Subdivision Tips and Techniques in Cinema 4D

hi guys this is Mike in this cinema4d tutorial I'm gonna show you tips and techniques for subdivision surface within 3d modeling okay in this first example open up lesson oh 1 and what you'll see here is a spline this rectangle spline and to best understand subdivision surface is to take a look at what we have here with a spline now you'll notice with a spline you are able to control the outside edge by clicking on these points and then moving these points around change the shape of your spine now you'll notice that these points these corners are very tight so it makes a sharp 90 degree angle now that's because we have our type set the linear now if I go to b-spline you can see what happens here is it interpolates a curve from this point to this point and you're able to control the curvature or the shape of this b-spline by using these little control points you can just move these around just like this so subdivision surface works in a very similar manner so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to this plane it's the same size and you can see that the shape of this object of this square plane that I have but setup the same exact way and the points are at the same point of our b-spline so if I put this plane within a subdivision surface you can see that it's smooth in exactly the same way as our b-spline now there might be a little bit difference because the way the difference between the interpolation between subdivision surface and thus b-spline but it does it the same exact way so I'm gonna go to my subdivision subdivision surface and drop the subdivisions down to one and what it's going to do is it's going to subdivide each polygon by by four so you'll have four polygons once I turn the subdivision surface on now it also smooths out your your shape as well and you can control subdivision surface by the same way by using this control cage so if you need to change the shape of your object you just use these control points now I have snapping on I can disable the snapping so it's very a similar fashion so if you can understand splines you shouldn't have any problem understanding how subdivision surface controls work you're just changing the controls the control points or the control cage now you can also change the way your subdivision the surface works in terms of the tools that you can use so if you go to your viewport settings you can come here to Isilon editing so if you enable enable that you can then control control your subdivision surface in just this a different way so instead of the control points being outside of the shape you can control the shape by using the points right on your object so it's a little tricky to work with sometimes I tend to not use Isilon editing but I want you to be knit I want you to know that this is available open lesson Oh - in this scene what you're gonna see is four cubes and in order to demonstrate a little bit more about subdivision surface and how we can sharpen edges a little bit more within our objects so in this first cube I'm going to turn on subdivision surface and what you can see is if I turn on garage shading lines you can see that what we have here if I turn off the subdivision surface is that there is no segments within this cube so when I turn on subdivision surface it essentially turns this this box into a sphere since there's no points in between each of these these lines it's going to curve all the way around now if I go to the next box that we have I have this split into quadrants right down the middle and right in between so if I turn on subdivision surface now you can see that we have a little bit more of a boxier shape and so now if I go to my third box what I did here is I cut using the loop cut tool and cut along in about 10 degrees or 10 segments in between from the edge so I did this evenly all the way around each of the edges of our box and so what that does is when I turn subdivision surface on is it smooths out this this box but it makes the edges a little bit tighter a little bit sharper and you can see that a little bit better if I turn off the lines and now if I turn on the subdivision surface on this final box you can see it's now even sharper so when I go to say edge mode you can see how sharp how close I put these edges in order to get this very sharp this very sharp edge so making edges and tightening making a really tight edge requires some extra lines in order to sharpen have a really nice sharp edge open lesson oh three now in this scene we're going to take a look at how subdivision how cylinders will react to subdivision surface now in this first example I have basically I have a disc that I've duplicated but I added different sides I added a four side a six side eight side a twelve side and then a thirty-six side now you'll notice once I turn subdivision surface on this first object how small gets compared to the original circle and you can see as I go through each one of these objects if I go now to the six side eight side and the twelve side and then finally the thirty-six side you can see the gap between these circles so when you have a small amount of geometry working with a cylinder or in this case a disc you can see how much it shrinks our object so if you want your object to be the exact circle you would have to go to a large amount of subdivisions in order to keep this same circle now in this example all the way to the extreme is 36 segments so you can see that how many segments that you're going to need how much geometry you're going to need in order to preserve the exact shape so if you want to have an object that stays within this circle you're going to have to scale up your original geometry so you can see this as I scale this up how large it has to be in order to fit within our circle so always keep in mind if you're going to be using low geometry under subdivision you're going to have to compensate and overshoot the model a little bit in order to preserve the size and shape that you want now you can take a look at this in another way it might kind of help you especially when you're working with subdivision surface is to go to display and then go to box so what boxes is this view in this display is it allows you to see the bounding box of an object doesn't matter what shape it is it's all going to be whatever this object is as it fits in this box so you can kind of see this shape and the gap that you have under subdivision surface compared to my circles that I just made some circle splines you can see how tight this has to be on their subdivision surface so just help you out a little bit open lesson o for begin so in this scene what I'm going to do is go through a few exercises to show you how to sharpen the edges of an object we're going to go through a few different techniques and I'm going to show you some of the pitfalls that you can run into first when first starting out doing your modeling and doing subdivision surface so I remember when I first started modeling in cinema 4d you know I would use subdivision surface and what I wanted to sharpen an edge what I would start doing is I would start adding in some loop cuts and if I go to my knife tool and I go to my loop cut tool if I go to K L I can start adding in some loop loop cuts in order to give you that sharp edge that I was talking about in previous lessons so if I turn on my subdivision surface on this object you can see what happens with our how it smooths everything out so I'm going to turn off my lines and you can see this is not exactly what I want I want a nice sharp edge around this this square that I extrude it out of this plane basically so what I would do is I would just take my loop cut tool and I would start putting in some cuts in order to get a nice sharper edge and I would just kind of run around the model and manually put in these cuts and I guess I started to do this because I saw this in a tutorial online and I just figured this is just how you add sharpening to your edge and I would start putting in in a loop around each of the edges that I wanted to have a nice cut now the problem with this is you know as you're looking at your model you're starting to realize that you're starting all these lines running up and down and all around your your object and having to do anything outside of these lines outside of this box just become sort of a it's just really a disaster you just have lines all over the place and there and especially when you start getting into some more complex this is just a box being extruded out of a plane when you start doing some more complex objects you can see that it just becomes very unwieldly having all these lines running around so you can see when I turn on the subdivision surface and let me click off this object you can see I get a nice sharp edge but when you look at the topology it really is not very it's not very organized so that's one way you can sharpen your edge manually cutting in and putting in loop cuts using your your loop cut tool so I'm going to turn this off and let's go to my next example and now another way you could do this is using your bevel so if I go to my selection tools you can see if I make some selections here and I go to my bevel if I go to MS on my keyboard and say I bevel this out you can see I have the same situation I have a loop that goes around my object over our excuse me around this edge and if I have it to one subdivision you can see that I put in this cut and if I put on the subdivisions surface you can see I get this nice sharpened edge so the problem with this version or this example is let's say you go around and you want to do something similar and you can select each of these whoops excuse me select each of these lines let me go to frame default and start adding in these bevels in order to get that sharpness that you are looking for and so you could do this a few different ways you can use your ring selection you kid you can use your loop cut tool or your loop selection excuse me and you know you could go through this in a few different ways and start adding in and you can see that it becomes pretty pretty pretty much of a mess if you're gonna be doing this one little bit at a time so if I undo say you know exactly where you want to add your your bevel or your your edge sharpening so I can turn off the stop at boundary try to get this loop here and then if I go to UB I can select these this ring and then I can just simply deselect some of these interior ones and now you can use your bevel tool so this is an option that you can use for your your bevel for adding in some edge sharpening so I'm going to go to my subdivision surface and you can see how this smoothes your object out now it doesn't in in a different way when you're using the bevel because it uses a little bit different of geometry that you would have if you're just using your loop cut and you can see these the topology is a little bit different and it reacts a little bit different as well to the subdivision let's see how it smooths over the corner or the edges and now what happens is is you get this sort of gradual smoothing that happens around the from the top all the way to the side well you don't get that when you go to your loop cut that you do with your with your knife tool so it's just something to consider when you're using your bevel when doing subdivision surface edge cuts edge sharpen excuse me now let's go to our other example here and let me turn off my let me hide my bevel example so another way that you could go is using the slide tool so if I go to my plane and I go to edge mode I can use a similar situation where I make some selections oh sorry about that and so I am selecting around here just like I did before and I can use the ring selection just remove these interior ones now if I go to my slide tool and I clone what I can do is I can clone out these edges now this doesn't work that well if you have everything selected so if I undo and remove the interior ones hold down command you can see I can build out a an edge that goes along so I could do that way I could select this top one again go to my slide tool and again do my command and clone that edge and now I can have my subdivision surface on and you can see I can do the same exact thing but here we have a bit of an issue is because now in order to slide this edge I'm gonna have to make some selections here and you can see how this can be a bit of a pain if you have to select each one of these edges so I go back to my slide command slide this edge and so it can just be sort of a bit of a pain to be able to select each one of these edges and use the slide tool so you have a few different options in order to get what you want in terms of sharpening up your edges and basically you're probably going to be using a combination of the three of using loop cuts bevel and the slide tool which is a completely totally useful and acceptable way of sharpening up your edges now I have another example to show you and let me hide my slide example so let me turn off my subdivision surface so another way of giving you an ability to sharpen up an edge without having all these lines all over the place and giving you a little bit of an easier time sharpening up edges now it all comes really comes back down to the same principles that I talked about in a previous tutorial about edge flow and what you're going to find is learning edge flow for topology and 3d modeling is probably your best friend because it's going to make things a lot easier and a lot more organized and that's basically what edge flow is it's just a way of organizing the lines your of your mesh so it's a little bit easier to work with in terms of predictability of where your edge is going to run and how you can select those using say loop selections or ring selections so here we have this very basic cube being extruded out of this plane so one thing that you can do is and I like use the poly pen tool is if we're in in point mode we can add a edge that goes across here and you can put this in symmetry to help you save a little bit of time but basically what you want to do is you want to give this point from your corner all the way all the way to the other point here right across and then what you can then do is select this point add in a line here all the way to your object all the way to your extrusion and do the same on this side and now what you can do is go to your edge mode select this edge and select this edge and now dissolve okay so now what you have here is you have quads and it gives you this ability to have this edge and have a line being able to go from this edge all the way to the other edge so it's going to loop around now you have some end dons here that we're going to fix and you can do this easily enough by using the slide tool I really like using the slide tool it really makes things a lot easier especially want to clone an edge so let's do the same thing over here that we did on this side so again we you do is just bring an edge all the way from the point select these two edges and then dissolve okay now I'm going to do this real quick add those add those lines and then go here select these edges and then dissolve and you're going to find this pops up a lot when you're doing any type of extruding of an object and the whole idea is to allow this loop the go around and protect the outer edge of your of the rest of your topology the rest of your mesh so I'm just going to dissolve this and now what we have here is the ability to loop put a cut a loop around this object around this extrusion so what I want to do next is I want to select our edges here and let me go to the slide tool and now I can just clone this out let's zoom in here let's take a look here and that's just used my poly pen tool and I'll just snap that now that will weld so there's a couple of options that you have here you can whoops me uh make sure I got the right point that should snap see what happened here there we go so you can do it that way you can use a cut you can use your loop cut tool excuse me not your loop cut tools your just your your line cut tool and you can cut across so you have a few different options of how you want to add in a cut and I'm just kind of eyeballing this okay so now we have this edge and we have this this nice edge cuts that we added that ran along now see what this happens now when you add in a loop cut you can see this as our little marker on our tool you can see how this comes across and goes around our op or extrusion so you can add a cut here you can add a cut here and you can add a have a cut here very easily so now when I add in my subdivision surface you can see excuse me how this topology looks so much better than what we had in our original one where we had lines running all over our object so that's our loop cuts and now here is our our object here and it's topology now what you can also do let me go back to my original one here and if I take off some of these cuts what you can do is you can simply use a few of the techniques that I just talked about we can use the slide tool so if I go to UL I can go to my slide holding down command and clone out that edge so you can do it that way or you can use your bevel as well so you have some options in terms of how you want to add in those loop cuts let's take a look at our subdivision surface real quick and I'm just going to put in a cut here just to sharpen that up okay so you can see how that that sharpens up and we're basically doing the same thing except giving yourself a little bit easier time when adding in these cuts I put a link in the description to download project files you can also go to astronomic 3d comm to download project files from this tutorial and all the tutorials that I've made so far thanks for watching

Channel: Michael Balchaitis

Views: 25,868

Keywords: Cinema 4d, subdivision surface, sub-d, modeling, tips, techniques, bevel, slide, loop, cut, edge, flow

Id: xC2rlkLp5O0

Length: 33min 17sec (1997 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018