in and I'm going to select all of them right into the middle now I'm doing this because I don't want to use the select all commands cause I don't want these outward kind of that they're radiating edges yet I'll do something of them afterwards which we can use the copy for and what I'm gonna do now I've got all these edges selected what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to mesh and under commands you can go edge to spline so select that and you'll see now that the hierarchy has changed very slightly and underneath the disc we've got this disc spline so I'm going to drag that out and you can see we've got our original object still there selected I always try to make a duplicate right at the start almost like duplicating the background layer in Photoshop so you've always got your starting point but we'll keep that for now I'm gonna hide it just to get it out of the way so I can show you what's going on here more easily so with this disc spline selected go into point mode and you can see that this is actually made a number of splines each circle is a spline in its own right and you can see the start-finish point where it changes from white to blue so hit command a right-click and you can go into your spline menu which is the bottom section here and you can look at what's going on you can see that you can round it some more if it's not rounded enough that which is possibly a good one to do so I'm going to choose the round tool click and drag and you can see now that as you drag to the right you get more segments like so so you can click and drag that out as you need to now I'm perfectly happy with how it is to start with there that's a right amount of segments for me but what we need to do is now put these into a sweet nose with a profile so I'm going to take a circle and I'm going to decrease the size of that circle down to probably 2 centimeters that might actually go down to one centimeter let's do that straight away add a sweetener to your scene and now with the circle above disks blind add those two objects to the sweepnurbs and let's just zoom in and you can see now we have the first part of our grille now it's looking pretty good I'm just going to go back into object mode so you can see it more clearly I'm also gonna go to filter and turn off the grid we don't need to see the grid for this particular object so now what we want to do is we want to do something very similar so bring back one of the disks just collapse that hierarchy if it's getting in the way take the disk and we're going to go back into edge mode at ul for loop selection we're going to take some of these crossed loops here now I'm just going to zoom in just a bit so I want to take every other loop really like so hold shift and then just pop your way around the object making sure you get the opposite loop to the one that you first find selected okay so once you have your loop selected let's go back into our perspective view here all you need to do is run the same command so under mesh just go down to commands edge spline and then you'll have the same again or have a new disk spline here which I'm going to take out I'm now gonna delete these two disks I don't need that anymore I'm going to take my first sweet nerve I'm going to ctrl click and drag that out and I'm just going to replace the original disks blowing are rings and I'm gonna replace that with our new disk spline which is our bars so let's call this let's call it the frame and the upper one we'll call rings like so now if we go into a side view we can see that these are actually on the same plane and really the Rings should be slightly forward of the the bars because they probably become a welded or soldered on and I'm gonna overlap them very slightly just like so and that will give us a much clearer look at what we're doing okay so this is looking pretty good now so what we need to do now is build the shell for this fan what we need to remember is that our rings here our disk that we originally is a hundred centimeters across with an extra half a centimeter on each side for the circle profile that we used so we're gonna add a tube to our scene make sure it's in the plus z axis and let's go to ninety nine centimeters for the inner radius and a hundred and one the outer radius I think I might actually go just slightly more than that I might go to let's go to 102 for this I'm going to increase my rotation segments to forty-eight and the reason I've made it just so it is smaller than a 100 centimeter disc is because I want this grill to sit very slightly in an indent there's gonna sit on our are kind of up the edge of the shell let's just make it editable and add a bit of a cap to it so I'm going to add a fill it here I'm gonna change the segments down to three and let's go to point two for our radius that gives a a nice little edge which will catch the light hit the C key to make it editable now you will find with the tube that things aren't quite optimized so in edge or point mode just right-click and go down to optimize and that will help when you choose the polygon and hit u W to select all you actually do get everything now before I make any cuts for the indent for this mesh what I want to do is actually just select both parts of our grille or mesh here oh gee and we'll rename that to mesh and that just groups them both under and null what I'm going to do is go into my side view H to get the whole scene in the viewport and I'm going to move this to near the front or in fact near the back I start with a front one like so let's just make sure it's where you want it to be about that far from the Front's good for me I'm going to ctrl click and drag in the object manager or you can control click and drag with your transform tools like so make sure that you keep holding ctrl until you let go of the drag if you let go with the dragging movement first then it doesn't work so what I'm going to do is just make sure that in my first mesh in object mode you want to make sure that this is let's just round this up so minus 42 like so and the first one here will do plus 42 and then we'll know that everything is kind of symmetrical so I always like turn the object round and you can now see that we've got the basics already and done okay so we need to take our tube object in polygon mode with the knife tool selected and I choose the loop I'm going to zoom right in to the point where I can see what's going on here and I'm gonna make a cut just to one side and never get round and a cut to the other side and I'm going to do the same on the back edge like so I'm gonna hit return to go into my polygon mode ul for loop select and I'm gonna select both of these borders so that I know I'm doing them both exactly the same dimensions so shift select the second loop D and just drag these in and I'm just gonna go I'm just gonna eyeball this really just so it sings down and we can see a bit of the wire that's what I'm really looking for okay hit spacebar to drop the tool I'm also gonna drop the selection now as well one last thing I want to do is I'm treating this almost like it was a kind of a skin wrapped around so like a kind of bent piece of plywood so what I want to do is make the seam which will probably go along the bottom about here so I'm gonna hit my return key twice to go into edge mode ul for loop select I'm going to select that whole loop right across the bottom and I'm going to right click she's bevel it's gonna bevel that out change over to probably go mode loop select that set of polygons D doesn't have to be much she could do outwards depends on the look you're after only go inwards like so and that will just add just that little bit of detail if I go back to preview so you can see the original image you can just make out there's a bit of an indent there which helps sell that look and also where the cable drops down from the motor that will pass through a hole there now you don't need to make the hole as that would be covered by a grommet or the actual cable passing through anyway but I just like to have that bit of detail that would be seen now let's move on to the actual motor itself and the motor is a really simple object let's do it the easy way which is with a cylinder makes all that sin plus Z and then resize it how you see fit whichever kind of look you'd like to go for I'm going to just decrease the overall radius and the overall depth now I'm gonna hide my tube for a minute let's just call that the skin I'm just gonna hide that from the editor view just so I can get into this tube a bit more easily and I want to really increase the kind of the link that is just a bit more than that and I'm gonna move it back in the z axis let's take that to say 8 centimeters I'm gonna make it editable and I am going to go into point mode and just optimize it make sure that all the points are welded in now the thing to do here I'm going to add a loop all the way around around rather than modeling a separate spindle for everything I'm just going to add some detail into this geometry itself so the first thing I want to do is just add maybe a couple of rings and this would be where maybe there's a cap that's the actual structure would have had maybe slightly more detail than you're seeing this might have been made of three parts but in this case we're just gonna make it out of the one so I'm just going to select the two loops with ul and then just oval them in just like so so they could be screw on or they could be you know they could just be pressed on it's just a nice to have it a little bit extra detail so I'm gonna take these polygons in the middle here ul just to make that a bit easier I'm going to use the inner extrude here so right click and then you've got extrude inner I'm going to drag that right in to they're gonna hit T it is smaller I'm gonna make the spindle and everything apart from the fan blades and the kind of the bracing that holds the motor in the center of the fan and I make it all out of this one piece of geometry hit D and bring that right larae forward just enough to be able to then go back to my extruding at all which I'm gonna bring out D again and once more this timing a hit T for scale just scoop round inside there bring that forward want to do is you actually just make a a very simple point like so and make sure it doesn't intersect the grill because we wouldn't want Matt to be hitting the wires it spins around and hit you why just to increase that selection I'm gonna move it back just a bit and then you K to reduce the selection just to make a bigger point like so okay so now we've got that I'm gonna make one more cut and I'm gonna make it cut here and the reason I'm doing this in polygon mode is just so I can then loop select and bring this in and this will be the indent where the fan blades will sit now you could leave it at this kind of a polygon level if you wanted to I'm gonna go for a bit more detail just in case I get closer up so in edge mode at ul and I'm just gonna start from here I'm just going to select loops only the ones that are really gonna be obvious I'm not gonna bother with this one in here that's not really needed and what I'm gonna do is just go back through the model paying particular attention to these kind of the outer ones the ones that air inside the dents not to worry about and what I'm gonna do is just bevel those out or right-click just bevel them and I'm gonna bevel twice and once you've done the first bevel you'll find they have these two edges and they're the newly created edges which you can then just click and drag to the right again and bevel once more and just trying to get them reasonably even so we have three polygons bending around the corner instead of the one sharp edge and this really does help when you're rendering helps just to catch any lights and it really does help to sell a render even with a very simple material that will help okay so the next thing to do is to make a blade to do this I'm gonna add a cube to the scene and I'm just gonna build the one blade and they're not I'm going to use mograph Coronas just to create a few more so go into object mode with your cube in the scene just decrease the size a fair bit I'm gonna reduce the depth in the side view so it will fit in place here in the spindle now we want to really form this in position so we know where it's got to live so I'm gonna move that to about there and do this as though it's actually attached to our spindle in the middle and then we'll move it back to the middle afterwards just to pop in a cloner and so I'm quite happy with that now you can choose to have as many blades as you want but it's worth creating a thicker blade from the start if you're in gonna have maybe four or five or six make a thinner blade if you're gonna have more let's go for six how many did I have in the original one two three four five six so let's stick with that again so I'm gonna make them about I'd say about 30 centimeters thick so once you've got to that point you've just got this very thin kind of almost plank like object go into the attributes for the cube itself and I'm gonna give this some more segments I'm gonna give it a 3 in the X 3 and the Y and I'm going to leave the Z segments at 1 for now I'll adjust them afterwards so hit C go into polygon mode in fact you could do this an edge or polygon mode up to you at share you're more comfortable with take a rectangular selection make sure that you're gonna select everything so only select visible elements should be unchecked is often the way Modelling I'm going to select all of those points of this blade that are going to sit on the spindle hit T and just reduce their size in the y-axis like so and then you can move along this fan braid swapping between the the move tool or the scale tool and the selection tool so I'm going to widen that point move them out towards the end like so get back to my selection tool and what I want to do now I don't want to just rotate this I want to angle just the top so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this whole kind of quadrant at the top there and I'm going to bring that forward like so and then I'm going to rotate just various polygons let's just zoom out so we can see them compared to everything else and that should be about right there so that's 37 degrees and I've moved those and you can see let's hide this mesh now just so we can get a good look at the shape we can see what's going on there now I want to take the bottom edge but you can't take this row of polygons here otherwise you may well have just rotated it and kept those ones in place I just want to take the Vosges and move them back just a little bit now you need to zoom in quite close here because what we're going to do is give some kind of clarity to the shape here because what we're gonna do is add this into a hypernurbs so I hold down the Alt key I don't open herbs to the scene and you can see that yes this looks lovely and smooth much more fan blade like but it's lost some of its definition so go back into the cube to the knife tool and make sure you're still in loop mode and add a cut to the front and a cut to the back and that will give this thickness some definition is also one more thing I'm not too keen on and that's the end shape here so I'm just going to take the two inner points there and just curve that out very slightly and lift it up a bit I'm going to take those points right in the corner and run them out just to kind of even out that shape now if you want you can modify that shape to however you see fit I think one more thing that might be worth doing is just to add a final cut around the spindle itself just to make sure that we can get everything in there looking nice and neat and tidy okay so to just see how this is fitting in now because we move things around this is intersecting slightly which isn't quite ideal but we can soon fix that alright so better no intersection is there and we can take the object let's call this blade so now we need to duplicate these and you could either put these into a mograph chronal object or you can do what i'm going to do here and that's just very simply going to your front view hit the L key which brings up the axis mode and with blade selected just pop that into the center of your scene you could turn grid snapping on here if you find that easier or you could type in a number I'm just gonna type in 0 and that's now in the right place don't forget to hit L again to remove the access mode otherwise you'll find that all sorts of mad things happen and then all you need to do is hit the rotate key and this is such a simple way this is why I'm not using mograph for it hold down the shift and just rotate yourself let's say 1 to 60 and another 60 because we're doing six blades going to - sixty-six times should if my maths is any good give us the right amount of blades so more there should be right I think ah now you'll see what I did wrong there is I didn't hold down control so as I was saying earlier you have to do each time you have to hold down control do your rotation holding shift to get the quantized there you go that's more like it control rotate hold down shift to get to 60 let go with them cursor before the control key same again just repeat this and one last one control click and drag with a shift key to quantize to 5 degree increments and there you go that's actually far quicker than using mograph although mograph tools would do the job just as well this is possibly more accurate so we can now select all those blades hit the G key and just call these let's call these all the blades blades like so we'll call this motor and the skin is all done so we can bring that back we can bring back our front mesh have a look at things looking this is looking pretty good all we need to do now is make a quick stand for it and I'll just show you how I made the bracket that holds the motor in place so I'm just going to hide the skin and the mesh for now in fact I hide the blades for now as well and I'm gonna add a tube to the seam make sure it's in the + Z like so and I'm just going to decrease the height of it bring in the inner radius and I move it back to about so bring in the out radius basically what I want to do is I want to make a kind of a strap that goes around the motor but I don't want to be doing loads of extrudes and trying to measure things out and everything and I want this to have kind of two parts so it's almost like a clamp with a loop over the top and a loop underneath and then bars that go off and to do this is actually quite easy because you can just use a slice so we can do this from one degree to 179 degrees or you can do it you know the top half if you prefer and there we go that this is now if we go to the front of you very slightly not quite meeting or xz-plane and the reason for that is that will leave us with a gap which is what I really want now I'm not going to add anything in the way of bevels yet because it's actually easier to do that afterwards so hit the C key into point mode just optimize that again optimizing is always important and I'm gonna take that polygon there and the same on the other side just by shift-clicking and I'm gonna hit D what I want to do is just to extrude these out you can see that they're kind of going off at weird angles and that's what you don't want but we'll fix that afterwards I need to bring back the skin just so that I can make sure that these meet up with that skin now I'm gonna hit the T key to bring these out rather than using the strudel add bevel tools just because we don't want any more divisions across there now let's just find a good viewport see this for probably the top view I think is about right for this so you can see that this is increased in size on the z-axis so just bring that back so it's the same now we can go back into the front view what I'm going to do is in point mode I'm going to take my rectangle selection and I'm gonna take - I actually doesn't matter which the selection mode you use as long as you're selecting right the way through I'm gonna take those two points and I'm going to raise them up now I can zoom into just one side because I know they're both selected and they're symmetrical and I can just lift that until that line isn't then straight do the same on the other side for the top points bring that up to there and now we have two straight bars which are used to connect to the skin itself now I think what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to cut a loop around there I'll do the same on this side I'm just going to cut a loop there I want to do is I want to just make the kind of lugs that would sit holding everything in place so I need to view from underneath to do this make sure you're nice selecting visible elements for this you don't want to select right through the model shift and connect that one and d4r extrude now you can see that this isn't quite looking right it's following a bit of a random angle what they actually want to do is leave that newly extruded polygons where it is and we want to go into point mode and just curve these ones out so they follow the shape just a bit cleanly so too the same for this side so and we'll get okay so we've got the first half so let's just cool this clamp one go into object mode and it doesn't really matter where you do this but I'm going to just control click and drag rename that to clamp to rotate it 180 degrees like so and when we drop this we should find there's a very slight gap between the two because we didn't do a full hundred and eighty degree arc like so and now if you really wanted to go into some details you could put some bolts through there or something but I don't think it's really necessary I think that's fine as is that's a nice amount of detail and once you bring back the visibility of everything else it starting to get really nice looking fan there and you're never going to notice the difference so the last thing to do is just to draw a spline I'm gonna use linear mode I'm gonna turn the grid back on and then I can use grid snapping just click and hold on that to make sure that grid snapping is actually turned on here and I've just turned it off yeah okay so now I want to add a point there I'm gonna go there and just one grid square above our center line is what I'm aiming for I'm going to take the two points at the bottom I'm gonna right click and use the chamfer tool just to round those off how much you round them is up to you and that going that far would look lovely if it's gonna be on then another base but I think just rounding them slightly because I'm envisaging this being made of kind of private of some kind go into a side view eh so you can see everything and then I'm going to take these two points and I'm going to just bring them back I'm gonna take the top point bring that forward and then the very last bottom points actually the points above them just take back once more now the reason I'm doing this is because when you use an extrusion your extrude along an axis and it's a world axis rather than being extruded off that perpendicular line from what we've just drawn so when I now drop this holding down the alt key into an extrude NURBS you can see that the stand is going right back and I'm gonna make this a 40 centimeter extrusion remove the whole thing Ford 1 square just to give our France and balance now you can go in to the spline in point mode if you wanted to and just adjust this to you know the shape that you want once you've got that shape in position you need to give it some thickness now to do this you need to make that extrude NURBS editable so hit the C key we didn't have any caps on or anything because we're gonna add the thickness ourselves now using the extrude tool so I'm gonna go into polygon mode hit the D key make sure create caps is on just click and drag to the right and I'm gonna give this well it's just under two but I could go into the offset here make that around two like so and there you go we've got a nice stand so let's call this stand I'm going to take a cylinder and I'm gonna put my cylinder in the x-axis and this is going to be our kind of nut and bolt at this edge so let's reduce that down to say the radius should be about three hype me3 as well rotation of 36 might be a bit high you don't necessarily need that but that's fine so now you need to bring it out so it intersects just going to turn off my snapping so that when I bring this out it's not doing anything to old now we can just place this in the gap between our stand and our skin and just increase the height until it intersects right everything that you want it to maybe a bit too much that's probably about right now all you need to do is if you need to give this some detail you might not need to you might not want to I'm just going to optimize that and I'm going to take polygon mode loop select and just do a extrude inner and then very small extrude out that way drop the selection let's just call this screw I'm going to ctrl if you can drag that screw and in object mode I'm just going to change that minus to a plus we should see around on the other side we've now got Ubud cut it's gonna be the wrong way around so in h4 heading I'm just going to rotate that 180 degrees and there you go so let's take those two screws put them into the stand I'm going to select everything now hit Alt + G and we'll call this fan I think the final thing that we need to do is maybe just to give this a power chord and again I'm just going to use a simple spline for this I'm going to use a linear spline and I'm going to do this in the side view I'm just going to draw out the first point somewhere around there like so draw that out to the bottom so it just passes out through the bottom of the skin itself and then you can be a bit more creative with where it's going so it could drop that now onto the floor go into your top view you can do something a bit more with this so you could just create a nice path to lead that off into the distance select all now you do need to just deselect a couple of points before you round this off so hold down control these let the top point and that first point there and if we go into our perspective view I'll just switch around the back so you can see what's happening I want to right click and I'm going to choose you can either do the chump for here or you can choose soft inflate interpolation and that will soften everything for you leaving just our first and second points hard which I'm going to do by hand the first point can stay as is this second point I'm just going to use the chump for tool and just right on that just by hand so I know it's not kind of warping anything on the inside because I want that to be just a straight line as it is there so spacebar to drop the tool add a circle spline to the scene I'm gonna make that gonna start off with say 3 centimeters out of sweepnurbs add the circle and the spline to the sweep NURBS making sure that the circle is above the spline and you can see now but probably just a touch too thick so take the circle again and we'll make that two now something else which is worth just noting here let's find a particularly obvious part now this chord is looking very very smooth but it's also taking a lot of polygons so if I highlight that sweet NURBS you can see there's quite a lot going on here and this is all driven by the circle so if we take that circle and in the attributes manager to go to intermediate points and change this from adaptive to natural you can now control the amount of subdivisions that are in this object and you can take it right down to a triangular profile or you can up it just one or two which will hugely reduce the amount of polygons and therefore the memory it takes to look after this object in your scene and but it still it's pretty smooth if I select that object again you can see this is looking much better still it's really really smooth it's still a nice organic natural shape but with far far fewer polygons so this is now ready to pinch your scene and render away

Channel: John Dickinson

Views: 7,801

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Id: kx2B2i7F5dc

Length: 37min 31sec (2251 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020