Tips and Techniques for Modeling in Cinema 4D

hi guys this is Mike in this cinema4d tutorial I'm gonna talk about some tips and techniques that will be useful for 3d modeling okay in this first example I'm gonna talk about edge flow now you can see that we have two very similar modeling compositions here and if you zoom in a little bit on the first one you can see that we have sort of a bit of a deformation along the edge of this of this curve the sort of Ridge that we have modeled into this this object now right now I have a subdivision on each one of these objects and you can see that one is a lot smoother than the other and if I bring up garage shading so you can press n B on your keyboard you can see how dense this model is in the first one now if i zoom in a little bit you can see how this mesh goes across this Ridge and it kind of goes along in a sort of a diagonal area goes against the grain to this this curve on this edge now if you take a look at this second model you can see how this curve how this model is laid out in terms of his topology and you can see it it kind of wraps over and around the curve going along with it so the thing to take away from this example is you want to make your edge flow go correspond to the edge of your curve and if I take off the subdivision surface to this model you can see how its laid out in terms of its of the model and so when you subdivide it doesn't matter how many times you subdivide you're going to get this really nice curve and it's really nice smooth now if I go back to my original example the first example you can see how dense this mesh is especially we can kind of pull back he can see it it's almost a different color in terms of how dark it is so you can use a lot lower of a mesh and you can keep the polygon count down a lot more when you use this technique of going along the curve of your object so it's a very important thing to take away from this example is that whenever you're modeling you make sure you model so that it's advantageous to subdivision so you can see as this has been subdivided no matter how much we increase the subdivisions make sure I'm on the right subdivision you're still going to have this deformation in the corners so it's important point to take away from this so let me bring this back okay moving on to this example here we have two two of these objects they're very identical except when I click on them and I turn on my subdivision surface you can see that it doesn't curve the way that I expected it to so it doesn't mound off these hard edges and so if I turn on the subdivision surface of my second example and see this is what I was expecting I see a nice smooth tube so why isn't this object smoothing over like this one here so one of the reasons is that you have an object that doesn't have connection points and they're not connected so if I go to point mode and I go to my life selection and I select my object I select this point you can see when I move it it's not connected to this object now if you're using an object if you're using a model and you have this experience with an object how would you know that these objects aren't Canadians are connected so one thing you can do is you can go to model modeling and then mesh checking and if you enable mesh checking let me turn off the subdivision surface you can see this green highlight that goes around the edges so if we come down here and we see boundary edges you can see that's marked in green that means that there is an edge it's not connected so another way you can check this is if you go to polygon mode and say you select the polygon and then you go to select and then you say go down to a select connected right here you can see that it selects all the polygons that are connected and you can tell that these edges and these points aren't connected because it's not selecting the rest of your model so in order to fix this what you would need to do is you would have to put it into a connect a connect object you can see right away how the Phong changes the shading changes on your object so when you enable the connect object you can see now when I turn on the subdivision surface how this connects and you have this this subdivision now if you go to your connect you can see that you have a tolerance where you can weld you can increase this if you're experiencing some objects that aren't connecting right away now what you can also do is you can go to back to your tube back to your object and let me turn off my subdivision surface if I go to point mode but you can also do is you can go to select all select all your points and you can right click go to optimize and we're going to go to this little gear here this is also going to give you a similar value system that you had with your Kinect so if you click OK you can see it also connects those points so you have a few different options when you're when you have that issue where it's not connecting okay let's move to this next example now we have a situation where we have an object that is smooth using subdivision surface but it's not connecting right here and what we have is a sort of an object that has this weird kind of pinch and it's something that you may not expect so if you click on your object and we'll turn off our subdivision surface what you can see is and we still have our mesh checking on we have this this red line that goes around that point the same point where we had our pinching let's go back to our model and modeling and we'll go to our mesh checking and with our mesh checking enabled let's go to where we have a red color and we have non manifold so what non manifold is is when you have a polygon that has more that has a connection to another polygon in more than one side so we can take a look at this if we go to our live selection polygon mode select these polygons go to select hide selection and now let's zoom in a little bit now you can see here what we have is this little cap on this tube this part of the tube so what's happening is is when you see this this when you experience this kind of as deformation as this issue you can always use your mesh checking to make sure if you have a non manifold or a polygon with multiple sides multiple connection sides so simply what we would do is we would select these polygons and we would delete and that's optimized so we can get rid of those extra points that we deleted our faces and then we'll go to our select and make sure we're on polygon mode and we'll go to unhide all and let's zoom out a little bit and now if I turn my subdivision surface on now you can see that we have this nice smooth smoothing that we would expect from our subdivision surface okay so let's move on to our next example if you take a look at this object you can see something isn't quite right and you would see it a little bit better if you did a render and let's make sure my my object is selected and you can see if we do a render something isn't quite right we don't have something working the way that we would we would want it and this is really sort of a shading issue and sometimes you'll be working with a model and you'll notice something that's not connecting correctly with a with your shading and something just doesn't it seems off they're shading so this usually means that you have normals that have been reversed and one of the best ways you can check your normals is if you go to your polygon polygon mode and you select all you can see that we have a blue loop that goes along our model and then we have orange in the rest the orange is the normals facing in the correct direction and you have your normals that are blue those are faced in the backwards position so one way you can check your normals is if you go to shift V and you go to polygon normals and you can see that we have this line that's sticking out from our normals facing the correct direction but if we go to our other our other normals you can see that we don't have this white line sticking out so it's a way of checking to see which direction your normals is is facing you can see that white line and these are are going in the opposite direction so in order to fix this you have two options you can simply select all and then go to right click and then align normals and that will align the normals to its correct position so let me undo and what you could also do is you could go to your UL or whatever selection tool and select the polygons that are reversed normals you can go to right click and you can go to reverse normals and that will also fix that and now you can see that these lines are facing these white lines are facing the right direction ok so let's go to our next tip and this is about resolving the spherical poles that you have when you have a sphere so I'm going to go to my object and I'm going to turn off my subdivision surface you can see that when we have a sphere we have this pole right at the top it's not very advantageous to subdivision because number one it's a complex pole and we have these triangles right at the top we generally want to avoid triangles and if you're in a workflow where you're not allowed to have try you're gonna have to figure out a way to resolve this poll every solve this top of your ears fear so how do you go about getting rid of these these fear these triangles well first let's take a look at the subdivision and see what's going on here so you can see when I subdivide you have these quads that are looking what you would expect you would see a nice quad but when you come up here and you start seeing this looping arc pattern that starts to happen when you have these triangles and a loops around and it makes this very weird looking pattern and you can see more when you go to your render you can see this sort of starburst kind of pattern that we have at the top and if I pull back a little bit you can see it a little bit better and this is gonna be an issue it just doesn't doesn't look correct we have this weird look to it so let's move over a little bit to duplicate copy of that sphere it's the same thing and what we want to do is we want to resolve these triangles so what I'm gonna do is select my sphere and I want to come over to I'm actually going to turn off you can see that mesh checking is indicating that there is a complex pole so I'm gonna go to my mode modeling and you can see that purple you can see complex pole is enabled I'm just going to turn off mesh checking just so I don't have to distracted by any of these extra colors so I want to go to edge mode and let's go to our top view zoom out a little bit so one way we can get rid of these triangles is if we select every other edge now in modeling whenever you model something you want to make sure that you always model with exactly even segments that's pretty much across the board and this will help you resolve issues when you're using when you're modeling you always want to go you can never want to use like 7 you want to make sure you're using 812 and so on so we're gonna select every other polygon every other edge excuse me and we're gonna go to right click and dissolve okay so what we have now is a quad at the top here and if I go to my edge mode you can see we have one two three four so now we have a quad but now we still have this pole and that doesn't really help us when I go to my subdivision we still have this weird-looking effect here and when I render you can still see this starburst okay so in another way we're gonna have to get rid of that pole so we're gonna have to come up with a solution that's going to get rid of this pole so one way you can go is if you select your object and if I go to my top view again so one thing we could do is we could select all our edges and simply just right-click and dissolve so now we have this end on so how do we resolve this end gone so what I'm gonna do is you can use your your knife tool and I'm gonna keep it at single single line and I like to go into point mode so I'm going to start right and cut it right through the center and then crisscross and I want to want to do is start making quads by connecting these these points so now we have quads and what you do is you go back and forth until you resolve all of your resolve this end gone so lips and let me just undo have an extra point there and so what you would do is connect these up so now we have five so we're gonna have to do is put a edge right here and an edge right here and what we have is quads all the way around our object all the way around the top here so now we resolved that we don't have triangles and we don't have a complex pole so let's go to our perspective mode and let's zoom out a little bit let's do a render so the issue now is that we have this flat top and that totally makes it it doesn't resolve our issue having this strange deformation we got rid of the starburst but now this flat top is an issue okay so the reason why is because this pole was giving us that curve so as we dissolved it now it's just flattening out that that top there so let's move on to this other sphere and see if we can resolve this well one thing what we could do is if I go to my top view one thing we can do is if I go back to my knife tool I can bring in the same pattern that we had before so I'll make my cuts just as I did with my previous example because I want to keep the curvature of this pole and so let's make sure we have excuse me let's make sure I do this correctly and you can always use your previous example as a reference so now we sort of have this mess of a mesh so what we would have to do and go to our move tool and so what we want to do is we want to get rid of all these lines that are coming in to this pole so what you can do is you can go to edge mode double click if we double-click on our edge they'll go along our path here make sure we get all our edges now some are gonna go off on to the others all the way through what we can fix that in just a minute so if you go along and select these polygons uh excuse me these edges in an attempt to make sure we get rid of this pole let me just deselect that one magic pick top okay so we have our lines let me zoom out and I just want to deselect these ones will have our tolerance selection on and holding down control we can simply just click and drag deselect these edges here okay so now what we can do is we can simply just right click and dissolve well there's one left over dissolve okay so let's go to our perspective mode now you can see we kept our curvature to the to a certain extent so let's go to our render and we render you can still see a little bit of deformation now it's a little bit better than what we had from before but it's still not perfect so in order to resolve this the best way is to use a lower resolution when using your ears fears so we have the same object except it's at a very low sphere we have about eight eight side eight segments and if I select my object and I go to my edges and we'll just simply select these edges and will dissolve now you can see that we have this nice quad system at the top it's not a complex pole so we have that removed we don't have triangles and we can say oh we have this curve at a very low resolution so when I turn on my subdivision surface you can see this curves nicely and if I go to my render you can see that we have this very nice and smooth curve there's no deformations we can right now I'm in the editor in the viewport so if I turn that up a little bit you can see that we smooth this out to a nice perfect curve in this perfect sphere so so just to recap what you would need to do is make sure you start at a low resolution when you're going to resolve any type of polls on a spherical a spherical object 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: 66,326

Keywords: Cinema 4d, Modeling, Tips, Tricks, Techniques, Edgeflow, Normals, Resolving, complex, poles, spherical, ngons, triangles

Id: Bg17Feg5OWE

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sun May 27 2018