What is the best way to learn modeling in Cinema 4D?

what is the best way to learn modeling in cinema 4d the best way is to understand the first the fundamental concepts of modeling in general and the best way to demonstrate this or explain this is to go to a cube and I'm going to go to an B on my keyboard and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a few different segments and raise this to about 333 and make this editable what you want to understand is is that modeling and typology within 3d modelling is made up of points also called vertices and those are connected by edges and those points in the edges will make up the mesh of your of your 3d model so you have your points and then you have your edges and then you have your polygons the next concept that is very important is edge flow and so if I go to a loop selection and I select an edge you can see that I have continuous loop around my object no matter what type of modeling what type of model that you're going to model you're going to want to have proper edge flow that wraps around your entire object or character whatever you're trying to model and stay within quads now if you're going to be doing game arts what you'll tend to have is you'll have these models that will be converted into triangles or I should say these quads will be converted into triangles so it doesn't matter if you're in game art if you're doing CG for television or movies or if you're doing 3d printing you want to stay within a quad based polygon and so what I mean by that is that you will have a quad of a polygon of four sides not a polygon with five sides or more and to demonstrate that what I'll do is I'll go to edge mode and I'll select an edge and I'll dissolve this edge now you're going to see that cinema 4d behind the scenes puts in this blue line or the cyan line and what that represents is that cinema 4d will break down all its polygons into quads and triangles so if I move this point you can see what I have is and I'll go to edge mode too so I can go to selections and I'll select these edges and you can see that I have five sides or more in this case six and this is an end gone this is a a polygon with more than one excuse me more than four four five sides or more and I'll go into polygon mode and I'll select that so even knows cinema 4d puts in this this little line this is actually just a and gone now we also have triangles and I'm going to make a cut I'm going to put this right here and you can see that what we have here is a triangle and an end gone right here now you can see where cinema 4d puts in this this line and I'll deselect so you can see that so there will always be triangles in quads even though this is an actual and an edge on our 3d model so what we have here is a mesh that is very difficult to make selections around and start making a you know for say beveling or deforming we're gonna have a lots of difficulty deforming some of these objects that have n guns or triangles now there's also issues with stretching with our polygons so for an example if I have a polygon and it's stretched we have these elongated polygons these polygons will give us difficulty when we're making UVs and what's going to happen is is that anything that we apply to this polygon say if it's an image and we add it to our 3d object the UV will then have to stretch that to go across this polygon so within 3d modelling as I undo back you'll notice the best way to model is to have these quads quad polygons with the ability to keep them at the same same size in the same distance you want to keep them as square as possible now in some cases that's not going to be completely the most possible that way that you can do it and you're going to have situations where you're going to have poles in your in your mesh now you can see a pole here we have poles and all our polygons you're gonna have this vertice that's going to be a cross cross-section of four edges but here you're going to see one two three four five edges now in some cases you really can't get away with not having a pole a pole will allow you to do is split your polygon mesh so that you can have more polygons into one particular section but what you don't want to have is you don't want to have six or more edges connecting to one point creating a six edged pole and what's that's going to do is it's going to be making very difficult and when you subdivide what you're going to have is some strange and [Music] unwanted distortion within your mesh so now that we have those basic concepts down we understand what we're trying to accomplish with in 3d modeling and to understand these concepts of creating realistic models we want to definitely have good edge flow and and we want to make sure that we stay within quads four-sided polygons so the next step is understanding the tools that we have here in cinema 4d in order to make it possible to create some of these more complex shapes now if you're modeling some very basic things very basic models cinema 4d has quite a few different types of primitives that you can start from to be a cube or cone or a cylinder or a torus so we have various different ways to start modeling from basic shapes we also have the ability to make splines and what that is is basically a way of creating a pen stroke and if you're familiar with Photoshop or illustrator you know you can create these lines and connect these lines and you have these these points as well and these little handles in which case you can then manipulate to change the shape and again cinema4d also has quite a few different primitive spline shapes in which to start from these spline shapes which we can use for certain generators oops excuse me such as the extrude and being able to create geometry from these shapes now what I want to impress upon you how very important it is to understand that these shapes although can create geometry quite quickly by just stretching out your pen tool and then applying these generators in order to make geometry that's fine except when you start getting into some more complex shapes and where these shapes are going to where your destination that you're going to be bringing these into if it's a game engine you're not going to be able to correctly bring a lot of these objects in because that they have n guns and they have a lot of stretching involved which makes it very difficult to apply UVs and have accurate materials and texturing on these objects it also gives us a very difficulty in terms of making these objects what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put this into a null put our extrude into a null and then put our null or put our the former within this this null and what we have is a very difficulty into forming this type of geometry and what I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate this around and we have to be particularly understanding of how this geometry now that we have it deformed in in this case a bend a former how this end gone because this is what this cap is to this extrude how it deforms in in a way that is not this isn't a very neat way of deforming this this cap in this geometry so then you go through the game of creating triangles and quadrangles and you start putting in this grid and then you have this problem here in the corners makes it very difficult to then start adding in some shapes such as a bevel and then what you do is you try to resolve this and then maybe make this editable and start deleting points and it becomes a nightmare in terms of time trying to create this geometry in an accurate way and then being able to UV it so at very first it might seem well why would I go through polygon by polygon when I can just use these splines and use these generators in order to create geometry well the reason is is that if you want to start making more accurate and more realistic geometry you're gonna have to do all these little tips and tricks and all these hacks in order to get your geometry to look in any way shape that you're trying to create with these deformers and these generators and these splines so the answer to being able to create and learn cinema4d and learn modeling listen cinema 4d is a way to go by building your models polygon by polygon now at first that seems very tedious but once you understand the concepts the initial concepts that I went over which is the basic general 3d modeling you dense then then start getting into how can I create the more realistic shapes that you know either I see in my head or that I draw or that I see online how do I start getting those realistic shapes within cinema 4d by using polygons this is where a reference file becomes essential so what I want to impress upon you is that whenever you're doing any type of 3d modeling always work with a reference so I'm going to go to my front view now I'm going to take everything I just made I'm just gonna put this in a null option G and I'm just gonna hide this so now we have a reference file what I did is I just went to shift V I went to back tab and image and I just applied this image that's in your project folder once that's applied with it you want to do is you want to bring down this transparency so you can see so it's not so bright and it's a difficult on my eyes so I bring it down to around 82 percent or so so you now you have a reference file in which to work with and by building polygon by polygon you're going through a process of resolving issues as they come about as you're working but also gives you a way to then start planning out your model visually so now you know where exactly what you're trying to accomplish instead of just trying to either work from memory or just kind of winging it and just kind of hoping that you hit the mark this way instead of shooting in the dark so to speak you're able to more accurately line up what you're trying to do almost like you're in a crosshair and you want to hit that target exactly this type of modeling modeling from a reference is nothing that is just specific to 3d modeling when you're drawing and when you're doing illustration you always want to have a reference file in which to work off of artists has been using this for years whether it's sculpting painting drawing and you want to be able to accurately create what you're trying to accomplish as accurately as possible even if it's something something like cartoons or something that's a little bit more organic you still want to have that type of reference so I talked a little bit about the tools that you're going to be using within cinema 4d it's very important that you master these tools so how do you master these within cinema 4d so anytime you have a tool that you want to use and I'm gonna be using the polygon pen within cinema 4d you have this icon in your attributes manager right click on this icon and then go down to where it says show help it's going to bring up a help menu in which case you can learn every single option within cinema 4d so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna adopt this to my to my dot to my palettes over here and what I'm gonna do is you can you can do this for anything that you want to learn within cinema 4d and you can move this over a little bit you can adjust the the sizing of this but so as you're working and as you're learning these these tools you can have this docked and like you go through the process of any tool that you want to use just right click on this icon bring this up with show help and then you can study and learn about every tool as you're working this is very important and I think it's a it's a great function within cinema 4d you don't have to go to a tutorial you don't have to buy any books you can stay within the program and learn how to model within by learning these tools and just by reading about these so I just talked about a little bit about the initial concepts understanding that we have various primitives and different types of ways of creating geometry I talked a little bit about the best way to create geometry which is to use quads and develop your models polygon by polygon and then always using a reference in which to accurately create any type of modeling and it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or if you're a seasoned professional you're always going to be using references it's just a mainstay of how you develop and design anything you want to do even if you draw it in a program such as Photoshop or illustrator or if you have a Wacom tablet draw out that design and work out that that concept and work out that concept art before bringing that into cinema 4d in which case then you don't have to guess now it's very important to use a reference file but don't limit yourself to having to make exactly what you see unless it's for commercial client which gives you a blueprint on which to work off of if you're just learning cinema 4d in the beginning you want to be able to use your own creativity and use your own ideas and concepts as you're working to fill in the gaps that sometimes you just don't get with a reference file you can't always get every view say if you take something from the internet and start building something off of building something off of a reference file you don't get every view so it's it's very important to understand that yes you want to use a reference file but you don't have to stick to it 100% so what I want to do now is to have you understand a little bit about the modeling process and everything that I just talked about so I'm going to bring in a primitive I'm going to bring this into negative Z and I'm gonna bring into this disk and I'm gonna go to wireframes so if you go to your displays and you go to wireframes you can see the different segments and I'm gonna bring this to - and when you're working with primitives you want to get down to you want to get down to a small enough segments that you can work with and depending if you're going to be bringing this into subdivision surface and subdividing these polygons you want to bring it into a low amount of polygons to start working out with now you can do things within box modeling and in box modeling is if I go to perspective mode you're creating something just starting off using a box just using this cube the issue with that and well what you would do is you would slowly add in subdivisions say for an example if I want to select all and then subdivide and you can go into this little gear here and you can go smooth self division and you can see now that my cube has has then been subdivided and now it's a little bit more spherical and then I do a little bit more work to it and then I subdivide again in order to get to more and more detail of what I'm trying to accomplish the issue with using box modelling is that it's a little bit more restrictive in what you in what you can start adding in more realistic details so even though you can create a character with box modeling and you can create various hard surface objects with box modeling what you're going to find is that it's going to become more and more difficult as you go and it's certainly a concept and in a in a technique in terms of modeling that you're free to explore but what I want to do is explain to you the beauty of being able to develop something polygon by polygon and in this case we're gonna start off in a flat view so if I go to a disc and say I choose 12 rotation segments and I couldn't bring down the outer radius and I can bring up this inner radius to mimic this this hole and it make this editable so now what I have here is what looks like a pretty complex shape with all these different holes and then we have these slots here and we have these angles and we have these curves and it's like ah I mean how would you do this with box modeling how would you do this with a spline so you start you know cutting in these lines here and say you get a spline and you know you start putting in all of these points and like I showed you before then you have a cap you extrude this then you have the problem with having to dealing with the regular grid and trying to get okay so what if I want to bevel this it just becomes very difficult in order to do that if you're using generators and all of that and then if you want like I said if you wanted to form this it becomes an issue with the forming and accurately so this may seem complex but what we're going to do is we're going to take this disc that I made and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna copy this command click and drag and just get this into my various areas where I want these holes so you know if there's if these holes don't line up for this demonstration and like I said it you want to have some flexibility in terms of your reference file you know unless it's something that is you do have to accurately portray for a client you do have some leeway but for this case what I'm gonna do is I'm going to copy these out put these in position to the various curves that I have here in this reference file so I have I'm gonna close this help file get that out of my view and I'm gonna bring this down a bit too so I have all these different discs here and I'm not sure what this polygon is so I'm just gonna delete and I'm gonna select these disks and I'm going to right-click connect objects + delete let's just call this metal plate so I have these objects and these don't line up that's alright and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into point mode and I'm gonna use my polygon pen and what you can do is you can weld by just snapping these points together and that welds and what I want to do is I want to select this polygon in fact I think I want to select this polygon instead and delete and I want to do the same thing on this side here delete and I'm going to go into edge mode or excuse me I'm gonna go into point mode go to my polygon pen command click and drag and pull this out and line these lot edges up a little bit and I want to command click and drag this will snap and do same thing on this side line this up pull this back a little bit command click and drag have that snap and I'm going to command click and drag and build this polygon by polygon and resolve the issues and problems that arise as I'm building out this this geometry and that's what 3d modeling is it's it's problem-solving it's trying to figure out a best solution in order to develop your model so I'm going to command click and drag snap that command click and drag and snap this now what we have here is a quad and this will have n gone here so 1 2 3 4 5 so in order to resolve this what we can do is we can snap this to here 1 2 3 4 5 6 and that's no good because I don't want that many poles snap this to here we have a quad it snap to see here now we have a quad 1 2 3 4 5 that's a 5 point pull and we can live with that as you can see now what I did here was connect up these edges and what I want to do here is I want to go to this polygon I want to delete this go to point mode pull this out command click and drag command click and drag here snap that command click and drag command click and drag here and just make some adjustments here ok so now what I have here if I go into my polygon mode and I go to loop selection so I go to ul and I'm gonna go around this object and what you have here is you can see the selection this loop now goes around this entire section of our object now like I said before edge flow is very important if I had n guns or if I had poles this would terminate okay that's fine but the issue is even if you have quads that's still an issue because then say when you want to start to bevel this you'll become a nightmare in order to make all these selections in order to bevel if we don't have proper edge flow see here we have proper edge flow in which case I can go to my command excuse me my move tool and let me go to edge mode and I double click on this and you can see that I have this edge is able to select so if I want to bevel this out you know say if I want to go to MS and bevel this with the bevel tool it can bevel this out you know we're in front view but the point is is that I'm able to do this very quickly very easily and so the rest of this object is all the very very similar all I'm doing here and if these slots these slots are very simple let me go to polygon mode and I'm what I'm doing here is I'm just selecting half of this polygon excuse me half of this disk of these polygons delete that and then just bridge these across and now what I do here is I can select these edges and what I can do is I can connect these I can connect these points and edges by just going to mesh commands and connect points at points and edges so in this case it's just mm whoops let me go back to my selection and I can simply type mm in order to get these polygons nice and evenly spaced so I do that with all of these so I do the same technique that goes around so it seems like a very complex model but here I am with building this very quickly just from one disk so I have this disk I copied it I don't know how many times nine times and I'm quickly able to start building out a lot of this geometry okay so maybe that's too many let me undo but you can see my point here is that I can quickly then make in these lines and the same situation that I did here by deleting a polygon on each of these curves here and why do we do this we do this in order to have proper edge flow around our object and let me just base this a little bit better command click and drag build this across and now at this point what I can do is I can either just space this maybe pull this down a little bit snap this snap this here snap this snap this here I don't think I would want to pull this polygon up to the top and stretch that a little bit too much so that's fine if I have this like this and pull these out and I resolve this area zoom in a little bit so this is kind of overshooting my reference so let me just pull this back in a little bit come and click and drag come and click and drag snap this into place I'm and click and drag and pull this out so now I don't want to stretch this too much just pull this out so here say for an example I pull this and I snap this to this point and so I snapped this to this point well we all have quads this is a little bit stretched out I can maybe just make some adjustments no problem right so I go to loop mode go to polygon mode and see what happens here I go to my loop selection so now I'm looping in instead of going across like I expect this one to do and you can see this this selects all across my edge it terminates and goes back into the center of this at of this disk that I made so that is why we keep this edge continuous by deleting that polygon and the me undo back instead of connecting it up that way I do what I did before select the polygon delete that go to point mode we have a bunch of points over left over you can just go to right click optimize I'll have that selected so let me deselect shift command a optimize and that will clear up those remainder points so we go to polygon mode pull this back off let's face this a little bit better command click and drag snap that in place snap this into place polygon mode delete it excuse me point mode command click and drag shift this over a bit command click and drag command click and drag that snaps in so now we go to polygon mode ul for loop selection and at any edge that I move over you can see now that that loops around that's good edge flow same thing with this Center slot same thing with our rings our holus I should say so at any time that I want to bevel this once I finish this this model I can do that so I do the same situation with each and every one of these these disks this one's a little bit tricky because now we have a kind of tight quarters here but that's still okay I can still do the same process and delete these out I go to point mode command click and drag pull this over you know that you will by now snap that in a place and so we just kind of tighten up a little bit here and let's try to make a nicer curve make this a little bit more a little bit more elegant and just move this over command click and drag command whoops excuse me command click and drag and now with this curve we just want to give it enough resolution so when we subdivide we have a nice smooth curve and I'm gonna click and move this out and let's pull this all the way over here now snap there now snap here we got this little edge here and this doesn't line up that's okay for our purposes we're just trying to [Music] now what we can do when we have these long slots and I'm not sure if I delete it accidentally deleted something here or maybe I just forgot to put a disk over here so I'll have to I just have to copy that and slide that over so we have these long points here I mean kind of just snap this and just kind of line this up a little bit so I might have deleted that by accident so I delete this and what I can do is I don't know I guess maybe I could just split this you P pull this out and actually I don't want to do that what polygons rotate this around 180 degrees and then I'll just connect objects plus the leap I'll go back into our point mode optimize clean up this points so now let me go over here and fix this edge point mode go to polygon pen and let's fix this up a little bit they're kind of overlapping a little bit and we have our situation where we want to delete a polygon on one of this disks and we have this little curve here we want to resolve pull this over and delete this polygon and delete this polygon go poly pen let's snap this together snap this together these will weld it's well DS up and let's get this under control command click and drag snap this together so we can get this there we go and now what I'll do is command click and drag command click and drag snap this here snap that together and there we go so that's all snapped and then I'll click across now we do have this poll here one two three four five and this is all kind of bunched up and it's looking kind of ugly and a little irritating but we're gonna clean that up so I'm going to continue on making some adjustments here command click and drag and pull this around let's see sorry about that it seems to be happening is not zoomed in enough and what I want to do is now I'm moving across this but you know in order to preserve this edge what I can do is I can pull this and stretch this all the way over maybe not that far command click drag this over to here snap that and now select this this edge German edge mode mm and what I can do is I can add in those lines and connect those edges so now we have a straight line here now you'll notice here this one's all kind of messy what I can do is I can select these lines select these edges ctrl click to deselect these other ones T on the keyboard pull this access down hold down shift 10 degree increments until we get to zero and now we have a nice clean edge there and you can see we have a clean edge all the way across because we used a bevel and we can clean this up a little bit and clean up this up a little bit as well but now this is a little bit tricky because we have this edge that's not you know straight up and down or left to right horizontally so we just go to a guide and grab our guide tool go to point mode and say here click this and let me escape make sure I have snapping on and make sure I have guides snap on click here and this will snap to this edge and then I go to my polygon pen tool zoom in and I can snap all these edges to this guide making it nice and sharp and flat making that look really nice and we can do the same thing on this side here so I'll just delete that go to guides zoom in a bit snap to this point here let me go to my poly pen back on my object and then snap to this now like I said before it's not lining up exactly perfect to my reference what this will give us a nice clean sharp edge I can just delete this guide okay so now let me just connect this edge here these disks so just actually I'm using the poly pen but you can do that you can use the bridge you can just bridge that up snap that so here's a tricky thing because I want to snap excuse me I want to cut so they'll connect to this other row of polygons that I made so I go to KK and I'll make a cut snap that there we've got a single line and I'll probably connect these guys up let me zoom in a bit so I could see what I'm doing here and so what I can do is I could just weld these up with my poly pen and so let me just make a cut here as well so I could just go to my poly pen these will weld up nicely snap this together snap this here snap this here and let's snap this together here and I think I've snapped everything now we have this section here so I can snap this together this might not work out perfect so I might have to dissolve a few edges I wasn't paying attention to my how many edges I had here so does this one here I'm gonna dissolve I'll just dissolve these and these are a little messy but we'll clean that up in a bit so okay so now what we have is a loop that goes around let me go to polygon mode so you can see it better now we have a loop that goes around our entire plate this metal plate we'll call it that and a loop that goes around each of our holes and these slots now we have all this interior stuff to work with here so this is kind of the part where you just kind of resolve and spend a little bit of time and my intention wasn't really to build this entire piece out but I just kind of started going and it's kind of fun to just kind of talk about this and connect all this up so at this point it's kind of just resolving these little tough parts and what I mean is what you'll do is you'll you'll start building polygon by polygon and this little stretched out and you just kind of work your way around and like look wait a minute this doesn't match up so let's try to figure this out so you're just kind of problem-solving as you let me go to point mode you're just kind of problem solving as you're working around you know around this this interior thing here that snaps oh this isn't really kind of connecting let's snap this here and you're just kind of going through this process of making this work just as long as you're in quads and you spaced this out correctly you don't have any guns you don't have triangles and you want to try to make this a nice grid if you can and this looks very messy so may have to redo this in a spot so you know you kind of see this and you're just like oh what a mess so what I do is and I do this at the end usually but I just want to show this now because I almost can't stand the look at how messy this is and at this point I don't think I'm gonna have to remove any points well let me just do this real quick so what I do is I'll grab my rectangle selection I'm gonna grab big piece of this select all these points and go back to my life selection just gonna deselect some of these points down here I'm gonna deselect these points because I want to preserve this curve I want to protect these points here excuse me I need a drink of water excuse me so I want to deselect these points here and here I have a ul and I can simply just paint along here control click and drag and paint with this live selection tool just to so I can preserve these points and what I do is I go to MC to bring up the brush tool and I'm gonna go to smooth for mode radius is fine strength is not fine let's go to something like 5 percent and we're just gonna smooth this out and what it's gonna do is just kind of even stuff out so I can resolve issues a little bit better it just allows me to see the ugly stuff a little bit better and I'm sure you can see it as well you can kind of see where the ugly part is this awful pole and maybe we can clean this up a little bit so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 polls so we have this pole here that we can kind of figure out how we can clean this up better and what I can do is when I when I get into ugly stuff like this I start thinking maybe I have too many edges here maybe I have too little edges here so I can whenever I have an issue of like trying to in this situation where I'm trying to pull everything together and get this looking nice and I'm like how do I resolve this how do I get all these all these points connected I start looking about well one two three four five mmm oops that's maybe acceptable and then you start going ugh what happened here so this is where I go maybe there's just too many edges here so maybe let's dissolve a few E's and it's kind of going through this process of you know I did this really quickly so I didn't really think how many edges I'm going to need in order to resolve this particular particular thing here so maybe having a little bit of foresight before doing this you can kind of see where you can line stuff up so that's a very important part of this process now we got this I don't want to lose this edge so maybe I want to use the slide tool just kind of slide this up a little bit slide this down a little bit kind of even this out so we don't have this gaping or we don't have this elongated edge here so maybe that works that's fine and then we go through the process again and just kind of cleaning this up a little bit I don't particularly like this this this I want to resolve this a little bit better so maybe I dissolve an edge here and this looks like the culprit to our issues so maybe I dissolve I'm gonna try and go here so maybe I dissolve this and I got an end gone here and I'd rather not take out so much of this and if I put up excuse me if I cut this along here ah let's close that polygon hole and I cut along here that doesn't help me in terms of this edge here and I dissolve this edge it's gonna really give me some elongated edges here so don't particularly like so it's a process of just kind of getting this one two three four five yeah it's maybe not ideal smooth this up a little bit and maybe I want to just give this a little bit of smoothing here so it's not so elongated and I just want to be careful of my spot here on the slot just to make sure that doesn't get I don't lose that so I did resolve that I still have this little pole here but we're looking pretty good and I can resolve this a little bit as well so my intention wasn't to go through this entire piece but I did want to show you well a lot of this and and see a lot of how this is resolved by going through the edges and going through these discs I'm gonna put this on pause okay back and created these connecting up these polygons and you can see that it's kind of all over the place a little bit it's kind of a little bit messy what I had to do in some instances was take out a few rows I just kind of went a little bit too much in terms of resolution so there was a few areas like up in here and down here where I had to delete a few polygons or dissolve a few edges in order to get the result that I was trying to go after but all quads no six point polls and now what I would like to do is when I was talking about a little bit before which is to clean up this entire model and what I'm gonna do is I'm going you go to ul for loop selection make sure that my points are selected on the edge and the Rings or the holes for say for screws or bolts whoops wrong loop and got these and I want to get these interior ones as well so have all these points now when a UI which is to invert those points and then go to MC for smooth and I'm going to bring this up to say 80 I would say for these size and let's bring the strength to about 20 and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go around this model and smooth out and what this will do is get a number 1 what it will do is it will space my polygons out the way that they should they should be spaced and you know they shouldn't be too bunched up in some areas take out some of the elongation but what it's also gonna do is it's gonna find issues it's it's gonna quickly find an issue that maybe I just didn't see I'm you know I'm just kind of like this issue here is weird to me and I don't know what's causing that so what I'm gonna do is even though it's all quads it's all kind of bunched up a little bit and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just kind of space this out a little bit a little bit nicer and oh well there's the issue one two three four five we have here is an end gone so let's resolve this and that's why I like doing that it's to pick up areas that I just didn't notice before so let's clean up this and gone and a good way to do that maybe is to maybe put a cut along here and close this polygon hole that's actually the issue is that I had a open section there and now what I can do is go to MC let's drag down this radius a bit and just clean up this one area so that's why I like doing that is and that was a perfect thing to happen because then you can kind of see where the where your issues are in terms of you gotta pull an end gone or in that case they open the spot so this is looking pretty good I'm pretty like liking how this turned out the only thing I want to do real quick is just kind of slide this points over maybe and give this a little bit nicer of a nicer of a spread here so it doesn't look so oh so ugly okay and okay as I've been doing this and and doing modeling it's something that doesn't look right is visual distraction to me okay so I didn't expect this video to go this long so I apologize for a very long video but I do think that this illustrates my point and the concept of building your models polygon by polygon so what I have here is a model that is looks fairly complex so we have a lot of different shapes in sides and we have all these holes and slots you know how do you go about resolving that and the point of this whole exercise was to prove that you can go polygon by polygon and resolve issues as they come up and build your your models correctly and being able to build them in quads with no end guns no triangles no succeded poles and being able to quickly and accurately build from a reference reference file so I'm going to go into perspective mode and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to polygon mode and just select all and and this is exactly why I did this I guess at some point I might have bridged and bridged the wrong way and we have reversed normals so this is why whenever I mean getting into cleanup mode after I smooth and space out my points and edges I do a select all to quickly find reverse normals and so when you see everything in orange these are the highlighted polygons you know that those are normals facing the correct direction and what you can also do is at this point you can reverse these normals or align normals you can just right click and then go to align normals and what that will do is that will put those polygons and flip them in the right direction so you go in the reverse on the other side you know that these normals are facing the way that you want them okay so this is our front view and well let's see here let me just make sure f4 okay yeah this is reversed and I want to make I want to make sure here okay sorry I got turned around this is the front view and so what I can do is I just can right-click and reverse normals so apologize just want to get this in the correct view based on our front view okay so in perspective mode what I want to do next is I want to I want to extrude this do you on your keyboard to extrude and what I want to do is I want to make sure that I have great caps on and extrude this out and let's rotate this around let me undo rotate excuse me extrude this out just kind of give it some some depth and you can see that we have our caps on if I turn that off we have this empty space so make sure you have create caps on and now we have this extruded object based on a building polygons from a flat surface flat object now you might be thinking right now well that's great if I have a flat object but what if I have objects that are are not flat that aren't well what I want you to understand is is that you can build an object and then extrude that to give it the depth that you want but you're not limited to just this building in just a flat flat plane so what I mean is after you build this and you have this in this flat surface you extrude this out but you can also use the form you can use the former's in order to shape out your object and it doesn't have to be this flat it can be you can extrude this out as far as you want so what I'm gonna do is I want to bevel this edge and these edges because right now it's just too sharp of an edge so what I want to do is I want to put this into a bevel the former so I'm going to go into our deformers go down to bevel and put this in our our metal plane here our metal plate excuse me so let me go to our model mode and what you can see is how our object is modeled out as bevel it out and I can put this into a subdivision surface now when I put this into a subdivision surface you can see that what we have here and let me turn off the lines because I'm not sure if you can see how this how this looks but we have sort of like this strange-looking effects that we have these artifacts that we have on our on our bevel and so I want to turn this off and what I want to do is I want to take my bevel and you can see we have a selection field so if I go to my metal object and I go to my edges and there's a couple ways you could do this you can do this by selecting all you can do a loop selection and then go around but you can also use a Fond break selection and select all and that will select the edges around your object and the edges around your holes and slots and you can see that if you rotate around that selects both sides and now I can go to my metal plate with this selected we can go to select set selection and now we have the selection tag if I go into the bevel drag this in to set selection now this kind of cleans up these artifacts that I might be getting with my my object okay so excuse me now that I have my subdivision surface and I have it beveled out and if you're getting any artifacts you can use that set selection tag now I want to demonstrate the ability to deform these by going to for someone to go to a null and I'm going to drag my subdivision surface in the null and what I'm gonna do is rename this metal plate and I'm gonna go to a bevel excuse me a bender former and drag this underneath our metal plate fit the parent and if I rotate you can see that it's not rotating exactly what I want you can see that it certainly can bend and we're not seeing any distortions in this particular view but if I rotate this in ninety degrees in this section in this direction and then go to fit to parent rotate this in this direction excuse me ninety degrees I'm not a little difficulty let me undo I have my snap on it and it's distracting so rotate this around to ninety degrees fit the parent and then move this Bend to our null make sure we're underneath the null and now when I rotate this around you can see that I can rotate this excuse me bend this in any direction that I want without worry of any type of distortion so if you notice or if you remember when I had my other object and I had this null and I'm gonna hide my plate you can see the distortions that I was getting into and all the problems that I was getting into with this other object let me just hide a lot of this other junk so you can just see my this little star thing here and now I have my star and you know if I put this I believe I can put in a bevel into this as well and you know what I mean it's it's a nightmare using these splines and the former excuse me generators and then applying these deformers and even though it's you know a different object and what I'm doing this is a much less complex object it's just a star that's all I have here is a star if I just you know hide all of this you can see I'm just it's just a star and as I apply all these other deformers and generators it becomes a nightmare you can't put this into anything you can't add this to anything so I just wanted to this whole point of this video is to explain my point of how when learning cinema 4d and the best way to learn cinema 4d is to learn as modeling within cinema 4d the best way to learn that is to learn the concepts of building polygons from polygons in order to develop the excuse me let me just kind of bend this around in order to develop what you're trying to accomplish using the correct topology using good edge flow if I did model this out correctly I wouldn't be able to put the bevel on I wouldn't be able to shape this around and by the way this is not just you can use any of the deformers and in there is no way look at the plasticity of this of this mesh I can subdivide it smooth this out I can rotate this angle around and you can see in any way any direction that I move my model in any way I stretch it you know it's it's going to stay very smooth and able to deform very nicely I can hide this and add in a twist the former let me go to my plate fit the parent let me go to my my null and I go to my twist and you can see that I can twist in any direction so just to recap and I didn't mean for this to go this long and I didn't mean to be so long-winded and basically what this can be boiled down to is the best way to learn cinema 4d is to learn modeling correctly learn the tools correctly by going like I suggested using the help selection a Help section within cinema 4d learn the tools master each one individually use a reference and model correctly using solid topology and then finally my my last bit of advice for learning cinema 4d modeling is to model sit down and and do and been the time and actually doing models anything that you can do is going to add sort of like a drop in the bucket a penny in the bank and each amount of effort each effort that you give to this it will add on to your your modeling skills 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: 59,897

Rating: 4.916101 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4D, modeling

Id: dTRx_9_7l_U

Length: 89min 29sec (5369 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017