1. Organic Modeling with the HyperNURBS ObjectWhat is HyperNURB modeling?| 00:00 | In a previous module in the Essential
Training Course, we looked at how to model a speaker
| | 00:05 | cabinet using polygon modeling
techniques, and spline modeling techniques.
| | 00:09 | That type of modeling works fantastic when
you're trying to create inorganic shapes with
| | 00:13 | things that don't have smooth edges.
| | 00:16 | But what happens when you do need to make
something that feels organic, or has smooth edges?
| | 00:20 | That's where the HyperNURB object comes in.
| | 00:22 | A HyperNURB is a special type of object in CINEMA
4D that smooths out whatever you put under it.
| | 00:28 | Let's take a look at that.
| | 00:30 | I'm going to add a cube to the scene.
| | 00:32 | A cube has some very hard edges to it.
| | 00:33 | I'll add this little guy
right here; the HyperNURB.
| | 00:36 | When I click on that, I
get a HyperNURB object.
| | 00:40 | The icon for the HyperNURB object is green.
| | 00:42 | That means it's a generator object, and it
needs to have a child, or multiple children
| | 00:47 | in order to produce some sort of result.
| | 00:49 | So if I take the cube and drop it under the
HyperNURB, then I get a sphere-like object.
| | 00:56 | What exactly is happening here?
| | 00:58 | Let's switch our view to the four-way
by middle mouse clicking.
| | 01:02 | I'm holding my mouse over each of
the views, and then hitting letter H.
| | 01:06 | Now that I've got the objects filled up in each of
the frames, let's change the Display options.
| | 01:11 | Let's go to Display, change it from Lines to
Gouraud Shading (Lines), so we can actually
| | 01:17 | see the lines on the surface of our object.
Do Display > Gouraud Shading (Lines), and
| | 01:22 | Display, and Gouraud Shading (Lines).
| | 01:26 | What the HyperNURB does is take whatever you
put under it, and it examines the midpoints
| | 01:30 | along each of the edges on your object.
| | 01:32 | It then draws an arc between the midpoints
on each of the edges on your object, and it
| | 01:38 | does that in all three dimensions, all at once.
| | 01:41 | So if we look at this cube here that we've
placed under the HyperNURB, and I'm looking
| | 01:45 | at in the Top view; in the Top view, there's a
midpoint along each edge, and that midpoint is right here.
| | 01:51 | The next midpoint in the Top
view is an edge right here.
| | 01:55 | So the HyperNURB object draws a
smooth arc between those two points.
| | 02:01 | It does it again on the other
side, and again here, and again here.
| | 02:04 | And then in the Front view, it does it
around in this axis, and it does this around each
| | 02:09 | of the axes, in each of the views, and it
does that in all three dimensions at once.
| | 02:14 | So what you end up with
is a sphere-like device.
| | 02:16 | I say sphere-like because
it's not truly spherical.
| | 02:20 | In order to get a round shape with the HyperNURB
object, you need to have more than four sides.
| | 02:24 | And so, because our cube is only four-sided,
you're only going to get a sphere-like object.
| | 02:30 | Now, every time we add a subdivision to this
cube, we're going to get a different shape,
| | 02:36 | because the midpoints will have changed.
| | 02:38 | So if I select the Cube object, and I go to the
Object Properties, and I'm going to adjust the Segments.
| | 02:43 | Let's adjust the Segments along the Z-axis,
so we'll see the change in our Top view.
| | 02:48 | So I go to the Z Segments,
and change it to, say, 5.
| | 02:52 | As soon as I do that now, all
of my midpoints have changed.
| | 02:56 | My midpoints around the Y-axis, though,
so along X, have not changed.
| | 03:01 | So I've got one midpoint way over here, and
then another midpoint right about here, and
| | 03:06 | that's why I get this short curve.
| | 03:08 | From midpoint to midpoint along the side, I
get no curve at all, because the midpoints
| | 03:13 | are all evenly spaced and
flat along the X-axis.
| | 03:17 | The general rule of thumb when you're modeling
with HyperNURB objects is that every time you
| | 03:20 | make a cut, or you add detail to your model,
you're going to have to do some revisions to it.
| | 03:26 | It's a very fluid and intuitive way to
work once you understand the basics.
| | 03:31 | Here are some great examples of objects that
are simple to make that I've created with
| | 03:34 | the HyperNURB object, and we've
got a very simple fish shape here.
| | 03:38 | And this fish started out life as a simple
cube, and I'm going to select the main body.
| | 03:44 | I'm in Texture mode right now.
| | 03:45 | Let's click on the Model mode, and go to the
Display, and tell it Gouraud Shading with Lines.
| | 03:52 | You can see that I've got
a lot of polygons here.
| | 03:54 | If I turn off the fish NURB for a second,
these are the actual polygons that are being
| | 03:58 | smoothed out by the HyperNURB object.
| | 04:01 | The HyperNURB allows you to create a low-res
mesh, and then smooth it to generate a much
| | 04:06 | higher res result.
| | 04:07 | There are some controls in the
HyperNURB that allow you to do that.
| | 04:10 | If I click on the HyperNURB object, and look
at the Subdivision Editor, and Subdivision
| | 04:14 | Renderer, those two fields control what the
fish looks like here in this window, and also
| | 04:20 | what it looks like in the Render window.
| | 04:22 | When I subdivide it lower here, I'll do a 1
on the Subdivision Editor, my Subdivision
| | 04:28 | Renderer is still pretty high at 3.
| | 04:30 | That means I'm going to get three
subdivisions for every one subdivision here.
| | 04:34 | That's going to give me a lot of polygons, and
in fact, if I turn on the HyperNURB, and I
| | 04:40 | look at the polygons that I'm getting, you
can see that this polygon count that I have
| | 04:45 | here represents what I'll
see in the Editor window.
| | 04:48 | Now when I render that, I'll see
the subdivisions in Renderer.
| | 04:52 | And if I hit Shift+R on the keyboard, just to
render the picture viewer, you can't really
| | 04:56 | tell in this view, because the
fish is already pretty smooth.
| | 04:59 | And that's a really important point to make
is that the HyperNURB object has a point of
| | 05:03 | diminishing returns.
| | 05:05 | You only want to add as much geometry to
your object as you absolutely need at the time
| | 05:09 | that you need it, because it's very hard to get rid
of the geometry once you have it in your model.
| | 05:15 | Now, when I change the Subdivision Editor from
1 to 3, I now have the exact same subdivision
| | 05:21 | as what I'll see when I render.
| | 05:22 | And you can see there's a lot more polygons.
| | 05:24 | And this polygon count can
get very heavy to pull around.
| | 05:28 | So that's what this Subdivision Editor field
is for; it allows you to lower the resolution
| | 05:31 | here, so that you don't have to
haul all that geometry around,
| | 05:35 | and then when it comes time to render the frame,
you'll get the higher resolution geometry.
| | 05:38 | It's a much better way to work and
allows for a lot of flexibility.
| | 05:42 | Now, HyperNURB modeling works fantastic for
truly organic shapes, like this fish, but there
| | 05:47 | are times where you want to make some
inorganic shapes out of HyperNURBs.
| | 05:50 | If I go the Window menu, and look at Hypernurb-type-
START, this Hypernurb type is a type element that
| | 05:57 | I created using the HyperNURB object.
| | 05:59 | I modeled the letters of this type logo.
| | 06:02 | You may be asking yourself, Rob,
why didn't you simple extrude?
| | 06:05 | The reason I didn't simply extrude is because I
wanted to have very clean quadrangle-based geometry.
| | 06:12 | If you do just extrude your logo, then you'll
be left with whatever geometry you get out
| | 06:16 | of the Extrude NURB object.
| | 06:18 | And that's one of the problems;
| | 06:19 | when you extrude a piece of type, the
geometry that you get is not very clean at all.
| | 06:24 | By modeling my type with the
HyperNURB, I get very clean geometry.
| | 06:28 | Let's take a look at that.
| | 06:29 | When I select an object, you can see that
I've got a very clean piece of geometry.
| | 06:33 | Let's switch to the Move tool.
| | 06:35 | Now we can see that we've got a representation of how
these polygons are distributed across the surface.
| | 06:41 | This curvature of lines that you're seeing
here is something called Isoline Editing mode.
| | 06:45 | This mode allows you to preview how the polygons
are being distributed across the surface based
| | 06:50 | on the HyperNURB.
| | 06:51 | Now, I don't normally like to work this way.
| | 06:53 | I prefer to work with Isoline Editing off.
| | 06:55 | Let me show you what that looks like.
| | 06:57 | We go to the Options menu, and
I'll uncheck Isoline Editing,
| | 07:02 | and now we see the low poly mesh around the
high poly geometry of the HyperNURB object.
| | 07:07 | So the light blue stuff represents the RG
Merged object, and then the gray stuff is the
| | 07:14 | HyperNURB itself.
| | 07:16 | HyperNURB Modeling is an awesome technique
to use when you need to create objects that
| | 07:19 | have smooth surfaces, or soft
transitions between edges.
| | 07:24 | With the polygon tools that we've talked about
in a previous module, combined with the HyperNURB
| | 07:28 | object, you can create just
about anything you could imagine.
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| Preparing to model: Setting up reference shapes| 00:00 | Normally, when I'm making a HyperNURB model,
I'm working from a reference sketch that I've
| | 00:04 | created, or someone has provided for me, or
some other type of image that I'm using to
| | 00:09 | model an object from.
| | 00:11 | Because we're going to be modeling type in
this example, I'm working with some paths
| | 00:15 | that I have created in Illustrator.
| | 00:16 | So I created this simple
type logo using a font.
| | 00:19 | I've made the font outlines, and I'm
going to be importing it into CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:24 | So I've saved this out as an Illustrator 8 file;
that's what that 8 at the end of it means.
| | 00:28 | So let's move over to CINEMA
4D, and import these paths.
| | 00:31 | So I'm going to go into the File menu in the
Object Manager, and go to Merge Objects, and
| | 00:38 | let's navigate to the Desktop, to the Exercise
Files, and go to the hyper-nurb modeling, and
| | 00:44 | select RG-8, and hit Open.
| | 00:48 | In the Illustrator Import dialog box that comes up,
I'll leave all the defaults on, and hit OK.
| | 00:53 | And my type is way down here; that's because
of the Illustrator ruler, and there's an issue
| | 00:57 | with that being read correctly by C4D, so
we can just zero out the position of this.
| | 01:02 | So let's click on that top Null object, go
to the Coordinate Properties, and zero them
| | 01:06 | out; just click 0, tab, 0, tab, 0, and don't
zero the Scale out, and then make sure the
| | 01:12 | Rotation is 0 as well.
| | 01:14 | So now that that's zeroed out, my type
is now on the center of the screen.
| | 01:18 | And this is going to become my
reference point for modeling my shapes.
| | 01:23 | Let's go ahead and get this file saved out.
| | 01:25 | Go to the File menu, and do a Save As, and
then let's call this RG-model-working.c4d.
| | 01:32 | Then hit Save, and now our file is saved.
| | 01:38 | Now we can get our scene set up,
and ready for HyperNURB modeling.
| | 01:42 | Most of the time when I start a
HyperNURB model, I start off with a cube.
| | 01:46 | So let's add a Cube to the scene.
| | 01:47 | Then we'll also add a HyperNURB.
| | 01:50 | So let's add a HyperNURB object, and take the
cube, and make it a child of the HyperNURB.
| | 01:55 | Then I want to make
something called a Hider object.
| | 01:57 | CINEMA 4D does not have a construction history,
so I kind of invented a way to make one myself,
| | 02:02 | and I call that a hider.
| | 02:04 | So I make a new Null object, put it at the
very bottom of the scene, and I call it Hider.
| | 02:10 | And then I make both of the status dots red.
| | 02:13 | Hold down the Option or Alt key,
and click twice on those two dots.
| | 02:17 | Now anything I put under
this will be hidden from view.
| | 02:20 | For example, I can hold down the Control key, and
place a copy of that cube, and put it under
| | 02:24 | the hider, and that's a little bit
of a gotcha, what you saw there.
| | 02:27 | Notice that it
accidentally created the Hider 2?
| | 02:29 | I don't need that, so I'll just delete it
out of there, and that happens when you have
| | 02:33 | two things selected, and you accidentally drag.
| | 02:37 | This becomes my construction history.
| | 02:38 | I'll call this one 001, and that's the
very first step that I go through.
| | 02:45 | So I hit the letter C on the
keyboard to make the object editable.
| | 02:49 | So now what we'll do is drag it over on the
X-axis, and what I want to do is line it up
| | 02:53 | with the vertical column on the R.
| | 02:55 | So let's go to the Front view, and I'm going to
change the Display options to Gouraud Shading (Lines),
| | 03:02 | so we can actually see the
lines on the surface of our object.
| | 03:05 | And now I can see my cube, and let's get it
lined up exactly in the center, and let's bring
| | 03:10 | it up on the Y-axis.
| | 03:12 | Now I can go into Point mode, and then
grab the Rectangular Selection tool,
| | 03:18 | and this step is very, very important;
| | 03:19 | I want to uncheck Only Select
Visible Elements. I'll turn that off.
| | 03:24 | And now when I make a selection with the Rectangular
Selection tool, I know that I'm selecting all the objects.
| | 03:30 | So let's middle mouse click back to the
Perspective view, and you could see I'm selecting everything
| | 03:34 | underneath the single point that I could see.
| | 03:36 | If I turn this back on, and in the Front view,
I draw a rectangle around that, you notice
| | 03:41 | that it only selected the point on top.
| | 03:43 | So I want to leave this unchecked
for the Rectangular Selection tool.
| | 03:47 | Now I can grab both of those points.
| | 03:49 | And then let's go to the Front
view; bring that full screen.
| | 03:51 | Let's take those points right there and move
them up about there, take these points and
| | 03:57 | move them down, and then I'll take all the
points, and hit T on the keyboard to bring
| | 04:02 | up the Scale tool, and only on the
X-axis, I'm going to drag that in.
| | 04:06 | You can see that I'm
roughing in that starting point.
| | 04:10 | So I think that's a good
place to leave our model.
| | 04:12 | We're going to talk about
roughing in the shapes next.
| | 04:14 | But usually when I start a model, I get the
first base shape put in position, then I do
| | 04:18 | a big save, and then I'm
ready to actually get started.
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| Creating a loose shape with polygon modeling tools| 00:00 | Our project goal is to create the letters
RG using the HyperNURB modeling, and we're
| | 00:05 | going to be using our
modeling tools to do that.
| | 00:07 | Before we get started, I want to make
sure that we're all seeing the same thing.
| | 00:10 | I am seeing the outside of my blue low poly
mesh, because I've turned off a very important
| | 00:17 | feature called Isoline Editing.
| | 00:19 | Underneath the Options menu is this
little icon right here: Isoline Editing.
| | 00:25 | If yours is on, you're going to
see a scene that looks like this.
| | 00:28 | Notice how my lines are curved on the surface.
| | 00:30 | I like to work with this off.
| | 00:32 | So let's go to the Options menu,
and turn off Isoline Editing.
| | 00:35 | Now you should be seeing this light blue
cage surrounding the actual HyperNURB shape.
| | 00:41 | Now we're ready to start using our Knife Tool
to make some cuts, and I'm going to right-click
| | 00:44 | in the interface, and go to Knife, and
let's change our Mode from Line to Loop.
| | 00:50 | Let's turn off those two options.
| | 00:52 | And now when we move it around, we can
see that we're getting a line right here.
| | 00:56 | You may be seeing a line being
drawn on the surface of your object.
| | 00:59 | There is an interesting bug with the recording
software that I'm using that's causing that
| | 01:04 | line not to be drawn.
| | 01:06 | So if you're seeing a white line around
your shape, then that's the right display.
| | 01:11 | If I click to the four-way view, you'll notice
that as I slide up and down this edge, you'll
| | 01:15 | notice that I'm going to be
cutting all the way around this shape.
| | 01:18 | That's very important.
| | 01:19 | If I make a single cut, it
cuts all the way around.
| | 01:22 | You'll notice also that it changed the shape.
| | 01:24 | So let's undo that cut for a second,
and switch back to the Front view.
| | 01:29 | And the place we want to make the cut -- let's
just zoom in just a bit -- is where we know
| | 01:32 | we're going to have to do an extrusion.
| | 01:34 | So I know I'm going to have to do an extrusion right
out here at the top to make this curvature for the R.
| | 01:38 | So I'm going to make a cut right here. I
know I'm going to have to make a cut right
| | 01:42 | here, and right here to account for that
extrusion, and my snapping is turned on.
| | 01:47 | For some reason, sometimes when you launch
the Knife tool, it defaults to Snap Enable,
| | 01:51 | so let's turn snapping off for a second.
| | 01:53 | I know I'm going to need to make a
cut somewhere right about here.
| | 01:58 | That's going to give me the handles
that I'll need to create the serifs.
| | 02:02 | Now that I've made those strategic cuts,
let's go to the Perspective view.
| | 02:06 | I'm going to select all the points, and hit T
on the keyboard to bring up the Scale tool,
| | 02:10 | and grab just the Z handle, and scale that in.
It doesn't matter exactly how much. I'm
| | 02:15 | just going to eyeball it for now.
| | 02:17 | I can always change it numerically later on.
| | 02:20 | The most important thing is I want
to get this back to skinny again.
| | 02:23 | Most of the time when we work, we're going
to be working in the Front view, but every
| | 02:26 | now and then we're going to need to go to
the Perspective view to get an idea for how
| | 02:30 | our objects are shaped.
| | 02:32 | So now let's switch over to Polygon
mode, and grab a different Selection tool.
| | 02:35 | I'm going to tear off the Selection menu.
| | 02:38 | I like to switch back and forth a lot between the
Selection tools, and I'll select Live Selection.
| | 02:43 | I like to use that when I'm in Polygon mode.
| | 02:46 | Let's grab this polygon, and this polygon.
| | 02:51 | Now what I'm going to do is right-click any
place in the editor window, and go down to
| | 02:55 | the Extrude tool, and I'm
going to do an extrusion.
| | 02:59 | And I'm not going to worry about exactly how
much, but I'm going to do two of them, and
| | 03:04 | that gives me a place to start from.
| | 03:07 | What I want to do is, rather than try and extrude
all the way around is, I like to shape my objects
| | 03:12 | by moving the points around.
| | 03:13 | So I set up this extrusion, and then I'm
going to move the points into position.
| | 03:18 | So let's do one more extrusion like
that; I think one more like that.
| | 03:24 | So that's a total of one, two,
three, four levels of extrusion.
| | 03:29 | Now let's switch back to Point mode, and get
our Rectangular Selection tool, and switch
| | 03:33 | to the Front view.
| | 03:35 | What I can do now is start to line things up.
| | 03:38 | I'm going to grab all these points here at the top, and
just raise them up a bit to change the thickness.
| | 03:44 | So I'll take this, and move it down here.
| | 03:46 | You'll notice I'm using the Rectangular Selection tool,
and I have Only Select Visible Elements turned off.
| | 03:53 | The important thing when you're working
this way is to not obsess about the shape.
| | 03:58 | Every time you make a cut, you're going to
have to reshape your object anyway, so your
| | 04:02 | goal is simply to get
the pieces into position.
| | 04:07 | I want to take this cut, and line
it up with the center on that R.
| | 04:10 | So let's bring that over here, and
take this one, and move it up like that.
| | 04:16 | Take these guys, and move them up here, and
take that one, and move it over here like that.
| | 04:25 | Just like in drawing with the Illustrator,
your goal is to make your shapes with as few
| | 04:30 | points as possible.
| | 04:31 | And here's a really cool tip.
| | 04:32 | If I go back to Polygon mode, it's
remembered my polygon selection.
| | 04:36 | So I'll hit D on the keyboard to bring up
the Extrude tool, and I'll just do two more
| | 04:40 | extrusions, like that.
| | 04:42 | I think that's going to work.
| | 04:44 | And then go back into Point mode, and
get a Rectangular Selection tool again,
| | 04:47 | and now I can reshape.
| | 04:50 | What I'm doing is I'm going to get these up
to a point where they're just facing opposite
| | 04:53 | each other, and then we're
going to bridge them together.
| | 04:55 | So let's take this and move it over here, and
move that up here, and then move those points
| | 05:02 | around like that.
| | 05:05 | What I'm going for is a
very smooth flow of polygons.
| | 05:08 | I don't want to have things like that;
| | 05:10 | I want to have a nice even transition
going all the way around my model.
| | 05:16 | Next up, I can create the extrusions for the
serifs, so let's go back into Polygon mode.
| | 05:21 | Now, I can use my Rectangular Selection tool, and
draw a rectangle just around that part right there.
| | 05:25 | You'll notice that it only selected that one
polygon, and I'll repeat that process down here.
| | 05:31 | I'll hold down the Shift key; boom, and boom.
| | 05:34 | Now what I can do is just do an extrusion;
| | 05:36 | D on the keyboard, and bring that out, like
that, and they'll all be the same length.
| | 05:42 | Now I'm ready to do one last
extrusion down here towards the G.
| | 05:46 | If you hit the spacebar, it will take you
back to the Rectangular Selection tool.
| | 05:50 | I'll draw a rectangle around
that polygon right there.
| | 05:52 | Now, if you accidentally grab too many,
you can hold down the Control key, and deselect
| | 05:59 | ,
those polygons or just redraw your rectangle,
so that you only get that one polygon.
| | 06:04 | Now I'll hit D on the
keyboard to get my extrusion.
| | 06:07 | I'll extrude outward, and take
it right over to the edge.
| | 06:10 | Now, let's do that by moving the points around.
| | 06:14 | There's a point there.
| | 06:16 | I am going to take it right up to the edge
of that G, so it's ready to bridge that gap.
| | 06:21 | Before we go any further, let's do a File > Save
As, and we'll call this one Loose-shape-WORKING.
| | 06:26 | You notice I'm in the hyper-nurb modeling
folder in the Exercise Files on the Desktop.
| | 06:31 | Now, in case anything bad
happens, we can get back to that.
| | 06:36 | So that's the basic shape of our R.
| | 06:38 | So let's take a copy of this cube, and Control+drag
it down there, and let's call this one R, and
| | 06:44 | we'll call it pre bridge, so
it's ready to be bridged to the G.
| | 06:49 | Now we're ready to make our G.
| | 06:51 | So I'll start off by adding
another Cube to the scene.
| | 06:54 | Let's call this cube G, let's call this cube R,
and then let's add a Null object to the scene.
| | 07:00 | The reason is is that the HyperNURB only
smooths the first thing it encounters.
| | 07:03 | When I drag this null under here,
notice it breaks the HyperNURB.
| | 07:07 | I'll put my R under there, and then my G under here
as well, and now both objects are being smoothed.
| | 07:13 | Now I could take the G, and move
its starting point over here.
| | 07:17 | Let's get out of Point mode into Model mode,
and then adjust the size of the G starting
| | 07:23 | point on X, so it's in the right position.
| | 07:26 | Just move it over like that.
| | 07:28 | That's actually a pretty good height I think.
| | 07:31 | So now what I'm going to do is take that cube,
and hold down the Control key, and drag a
| | 07:35 | copy of it, and I'll call this one 001-G,
| | 07:38 | and I'll call this one 001-R.
| | 07:43 | Now, back on this G, I'll make
it editable; C on the keyboard,
| | 07:46 | and let's go into Point mode now, and we can
get our Knife tool, and start our cuts again.
| | 07:51 | So let's hit K on the keyboard, and we'll make
a cut right about there, and then I'll make
| | 07:56 | another cut right about there, and let's make one
more in the middle, just to kind of even things out.
| | 08:02 | You never want to have too long an edge on
an object, and so I'll make a cut right in
| | 08:06 | the middle to smooth that.
| | 08:08 | Let's take that down there, and
do this one right about here.
| | 08:13 | I'm going to go into Polygon mode, and draw a
rectangle around that polygon right there.
| | 08:17 | You can see, that's the polygon
associated with that part of that G.
| | 08:23 | And then I'll hit D on the
keyboard to bring up the Extrude tool.
| | 08:26 | So let's do a few extrudes, and
then push and pull those points.
| | 08:31 | I think that's enough for now.
| | 08:33 | So that was one, two, three, four extrusions.
| | 08:36 | Now I'm going to go back into Point mode,
and get my Rectangular Selection tool.
| | 08:40 | Now I can grab those points, and move them up
right to the base of where the R is going
| | 08:46 | to merge with the G. I'm going to take that one, and put
it right here; take this one, and move it up here.
| | 08:53 | Remember, once again, you're going for a very
smooth flow on polygons, so your goal is to
| | 08:58 | get the spacing even, and the actual
polygons themselves to be well aligned.
| | 09:06 | I'll take this one, and move it down;
take this one, and move it down as well.
| | 09:11 | You can see that it starts to round out that
corner right there. Take this one, and move
| | 09:15 | it down like this. There we go.
| | 09:18 | Let's go back to Polygon mode, and do an
extrusion; D on the keyboard. I'll extrude up.
| | 09:23 | That's going to be where the R joins with it.
| | 09:25 | If I hit the R on the keyboard, and click
anywhere outside this, I can rotate around, and then
| | 09:31 | I'll hit E to move it over. There we go.
| | 09:35 | And then I'm going to do another extrusion.
| | 09:38 | I'm going to rotate it around, and I'll D
through, and then I'll rotate it around.
| | 09:48 | You'll notice I'm lining up the top edge.
| | 09:51 | I'll come back and get the inner edge.
| | 09:55 | Now I can switch back into Point mode, and
go to my Rectangular Selection tool, and I
| | 09:59 | can start to rough in the inner edge.
| | 10:02 | So let's take that one, and move it in right here;
take that one, and move it down here just a bit.
| | 10:08 | I'm going to try to even things out.
| | 10:11 | And then I'm going to go into Polygon mode,
drag a rectangle around that one, hit D on
| | 10:17 | the keyboard, and just do an extrusion down.
| | 10:20 | And then I'll go back to Point mode,
Polygon Selection, and bring that over here.
| | 10:28 | Now I can go back to Polygon mode, and get
my serifs going. I'll grab that one, and
| | 10:33 | that one, and then hit D on the
keyboard, and do an extrude outward.
| | 10:37 | And don't worry about it if it
doesn't line up quite exactly.
| | 10:40 | This is an interpretation of that typeface.
And then I can go into the Scale tool, T on
| | 10:45 | the keyboard, and then pinch those down.
| | 10:49 | Once I've pinched those down, I can switch
back to the Move tool, and move them up so
| | 10:53 | that they're flat.
| | 10:55 | So there's my G, and I'll hold down the Control
key and make a copy of this one, and I'll call
| | 11:00 | this one G-pre bridge.
| | 11:04 | Let's save our working
file; Command+S or Control+S.
| | 11:07 | In the next movie, we're going to connect
these letters together, and use the Bridge
| | 11:11 | tool to close up the gaps on the model.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Connecting shapes and bridging gaps| 00:00 | The next step in the process of making these
letters is to merge the two letters together,
| | 00:05 | and then bridge and close
the gaps in the letterforms.
| | 00:09 | To do this, we need to take these two objects,
and convert them into a single polygon object.
| | 00:15 | CINEMA 4D does a great job of bridging objects, but
they have to be all together under a single polygon.
| | 00:22 | In the previous movie, I created copies of
the pre-bridged objects, so that I could go
| | 00:27 | back a step if I needed to.
| | 00:28 | So I'm going to take these two objects, and draw
a rectangle around them, and then right-click
| | 00:33 | on any one of the letters, and then
go to Connect Objects, and Delete.
| | 00:38 | Now, if you had not already made copies, then
you'd want to do just a regular Connect Objects,
| | 00:42 | but since I already made my copies ahead of
time, I can do a Connect Objects, and Delete.
| | 00:46 | What that's going to do is merge these two
objects into one, and delete the old versions.
| | 00:51 | So you can see now, it looks like nothing
has happened visually here, but you see in
| | 00:55 | the Object Manager, I have a single object
now called G.1, and I'll call this RG - merged.
| | 01:03 | Let's make a copy of it; hold down the Control
key, and drag it down here, and now go back
| | 01:08 | and click on it here, and you can
see we've got just one object now.
| | 01:10 | So that was the connection part of it.
Now we're ready to bridge our gaps,
| | 01:16 | so let's middle-mouse over to the Perspective
view, and in the Perspective view, you notice
| | 01:21 | that my objects are not the same width.
| | 01:23 | So what I want to do is to make the polygons on
the G the same width as the polygons on the R.
| | 01:31 | So let's go into Point mode, and grab the
polygons just on the R. So let's grab the
| | 01:36 | Rectangular Selection tool, make sure that
Only Select Visible Elements is unchecked,
| | 01:40 | and then let's select all the points, or
at least some of the points on the R.
| | 01:44 | Now, along the Z-axis we can
see that our Z Size is 53.295.
| | 01:51 | Let's make the math easy; I'm
going to change this to 55.
| | 01:53 | When I change that to 55, that
makes this distance here 55 units.
| | 01:59 | So now what we can do is
grab those points to the G.
| | 02:03 | And then go to the Selection
menu, and do a Select Connected.
| | 02:08 | That selects all of the points that are
connected to the ones that we had selected earlier.
| | 02:12 | Now I can make the Size on the Z-axis 55.
| | 02:17 | Now my two letters are exactly
the same size along the Z-axis.
| | 02:22 | That's going to make the
bridging much cleaner.
| | 02:25 | Zoom in on this area; we want
to go into Polygon mode now.
| | 02:28 | The first thing we should do before we bridge is to
delete the two polygons where the objects meet up.
| | 02:35 | So let's take the polygon that we have selected,
and if you don't already have that one selected
| | 02:39 | you can go to your Live Selection tool, and
click on that guy right there, and let's hold
| | 02:44 | down the Shift key, and click on that
polygon right there, and then delete them.
| | 02:47 | You can see that we've opened up a hole in our
object. Now we're ready to use the Bridge tool.
| | 02:52 | I like to use the Bridge tool in
Edge mode; I'll click on Edge mode.
| | 02:57 | And the way the Bridge tool works is we're
going to highlight from edge to edge to create
| | 03:01 | the polygons we need around the object.
| | 03:03 | So let's right-click, and go to Bridge, and
then the way this works is that we have to
| | 03:09 | click on an edge. And understanding where you're
looking at within the scene is really important.
| | 03:14 | So I want to make sure that I'm
looking at the correct edges.
| | 03:18 | We're going to start off by going from this
edge, and dragging across. You want to be very
| | 03:21 | careful. I don't want to go to that edge
there; I want to go to that edge right there.
| | 03:25 | When I let go, you can see that I've
created a polygon that spans that gap.
| | 03:30 | You could see on that side,
it's completely closed.
| | 03:33 | Now I can work my way around
the gap with the Bridge tool.
| | 03:37 | I can go here to here, and be
really careful about which one you do.
| | 03:42 | And if you accidentally bridge to the wrong
polygon, like I just did right there, just
| | 03:46 | hit Command+Z or Control+Z to get rid of that.
| | 03:49 | Let's go here to here. There we go, and
then go down here to here, and that's nice.
| | 03:59 | Let's go up here and repeat
the process to close up the R.
| | 04:02 | And I'm going to go into Polygon mode, and
then get my Selection tool. Grab that polygon,
| | 04:07 | and that polygon; I'll hit the Delete key.
| | 04:11 | You're probably asking a question right now;
well Rob, why don't you just use the Bridge
| | 04:14 | tool in Polygon mode?
| | 04:16 | Let me show you why.
| | 04:18 | I'll undo that delete, and if I go to the
Bridge tool, and I'll click the button, and bridge
| | 04:24 | it. That one worked just fine.
| | 04:27 | Sometimes, though, you'll get a crazy twisted polygon,
and it would have done that down here on the G for sure.
| | 04:33 | When you're connecting two objects that were
previously unconnected, then the Bridge tool
| | 04:37 | usually gives you a twisted polygon, so I'd
normally use it in Edge mode; that way I know
| | 04:41 | exactly what I'm creating.
| | 04:43 | The other thing you always want to double
check is if you zoom inside our object --
| | 04:47 | I'm going to go all the way inside; I want
to be able to look around inside my object,
| | 04:53 | and this is going to get a little
bit confusing here for a second.
| | 04:55 | Let's zoom up underneath, and
then go into it this way.
| | 04:59 | You want to be able to see that you're seeing
all the way through; that you don't have any
| | 05:02 | extra polygons in there, and it
looks like I'm pretty clean.
| | 05:04 | When you zoom inside, you should be able to
look down the letter R like a pipe, and I'll
| | 05:08 | orbit around this way to double-check that.
| | 05:12 | And you can see how I'm looking all the way
down my object, and I can see a little tunnel
| | 05:15 | down there, and I know that my join was clean.
| | 05:19 | The last thing I want to do in that connection
process is to make sure all my polygons are
| | 05:24 | facing the right direction.
| | 05:26 | If you remember from the module on polygon
modeling, polygons have something called a
| | 05:30 | normal axis that tells CINEMA 4D
what direction the polygon is facing,
| | 05:35 | and sometimes when you're using connection
tools like this, you can accidentally create
| | 05:38 | polygons that are facing the wrong direction, and
so I want to make sure that everything lines up.
| | 05:42 | So the first thing I'd like to do
is to make my Normals visible.
| | 05:46 | So I'm going to go to Perspective view
Options menu, and do a Configure All.
| | 05:50 | And then under the Display
options, I'm going to select Normals,
| | 05:53 | and that's going to show me the normals for
the polygons that I have selected. So I'll
| | 05:57 | hit Command+A or Control+A
to select everything,
| | 05:59 | and you can see that the normals that I
created down here are all facing the right
| | 06:03 | direction; they're all pointing
outward, just like all the other polygons.
| | 06:07 | Just to be safe, though, I'm going to right-click
in the interface, and do Align Normals, and
| | 06:12 | that's going to get anything that I might have
missed, and make sure that it's pointing the right way.
| | 06:17 | Now, nothing changed; that's because it looks
like I got everything facing the right way.
| | 06:22 | By connecting these two objects together,
when it comes time to really sculpt the bevels,
| | 06:26 | we're going to have a nice smooth transition
between each of the letters, especially in
| | 06:30 | this area here.
| | 06:32 | Connecting those objects up has really set
us up for success in our modeling process.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the shape with knife cuts| 00:00 | Now that we've got our shapes connected together,
and we've bridged the gaps, we can start to
| | 00:03 | refine the letterforms with the Knife tool.
| | 00:07 | One of the things we want to
take a look at is the edging.
| | 00:10 | We want to create a very clean transition
from the face of the letter to the side, and
| | 00:15 | right now it's a very round transition.
| | 00:17 | We want to give that a
nice chiseled kind of edge.
| | 00:20 | And eventually we're going to be creating a
chiseled bevel around the centers of each
| | 00:24 | of the letterforms, and so we need some
strategic knife cuts in order to do both those tasks.
| | 00:29 | So let's start off by refining the edges of the
letter; the transition from the face to the sides.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to go into Point mode, and I need
the Knife tool out, so let's right-click, and
| | 00:41 | get the Knife tool.
| | 00:44 | If your Knife tool is not set to Loop mode
already go ahead, and change it to Loop mode,
| | 00:47 | and uncheck the options.
| | 00:49 | As I highlight this edge, you're going to
see a line draw around your object, and this
| | 00:53 | is the loop of edges that travel
all the way around your object.
| | 00:57 | Now, you may be seeing at home an actual line;
I'm only seeing dots, and that's because of
| | 01:01 | a strange bug we're getting with
the screen recording software.
| | 01:04 | Just know that it's going to behave the same
way when I click it as it will for you at
| | 01:08 | home; we're just seeing a
slightly different representation.
| | 01:11 | So you should be seeing lines around your
model, and I'm seeing these dots, but it's going
| | 01:14 | to do just the same thing.
| | 01:17 | So what I want to do is to make two cuts;
one right about here, and watch how the shape
| | 01:22 | changes when I do that.
| | 01:25 | You can see how that gives me a nice firm
edge. Let's back out and see what that looks
| | 01:28 | like when I render; Command+R,
or Control+R on the PC.
| | 01:31 | Now, we're going to have to come back and get
the inside edge of the R here, but you can
| | 01:35 | see how we already have a nice
transition to the outer edge.
| | 01:39 | Let's hit A on the
keyboard to redraw the frame.
| | 01:41 | Let's go back in here, and I'm going to make
another cut right about here, and that makes
| | 01:47 | the transition even more firm.
| | 01:49 | Then let's go in to the center
of the R, and do the same thing.
| | 01:53 | I'm going to make the first cut really tight
right about there, and then the second cut,
| | 01:59 | I'll make right about there, and I've
ended up with the same sort of transition.
| | 02:04 | If I back out, and do a rendering, Command+R
or Control+R, you can see that I've got a really
| | 02:09 | nice transition on the faces.
| | 02:11 | Then on the backside, I don't want to have
this rounded back corner either, so I'm going
| | 02:15 | to do the same sort of thing out here.
| | 02:17 | So let's make our first cut right about
there, and I think that's pretty good.
| | 02:23 | Then let's go to the inside of the
R, and do the same thing in there.
| | 02:28 | That's going to give our shapes
a little bit more structure.
| | 02:32 | Now what we want to do is make a cut roughly
about here in the middle. You want to try
| | 02:36 | and avoid really long polygons like this.
| | 02:38 | See how there is a really long arch right
here? That's going to create, I think, some
| | 02:42 | unfavorable shapes when we go to render, so
I'm going to make a cut to break that up right
| | 02:46 | there, and that also cleans
up this transition here.
| | 02:50 | I'm going to make one more cut, I think, right
about here, and then another cut right about here.
| | 02:59 | One of the things I haven't done yet is I
haven't adjusted the size of the serifs on
| | 03:03 | the base of the R, and also
on the top of the R as well.
| | 03:07 | So let's go into Polygon mode, and deselect
all the polygons, and what I want to do is
| | 03:12 | get the polygons that are just
on this top edge right here.
| | 03:15 | Now, if you accidentally select too many of
them, you hold down the Control key, and deselect.
| | 03:22 | And then I want to do the same thing; let's
go down here, and orbit around, and I'm going
| | 03:27 | to hold down the Shift key now, and grab
those polygons there; Control key to deselect that
| | 03:31 | one. And let's orbit around again, and then
hold down the Shift key, and pan across that
| | 03:37 | way, and hold down the Control key to deselect.
| | 03:40 | Now, make sure that you don't have any
polygons selected on the back side.
| | 03:44 | Now, I've made a mistake here when I did my
selection, and I want to do it to illustrate
| | 03:48 | an important point, and that's
where the modeling axis is.
| | 03:51 | Now, when I grab polygons at the top of the
R, and the bottom of the R, you notice that
| | 03:56 | my modeling axis is here.
| | 03:58 | What I want to do is to scale down the
polygons on the ends of the serifs, the same way I
| | 04:03 | did on the G over here.
| | 04:05 | But if I use the Scale tool right now, hit T
on the keyboard, and I scale down, look what's
| | 04:09 | going to happen; that's not exactly
what I want, so let's undo that.
| | 04:13 | I'm going to go hit the spacebar to get back
to the Selection tool, so let's hold down
| | 04:18 | the Control key, and deselect
those polygons at the top.
| | 04:21 | Now we're left with just an axis for these
polygons at the bottom, and that's just what we need.
| | 04:26 | So hit T on the keyboard now, and
then scale those polygons down.
| | 04:30 | I'm dragging up and down to get them just
the right size; I think that's pretty good.
| | 04:36 | Let's compare them to the size
over here; yeah, that's pretty good.
| | 04:41 | Now we can take those, hit the E key to
bring up the Move tool, and just drag those down
| | 04:46 | until they're flat.
| | 04:47 | You want to do that in the Side view; it's
probably a better place to do that. Looks
| | 04:50 | like I guessed correctly right there.
| | 04:53 | Now let's repeat that
process for the ones at the top.
| | 04:57 | So I'll hit the spacebar to get back to the
Selection tool, and then select those polygons,
| | 05:02 | and hold down the Control key
to deselect; there we go.
| | 05:06 | Now hit T on the keyboard, scale that down,
looks about right, and then you can move it
| | 05:12 | back up again. Hit E on the keyboard to
move that back up into a straight line.
| | 05:17 | Now we can focus on the center cuts that
we'll need to create that internal beveling.
| | 05:22 | Before I do that, that's a pretty drastic change,
so I'm going to Control+drag a copy of that down
| | 05:26 | into the Hider, and name
that one pre center cuts.
| | 05:31 | Now I can go back to this
original, and make my center cuts.
| | 05:35 | Let's go into Point mode, and get the Knife
tool again, and let's switch back to Perspective
| | 05:40 | view, and start with making our center cuts.
| | 05:43 | So the first center cut that I want to
make is right down the middle of the R.
| | 05:47 | And so I'm going to eyeball
this one right about there.
| | 05:52 | The reason I'm eyeballing it is because I
want the type to feel a little bit organic,
| | 05:55 | and I don't want it to be super machine-made, so
eyeballing the center cut is going to be just fine.
| | 06:02 | So I'm going to go right
around the R that way.
| | 06:06 | What that gives me now is a ridge
that runs right down the center.
| | 06:10 | Let's do the same thing
down here on our serifs.
| | 06:14 | You might need to zoom it a bit to make sure
you get the middle. I think it's pretty good
| | 06:18 | right there, and now we're left
with a nice ridge for that.
| | 06:24 | Next one we want to make a cut for it right
here in the middle; that's going to be the
| | 06:26 | edge that joins the R and the G.
| | 06:29 | So I want to click that one right in the
middle about there; perfect. And now I can
| | 06:33 | go over to the G, and get one right here, and
then we'll do another one around the loop
| | 06:40 | this way; just get it right about there.
| | 06:45 | And then the last, but not least, is
going to be this one at the top here.
| | 06:49 | Let's zoom in on that little
tip, and then click right there.
| | 06:55 | Now, this is a long transition right here, so
let's make a cut right there to clean that
| | 07:00 | up; give us a little bit more control points.
| | 07:03 | I've missed this serif right here.
| | 07:05 | Let's get in here and click that one too, so
we have control for our serifs; there we go.
| | 07:10 | So you can see that with those strategic knife
cuts, I've got a nice center line running down
| | 07:15 | all my letterforms, and so the next step is
going to be to raise and refine that center line.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cleaning up the lines by moving points| 00:00 | The last step in the process of modeling these
letters, and giving them a good chiseled look
| | 00:05 | is going to be to create the chiseled edge
that runs through the center of the letters.
| | 00:09 | To do that, we need to do two things; we're
going to have to raise up these points that
| | 00:14 | run to the center line of our letters.
| | 00:16 | Now, I've got my Knife tool set to Loop mode right
now; that's what highlighting those areas here.
| | 00:21 | I'm going to switch my tool to the Selection
tool, and then I'm going to go to the Select
| | 00:25 | menu, and grab something
called a Path Selection.
| | 00:29 | Path Selection allows you to draw a path
around your object, and select points.
| | 00:34 | What I mean by that is, when I click and drag
around this object, you're going to see that
| | 00:39 | it's going to be making a path of selection
that I can drag around, and when I let go, I end
| | 00:44 | up with a selection of points around
my object based on the path that I drag.
| | 00:49 | You notice that I made a mistake there;
that's because I was too far out when I did that.
| | 00:52 | So let's undo that; Command+Z or Control+Z.
| | 00:53 | And let's frame up our letter, so that the
majority of the R is right there in frame,
| | 00:59 | and let's go and drag around, and all
the way out to the edge right there.
| | 01:03 | I'm going to stop at that center ridge.
| | 01:06 | Then I'll hold the Shift key down, and start
at this point; not the one all the way at
| | 01:10 | the top, but this one right here, and
then drag a selection down that way.
| | 01:14 | Now, when I need to navigate, I'll just hold
the 1 key down, and anytime I click again, I
| | 01:18 | want to make sure I hold the Shift
key down, so I'm adding to the selection.
| | 01:22 | Then I'll drag across here, and
add that selection right there.
| | 01:25 | Now I can go back and get this selection right to
the ridge, and then I can work my way around the G.
| | 01:33 | So let's start here, work our way
up that way, and then select again.
| | 01:39 | So you can see that I now have a ridge of
points running through the center of my object.
| | 01:46 | So what I want to do is to move those
points, and that's a pretty drastic change,
| | 01:50 | so what I'm going to do is make a copy of
this, so I'll hold down the Control key, and drag
| | 01:54 | a copy of this RG - merged down into the Hider, and
we'll call this RG - merged, pre center bevel.
| | 02:02 | And that pre center bevel tells me that I'm
right about to make this unflat. So let's
| | 02:08 | go to the RG - merged.
| | 02:10 | Now what we're going to do is switch to the
Move tool, hit E on the keyboard, and then
| | 02:14 | we'll take all of these points,
and on the Z-axis, drag them out.
| | 02:19 | That is about right, and I think
that is a good depth for my bevel.
| | 02:22 | Now, you're probably asking the question,
that doesn't really look like much of a bevel;
| | 02:26 | it's kind of rounded.
| | 02:27 | And if we hit Command+R or Control+R on the
keyboard, you'll see that in fact it is a bit round.
| | 02:32 | That's because we need to do one more
step. Let's hit A on the keyboard.
| | 02:36 | The step that we need to do is to bevel this
ridge of points. To do that, we're going to
| | 02:41 | have to go into Edge mode.
| | 02:42 | Now, if I hold down the Control key, and click
on Edge mode, that translates my selection
| | 02:47 | of points into a selection of edges.
| | 02:50 | So when I Control+Click on that, you'll see
that now I have those edges selected.
| | 02:54 | I'm getting another weird issue with the screen
redraw, because of the recording software that
| | 02:59 | I'm using; it's not displaying
my selected edges correctly.
| | 03:02 | But I can tell that they're
selected because they're invisible.
| | 03:04 | Now, you should be seeing your edges selected
visibly here with a highlight, and that's
| | 03:10 | what you'll see at home.
| | 03:11 | So just know that I actually have my edges
selected here, and everything should work just fine.
| | 03:17 | Now what I want to do is to right-click,
and get the Bevel tool.
| | 03:21 | The Bevel tool is going to allow us to
create a beveled edge based on those selections.
| | 03:26 | Let's zoom in on this area, so we can
see how thick our bevel is going to be.
| | 03:29 | This is very important; you want
to click away from your bevel.
| | 03:32 | So I'm going to click down here in the
gray area. Click and drag to the right.
| | 03:36 | Now, don't drag to the left, because you don't want to
create those overlaps there. I'm going to undo that.
| | 03:40 | What I'm going to do is click
and drag to the right just a bit.
| | 03:44 | And you can see, when I did that, look at
the center line that I've got on my cut.
| | 03:49 | Now let's go around and examine before we move on;
let's hit Command+R or Control+R on the keyboard.
| | 03:54 | You can see that we've made a couple
of errors in our selection for our edges.
| | 03:59 | If you look at the edge on the serif, hit
Command+R or Control+R on the keyboard, you
| | 04:04 | can see that we've got this high ridge here that
rounds off to nothing. It does it up here as well.
| | 04:09 | And the reason for that is that we needed
to select that edge there, along with that
| | 04:13 | edge, and that edge, before we did the bevels.
Let's undo that bevel, and then let's go back
| | 04:17 | into the selection tool, hit spacebar,
and we're in the Live Selection tool.
| | 04:22 | And I'll hold down the Shift key, and
I'll select just that edge right there.
| | 04:25 | Then I'll do the same thing on
these serifs there, and there.
| | 04:30 | Make sure you're getting just the right edge.
| | 04:32 | I'll grab that one, and then
select that edge right there.
| | 04:37 | Now let's drag up, and zoom in, and
grab just that edge right there.
| | 04:42 | Now we can do our beveling again.
| | 04:43 | Let's right-click, and go to the Bevel tool,
and then I'm going to click and drag once
| | 04:50 | to the right, and I'm
going to do it right here.
| | 04:51 | You can see now we're getting a
really nice transitional edge.
| | 04:56 | I think that's going to do it right there.
| | 04:58 | When we back out a little bit, you can see
that we've got a great looking ridge running
| | 05:03 | through the center of our letters.
| | 05:04 | Now, we've got a couple of little problem
spots right there, and let's click into the
| | 05:08 | front view to see what's causing
that. Let's also go into Point mode.
| | 05:11 | And if I zoom in, you can see that I've got
this jig right here; I want to have a straight
| | 05:16 | line running out to that edge.
| | 05:18 | So let's go into the Rectangular Selection
tool, grab this center point right here, and
| | 05:23 | then move that over, so that they line up.
| | 05:25 | I'm going to grab that one, and move
it over, so that it lines up as well.
| | 05:30 | That's going to clean that up nicely.
| | 05:32 | And there's another spot that I noticed, if
we do a rendering, Command+R or Control+R, we
| | 05:39 | might have a little bit
of an issue right there.
| | 05:41 | Let's hit A on the keyboard,
and yeah, we've got an issue.
| | 05:44 | Let's take that, and raise it up, so we
have a cleaner line running through here.
| | 05:50 | And then let's take this bridge of points,
and move them over, and take this bridge of
| | 05:56 | points, and move them over that way.
| | 05:59 | That's going to help to clean that up
just a little bit through there.
| | 06:02 | Let's hit Command+R or Control+R on the keyboard,
and you can see our type is looking fantastic.
| | 06:08 | So that's a really great overview of the
process that you'll go through for using HyperNURB
| | 06:12 | modeling techniques.
| | 06:13 | The most important thing
is to have a goal in mind.
| | 06:16 | I started with reference splines that I
created in Illustrator, but you could use sketches,
| | 06:20 | or pictures, or images.
| | 06:22 | The important thing is to have a reference,
so you know the shapes that you're creating.
| | 06:25 | It's very rare that I'll model something from
complete scratch when I'm HyperNURB modeling,
| | 06:29 | but it can be done.
| | 06:31 | It always go smoother, though,
when you have a reference.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. A New Modeling Workflow with the Sculpting ToolUnderstanding the sculpting workflow| 00:00 | The sculpting workflow is entirely new to
CINEMA 4D R14, and it really represents a new
| | 00:06 | idea in the way you create models.
| | 00:09 | When I first heard about it, I really
couldn't figure out a good use for sculpting in my
| | 00:13 | workflow; I have to be perfectly honest.
| | 00:15 | That's because I'm a motion graphics artist.
| | 00:16 | I don't do a lot of intense organic modeling,
where I'm having to create characters, or other
| | 00:21 | types of really complex organic shapes.
| | 00:23 | If that's the kind of work that you do,
then the Sculpting tool is absolutely critical.
| | 00:28 | What I'm going to do within this chapter is
try to put the Sculpting tool in context for
| | 00:31 | how I would normally work with it, and
that's as a motion graphics artist.
| | 00:36 | What I want to try to create over the course
of this chapter is the beaded weld on this
| | 00:41 | type object here.
| | 00:43 | Now, that may not seem like such a big
deal, but the interesting about this beaded
| | 00:47 | weld is that it is
entirely done with geometry.
| | 00:51 | It is not a texture.
| | 00:52 | That means that I can
push in really close on it.
| | 00:54 | So, for example, if this were the logo for
a movie, then I could zoom in on this type
| | 01:00 | all the way to full screen, and it would hold
up under intense scrutiny on a big screen.
| | 01:06 | That's going to be critical for type
workflows for creating movie titles, and that's kind
| | 01:10 | of how I wanted to approach this chapter.
| | 01:13 | So let's take a look at the geometry for this.
| | 01:15 | And this is that same scene file.
| | 01:17 | Let's zoom in on that.
| | 01:18 | I want you to see the actual geometry.
| | 01:20 | If you zoom in on that, you can see
that there are tons and tons of polygons.
| | 01:25 | I'm going to select my object, which is this
right here, and I'm going to go to the Display,
| | 01:30 | and change it to Gouraud Shading (Lines).
| | 01:32 | When I do that, you can now see all of the
geometry that was created with the Sculpt object.
| | 01:37 | Now, there is a lot of geometry here, and
this is not the kind of workflow you'd want to
| | 01:41 | use for a simple, coming up next on, you know,
whatever network you're working on.
| | 01:47 | The workflow is a bit time consuming, but
the results are worth it, especially for a
| | 01:51 | main title logo like this.
| | 01:54 | So how does the sculpting engine work?
| | 01:56 | The sculpting engine really
is part of a new workflow.
| | 01:59 | Let's make a new document here, and we'll
talk about some of the key sculpting tools.
| | 02:04 | I'm going to add a Cube to the scene.
| | 02:06 | Like a lot of things in the
modeling process, we start with a cube.
| | 02:08 | Now I'm going to switch my
Layout from Startup to Sculpting.
| | 02:13 | When I do that, I see this new sculpting
interface here, and on the right-hand side, we've got
| | 02:19 | the Sculpting Layers manager, and
then down below we have our attributes.
| | 02:23 | In this middle panel here, we've got the key
sculpting tools that are available to us.
| | 02:28 | Now, they're all grayed out.
| | 02:29 | The reason they're all grayed out is because my
object, the cube here, is not ready for sculpting.
| | 02:34 | You have to sculpt on objects
that are made out of polygons.
| | 02:36 | So what I need to do is go over to the Objects
manager, and then click on the Cube, and then
| | 02:42 | click the make object editable button.
| | 02:44 | Once I do that, I now see the
Subdivide command available to me.
| | 02:48 | Now, there's a little icon
here at the end of this.
| | 02:51 | If I click that, that presents me
with the Subdivide Sculpting Options.
| | 02:54 | I normally leave my Smoothness all the way
up to 100%, so I'll just cancel out of that,
| | 02:59 | and let's go back to the Sculpting Layers,
and talk about what's going to happen here.
| | 03:02 | When I click the Subdivide button, I'm
going to get a new sculpting layer.
| | 03:06 | So let's go ahead and click that now,
| | 03:08 | and you can see that my cube has now become a
little bit more rounded, and that's because
| | 03:13 | the Subdivide command begins the
process of smoothing out this model.
| | 03:18 | When you subdivide in the sculptor, it smooths the
object, and adds more detail; more polygons to the surface.
| | 03:25 | Each time I click this, you're going to see
the level go up, and it's going to add more
| | 03:29 | detail to the model, and you can see
that the Polygon Count is currently at six.
| | 03:32 | When you first click the Subdivide button,
it prepares the model for subdivision, but
| | 03:36 | it didn't really subdivide it.
| | 03:37 | It's still got six polygons,
just like a regular cube.
| | 03:39 | So let's go ahead and click that again.
| | 03:41 | You will see that the
Polygon Count went up to 24.
| | 03:43 | It's subdivided them four
times; four times six being 24.
| | 03:46 | The other thing you notice is that
the cube got more and more round.
| | 03:51 | Let's click this Subdivide
a couple more times.
| | 03:54 | One, two, in fact, let's take
it all the way up to Level 5.
| | 03:58 | One of the interesting gotchas with
the Sculpting tool -- and it got me --
| | 04:02 | when I first got to Sculpting tool, I immediately
subdivided an object, and then tried to use
| | 04:07 | one of the tools on it, but I
wasn't getting any results.
| | 04:11 | The reason I wasn't getting any results was
because I hadn't subdivided my object enough.
| | 04:15 | In fact, I'll undo.
| | 04:16 | I'll take the level back down to
Level 2, and I'm going to grab the Pull.
| | 04:23 | And when I go out on the object and try
pulling, you'll see that nothing's happened.
| | 04:26 | I'm clicking and dragging with the pull on the
surface of the object, and nothing happened at all.
| | 04:31 | Let's undo that.
| | 04:32 | The reason nothing happened is that I don't
have enough geometry in my object in order
| | 04:37 | to register that tool.
| | 04:39 | So let's take it back up to Level 5.
| | 04:40 | So let's go back on that object, and increase
the subdivision Level up to 5, and let's take
| | 04:50 | it up, in fact, to 6; one more level.
| | 04:53 | And you can't do that by clicking on it.
| | 04:55 | You have to click the Subdivide
command, that takes it up to 6.
| | 04:57 | Now that I've got that subdivision Level at 6,
let's zoom in a little bit on this now sphere.
| | 05:03 | And now I'll start to push and pull.
| | 05:05 | And you can see that when I click and drag
with the Pull tool, I'm now getting a response,
| | 05:09 | and it's in fact pulling the
geometry out of the surface.
| | 05:12 | If I orbit around, you can see that it's
actually moving those polygons around.
| | 05:17 | If I hold down the Control key with the Pull tool,
it will push inward, and I can keep pushing in.
| | 05:22 | I'm running over the same
spot a bunch of times;
| | 05:25 | you can see that it makes a
groove, and it gets deeper each time.
| | 05:28 | Now, over in the right-hand side,
we've got the Pull tool attributes.
| | 05:31 | Before we talk about that, though, I want
to make a special note about the layers.
| | 05:35 | Now, I just used the Pull tool on the base
object layer, and that's not normally the way
| | 05:40 | you want to do it.
| | 05:42 | One of the beauties of the Sculpting tool
is that it relies on the idea of layers in
| | 05:46 | order to give you a very flexible workflow.
| | 05:48 | So what you should do is, first, subdivide
your object into the base layer, and then create
| | 05:53 | a new layer on top, just
like you would in Photoshop.
| | 05:56 | So I'm going to undo those brush strokes; Command+Z
or Control+Z until I get back to my clean object.
| | 06:01 | And then I'm going to add
a new sculpting layer.
| | 06:04 | When I do that, I get a new sculpting layer called
Layer 1, and I can name this layer whatever I want.
| | 06:09 | For now, I'll just leave it called Layer 1.
| | 06:11 | And you want to make sure that you actually
have that sculpting layer active, highlighted
| | 06:15 | yellow, when you go to sculpt.
| | 06:18 | So now that I'm on the Pull tool, I can go
back, and push and pull on these polygons, and
| | 06:23 | move them around.
| | 06:24 | Now, the beauty of this
workflow is the flexibility.
| | 06:27 | If I don't like these strokes, I can
simply turn off that layer, and they're gone.
| | 06:32 | If I want to bring them back,
I'll turn the layer on.
| | 06:34 | I can also adjust the strength.
| | 06:35 | I can dial the strength for that layer down,
and reduce the intensity of those strokes.
| | 06:42 | You can see them getting more and more faint.
| | 06:43 | I'll bring that back up to a 100%.
| | 06:46 | It's really a lot like Photoshop.
| | 06:48 | It's almost like modeling in Photoshop,
and that's the beauty of the workflow.
| | 06:52 | So let's take a look at some
of the options for the tools.
| | 06:55 | Each of the tools has a Settings, and the Settings
is where you adjust the Size, and the Pressure,
| | 07:00 | and something called Steady Stroke.
| | 07:03 | And I'm going to undo that brush stroke
real quick, and adjust the Size of my brush.
| | 07:06 | And there's a great way to
interactively adjust the Size of your brush.
| | 07:10 | You see the yellow circle there; if I hold
down the middle mouse key, and drag to the
| | 07:14 | left or right, then I'm
increasing the Size of that brush.
| | 07:18 | If I let go of the middle mouse, click again, and
drag up and down, then I'm adjusting the Pressure.
| | 07:23 | So I'll increase the Pressure all the way up to
100%, and you can go beyond a 100% if you want.
| | 07:27 | I'll bring it up to around a 100%, and I'll
increase the Size of my brush a little bit more.
| | 07:32 | And now I can click and drag, and you
see I'm really pulling on that sphere.
| | 07:37 | If I hold down the Control key, I can push
those polygons back in again, and I've made this
| | 07:42 | really interesting indentation on my object.
| | 07:45 | The Steady Stroke option
is a really amazing thing.
| | 07:48 | It's something I kind of
wish we had in Photoshop.
| | 07:51 | What it allows you to do is to smooth out
your stroke, and I'll undo this recent stroke
| | 07:56 | again, and I'm going to make my
brush a little bit smaller.
| | 08:00 | The Steady Stroke is an option I
really wish we had in Photoshop.
| | 08:03 | I'm going to turn that on, and I'm going to
change my brush Size to 20, and bring this
| | 08:09 | back to the default value of 2.
| | 08:11 | Now, when I go out to paint on my object, you'll
see it doesn't really look much different.
| | 08:16 | I'm going to undo that for a second by
cranking the Steady Stroke value up; let's bring it
| | 08:20 | up to like 16 or so.
| | 08:22 | Now when I paint on my object, I
get this little line that drags out,
| | 08:25 | and that line smooths your brush
stroke out as you move along the object.
| | 08:29 | You can see that it's very hard for me
to make a crooked line on my object.
| | 08:34 | When the steady stroke is off, it really makes
it much easier to make a jittery line on the
| | 08:38 | surface of your object.
| | 08:39 | This is really crucial for when you're painting with
the Wacom tablet, or you've got a really small brush.
| | 08:44 | It's going to help really smooth
out the strokes you're making.
| | 08:47 | The Buildup relates to how much pressure is
added as you hold the mouse down over a stroke.
| | 08:53 | With the Buildup pressure set to 50 right now,
as I hold the mouse down, over the length
| | 08:57 | of the stroke, I get more
intense results from that brush.
| | 09:01 | If I bring this value down to 1, as I
paint, I'll get a less intense brush.
| | 09:07 | You can see I have to really do a lot of
strokes in the same spot by holding the mouse down
| | 09:13 | to get that result to happen.
| | 09:15 | So I'll leave the Buildup set to
a default value of 50 for now.
| | 09:18 | Next step is the Falloff, and the
Falloff controls the shape of the brush.
| | 09:22 | I'm going to make a new sculpting layer, and
I'll call this layer falloff, and I'll turn
| | 09:28 | off the layer below it.
| | 09:30 | I love being able to do that.
| | 09:32 | Now, you notice on the brush, as I'm on the
surface of the object now, there's a little
| | 09:36 | sort of curved line.
| | 09:37 | That curved line represents what this line
would look like if it were projected, and flipped
| | 09:43 | over on the other side.
| | 09:43 | It would make a bell curve.
| | 09:45 | If I take this line, and make it a shape like
this, I'm going to get a very different type
| | 09:50 | of brushstroke, and notice that the
line on the brush is changed here.
| | 09:54 | Let's bring this back up for a second.
| | 09:56 | I'll make two different brushstrokes; one
with the Falloff like that, and then let's
| | 10:01 | take the brushstroke, and adjust it down here,
and then I'll go in and do another brushstroke.
| | 10:06 | You can see that I haven't changed the brush
Size; the Falloff has changed, though, and
| | 10:10 | it gives me a much more pinched stroke.
| | 10:13 | Let's bring this back.
| | 10:14 | I'll just reset it actually.
| | 10:17 | The Stamp option is a really amazing thing.
| | 10:19 | It allows you to load in an image, and use that image
to stamp stuff onto the surface of your object.
| | 10:24 | Let's undo these two brush strokes; Command+Z
or Control+Z. And let's load in an image.
| | 10:28 | I have something in the Exercise Files
called chisel-marks, and I'll just select that.
| | 10:33 | These are just some strokes that I
made inside of Photoshop; hit Open.
| | 10:38 | Now, when I use my Stamp, you can see
I'm using that stroke on my object.
| | 10:46 | Now, let's make that much larger, and now when I
click, you'll see that I actually get those marks.
| | 10:53 | Now, one of the things that's interesting
about the strokes is that you have to have a lot
| | 10:57 | more geometry in order to
really make the Stamp useful.
| | 11:00 | And for the kinds of stuff that I've been
doing, I haven't found it super useful, but
| | 11:04 | when you get into really high polygon counts,
then the Stamp becomes incredibly useful.
| | 11:10 | Symmetry allows you to work on both sides
of an axis, and if I activate the Symmetry
| | 11:16 | for YZ, now that's going to activate the symmetry
across the YZ plane, which is this plane here.
| | 11:23 | So now you'll see that when I make a stroke
over here, it's going to make the same stroke
| | 11:27 | on both sides of the object across the plane.
| | 11:33 | The Stencil option is related to the Stamp
in that it allows you to overlay an image
| | 11:37 | on top of your object.
| | 11:38 | Now, I'm going to turn the Symmetry off, and go to
Stencil, and I'll load in those same chisel-marks.
| | 11:46 | And now these chisel-marks are projected over
the image, and when I use the brush, you can
| | 11:52 | see that it gets projected.
| | 11:55 | These lines line up.
| | 11:56 | I can actually scale that image as well.
| | 11:57 | Let's bring that image down in resolution.
| | 11:59 | Let's orbit to another side of my object,
and I'll paint over here. Let's undo that.
| | 12:05 | I'll just do a stroke right there.
| | 12:07 | You can see that I have
the same sort of issue.
| | 12:10 | The resolution of my object is not quite
enough to match the resolution of the image, and so
| | 12:15 | I'm getting a little bit of jag in this.
| | 12:16 | So if I turn this Use Stencil off, then you'll
get to see that these lumps in here are the
| | 12:21 | result of the polygon count in the sphere not being
high enough to account for the resolution of the image.
| | 12:28 | So if you're planning on using the Stencil, you want
to have a very high Polygon Count in your object.
| | 12:32 | The other tools that you see
here pretty much do what they say.
| | 12:36 | The Wax tool allows you to
kind of wax your object.
| | 12:40 | It's a way of smoothing, but it's almost
like a blur; not quite the same as Smoothing.
| | 12:46 | Smoothing, if you run that across the object,
really flattens the object out back to where it was.
| | 12:53 | It's almost a little bit like erasing.
| | 12:55 | The Erase tool does exactly that, though.
| | 12:57 | The Erase tool erases what you had done on
that sculpting layer, getting you back to the
| | 13:03 | original shape underneath.
| | 13:06 | The Repeat allows you to repeat a pattern across an
object, and let's load in that same chisel-mark.
| | 13:13 | Oops!
| | 13:15 | I accidentally loaded that into the Stencil.
| | 13:17 | I'm going to clear that out by clicking the Clear
button, and go back to the Settings for that.
| | 13:21 | What I really meant to do is click
the Load button under the Settings.
| | 13:24 | So let's go to the Settings, and click on the
Load button there, and you see we have all
| | 13:28 | these really interesting patterns here.
| | 13:30 | There's a great way to add rivets on
your object, and these are these screws.
| | 13:34 | Let's click on that Phillips screw, and now I
can click and start to paint rivets on there.
| | 13:41 | But once again, I don't have quite enough
resolution, so let's crank up the Pressure.
| | 13:46 | And then when I do that, you'll see
I get a little bit more definition.
| | 13:54 | But once again, you have to have a lot of
resolution in your object to make that useful.
| | 13:58 | So all you're really getting is a
little bit of an impression of that.
| | 14:01 | There's a lot more tools down here.
| | 14:02 | Rather than go through each of them, because
I think you get the gist of how they work,
| | 14:05 | I just want to talk about the ones that
I'm going to use in this next exercise.
| | 14:09 | The Inflate option is a very interesting tool.
| | 14:12 | What it does is it works an
object along its normals.
| | 14:18 | All of these are polygons, and each
polygon has an axis called the normal axis.
| | 14:21 | That's why the brush tends to jump around.
| | 14:23 | It's trying to align itself with the normals.
| | 14:25 | What the Inflate tool does is it moves the
polygons based on their normal axis, and
| | 14:30 | you'll see, as I pass it over this, it
tends to puff thing up a little bit.
| | 14:35 | If you run it over a piece of detail like
this, it tends to blow that detail up.
| | 14:40 | That's going to be very
useful in the next exercise.
| | 14:43 | The Knife tool also allows you to
make some cuts in your object.
| | 14:46 | If you hold down the Control key, you can do
really interesting pinches like that. You
| | 14:51 | can come back and slice things up.
| | 14:54 | It's really great for editing
scars and detail to your object.
| | 14:57 | The Pinch really allows you
to pinch detail together.
| | 15:02 | And if you run it on a smooth area, you really don't
get much of an effect until you really run it over.
| | 15:07 | You can see I was grabbing the
polygons, and pulling them together.
| | 15:10 | If I run it over an area like this, I'm
going to get a much more interesting result.
| | 15:14 | It's going to pinch that edge,
and create a much harder surface.
| | 15:18 | Down below, you've got masking options that allow
you to mask off sections of the sculpting layers.
| | 15:23 | And then you've got the Bake Sculpt command.
| | 15:25 | When I launch the Bake Sculpt command, the
window is a little bit too big for recording,
| | 15:29 | but what this allows you to do is to convert
the results of the sculpting layers into a
| | 15:34 | texture map, and that texture map
can be saved out and modified.
| | 15:37 | This is especially useful in game engine
workflows, and I don't really use it in my workflow, so
| | 15:42 | I'm going to leave this button alone for now,
because there's another way to prepare models
| | 15:46 | that involves the geometry
itself once you're done sculpting.
| | 15:50 | So that's a very quick overview of the
basic tools in the sculpting engine.
| | 15:54 | Over the next few movies, we're going to
create that type object that you saw earlier.
| | 15:57 | The next step is to prepare the geometry.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing geometry and subdividing objects| 00:00 | The first step in your sculpting process should
be to prepare the geometry that you're going
| | 00:04 | to use as your sculpting base.
| | 00:06 | Now, if you're just starting from a sphere,
then that's just going to be making a cube
| | 00:09 | editable, and subdividing it.
| | 00:11 | But if you're going to be sculpting on an
object, like we are in this movie, then you
| | 00:14 | have to do a few things with the geometry.
| | 00:16 | The needs of the sculpting engine are a bit
different than the needs of the HyperNURB
| | 00:20 | engine, and so we have to do some things to this
existing type example in order to make it work.
| | 00:26 | So the first thing we need to do is
get rid of the HyperNURB object.
| | 00:28 | We don't need that anymore.
| | 00:29 | So let's take that out of the
hierarchy, and then delete the HyperNURB.
| | 00:34 | And then we need to go into a Point mode,
and take a look at how the geometry is made.
| | 00:39 | If we zoom in on that, you can see that in
our original type example, I had created this
| | 00:43 | ridge around the center of the
type that gives us that hard cut.
| | 00:47 | This tight grouping of polygons around the
center ridgeline is going to be problematic
| | 00:51 | for the sculpting engine, so
we want to get rid of it.
| | 00:53 | So I'm going to use something called the
Weld tool to go and get rid of these edges.
| | 00:57 | So let's switch over to the Live Selection
tool, and I'm going to orbit around a bit, and
| | 01:02 | I'm going to focus on this point right here.
| | 01:04 | I'm going to start right here.
| | 01:05 | I'm going to grab all three of these points, and
I'm going to pan a selection around those three.
| | 01:10 | I'm going to right-click, and go to the
Weld tool, which is right down here.
| | 01:14 | When I do that, it's going to ask me to click,
and when I click with those points selected,
| | 01:20 | they're going to be
merged into a single point.
| | 01:23 | Now, I accidentally grabbed one
point too many. Let's undo that.
| | 01:26 | I don't want to grab this point right here.
| | 01:28 | Let's hit the spacebar to get
back to the Selection tool.
| | 01:30 | Hold down the Control key, and deselect that
point, and merge just those three points.
| | 01:35 | Let's right-click, and go to Weld, and
then click, and that merges them together.
| | 01:40 | Now I can work my way around the model, and
I'm going to use the spacebar to get back
| | 01:45 | and forth between the two tools. That's going
to allow me to move quickly through the model.
| | 01:48 | So I'll hit the spacebar, grab the
points, hit the spacebar, and click.
| | 01:52 | Then navigate to the next point.
| | 01:54 | Grab those three points, hit the spacebar, click;
spacebar, back, spacebar, click; Spacebar, click.
| | 02:05 | And I'm going to keep doing
this all the way around the face.
| | 02:12 | At the ends of each of these serifs, I'm going
to have to do that same three point arrangement.
| | 02:16 | I want to be careful which points I grab.
| | 02:18 | Undo, grab just those three points,
and then weld that together.
| | 02:24 | This process is going to take a little bit
time, so we'll cross dissolve to the point
| | 02:26 | where I've got all of these ridges corrected.
| | 02:30 | So here we've got all of the ridges corrected, and
I'm going to Control+drag a copy of that object down.
| | 02:35 | Let's put it under a new Null object, and
this null is going to be called Hider.
| | 02:42 | And I'll make both dots on that red by holding
on the Alt key, and clicking twice on there.
| | 02:47 | Now, back on the original object, the next step in
the process is going to be to add in some ridges.
| | 02:55 | The polygons around the ridgeline on the
face of the letters need to get split in order
| | 02:59 | to have a more favorable
distribution of polygons when I sculpt.
| | 03:02 | And so I'm going to use the Knife tool
in Loop mode in order to cut those.
| | 03:10 | Let's grab the Knife tool, and change its
Mode to Loop if it's not there already.
| | 03:15 | And I'll uncheck these options, if
they're not already unchecked for you.
| | 03:19 | And I'm going to zoom in here.
| | 03:20 | I want to grab this edge right
here; notice where my line is going.
| | 03:24 | Now, don't forget, I'm getting a screen
redraw issue here, and you should be seeing lines
| | 03:27 | traveling around your object instead of dots.
| | 03:30 | And so I'm going to click
once, and cut that edge.
| | 03:33 | And then I'm going to go down here, and do the same
thing on this inner edge, and I'll click once.
| | 03:39 | Boom.
| | 03:41 | Now, I'm getting a weirdness here, and the
reason I'm getting weirdness on this polygon here
| | 03:46 | is because when I thought I put my object
under the Hider, I actually just made it below
| | 03:50 | the Hider instead of making
it a child of the Hider.
| | 03:53 | So I'm going to correct that by
dragging it right up under here.
| | 03:55 | That was a little mistake I made.
| | 03:57 | Let's click back on the main object, and
then we're going to work out way around.
| | 04:02 | And basically what we want to do is to split
up all of these phases, so now I have to
| | 04:08 | loop this edge here; boom. And
I'll loop this edge here, boom.
| | 04:11 | Now, we're going to end up with a couple of
spots in the model, like this, and down here
| | 04:16 | where we've got a lot of polygons, but that's
going to be okay because of the good things
| | 04:20 | it's going to do for the rest of the model.
| | 04:23 | Now I want to cut this one right here, because
that's a -- a long polygon like this is not
| | 04:26 | good for the sculpting engine either.
| | 04:28 | So I'll cut that one, and I'll cut this one
right here as well, and then I'm going to cut
| | 04:35 | this one right here, and then I'll make two
cuts: one right here, and one right here.
| | 04:42 | And see how it splits up that edge?
| | 04:45 | Then I'm going to go on to the G, and make a cut
all the way around on that one right there.
| | 04:49 | It's going to make a cut
there; make a cut there.
| | 04:54 | Now I can repeat that process right here, and
right here, and I can break this one up too.
| | 05:02 | And then last, but not
least, is this one here.
| | 05:05 | I'm going to cut that one
there, and cut that one there.
| | 05:10 | I think that's pretty good.
| | 05:15 | Let's make another copy of the object.
| | 05:16 | Hold down the Control key, and drag it down,
and we'll call this one edge cuts; okay.
| | 05:23 | And then we'll go back to the original object.
| | 05:25 | Now, the last thing we need to do to prepare
this is to get rid of some of these guide
| | 05:29 | cuts, or actually just move them around a bit.
| | 05:31 | Normally, on a HyperNURB object, these edges
that we see here, the one I have highlighted
| | 05:36 | right now, would serve to create a
transition from the face to the sides.
| | 05:41 | And we don't really need that in our models.
| | 05:42 | So we're going to click on that. Oops!
| | 05:45 | I accidentally forgot that I have the Knife
tool selected when I made that cut. Let's
| | 05:48 | Command+Z or Control+Z to get rid of it.
| | 05:50 | And then we'll go back to the
Selection menu, and get the Loop Selection.
| | 05:54 | And with Loop Selection, now I can select
all the points, and when I click on that,
| | 05:59 | I've selected all the points
around the outside edge of the G.
| | 06:02 | Let's repeat that process for the
matching edge on the inside letter R.
| | 06:07 | Hold down the Shift key to add to the selection,
and now I'll switch to the Move tool; hit
| | 06:12 | E on the keyboard, and now I
can move that edge back.
| | 06:17 | You can see I'm moving that whole edge back
somewhere around the middle or so. Right about
| | 06:21 | there; about a third of the way back.
| | 06:24 | I won't worry about the outside
edge, because that's on the back.
| | 06:27 | What I'm going to do instead is move this
one back just a bit, and then grab this next
| | 06:31 | inside edge right here.
| | 06:32 | Let's go back to the Selection menu, and get
the Loop Selection. Then I'll grab this loop
| | 06:36 | right here, and then do the same
thing on the inside of the R.
| | 06:41 | Hold down the Shift key
to add to the selection.
| | 06:43 | Switch to the Move tool, E on the
keyboard, and then drag that back a little bit.
| | 06:48 | Now what we've got is a better
distribution of polygons on the object.
| | 06:51 | That's the last thing we needed to do to
prepare our model, and this arrangement of polygons
| | 06:55 | is going to give us a much more favorable
result when we go to subdivide in the sculpting engine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with sculpting layers| 00:00 | Now that we've got our geometry ready
for sculpting, we can begin the process.
| | 00:04 | Now, that process is a little bit time consuming,
so rather than do the entire piece of type,
| | 00:09 | I'm going to work on just a small area
up here in the upper left-hand corner.
| | 00:13 | In order to help you understand the process
that I went through, I have open in the
| | 00:17 | background under the Window menu a sculpting-layers
-EXAMPLE file, and this is in the Exercise Files.
| | 00:22 | And this is the finished type object, and we're
going to be actually creating these weld marks
| | 00:28 | on here, and these pinches, and stuff.
| | 00:30 | And so let's take a look at the
layer structure that I used.
| | 00:34 | Let's go to the Layers menu, and switch over to the
Sculpting layout if you're not already in there.
| | 00:38 | And here in the Sculpting layout, I can now
see my layers. Let's bring that down a bit.
| | 00:42 | And you can see I've labeled my
layers. I've got a base object.
| | 00:46 | These layers are named after
what I did in each of them.
| | 00:49 | So I started with the base object; that's the
very first step, and that's where you subdivide
| | 00:53 | your object, and make it ready for sculpting.
| | 00:55 | So let's go back to our START file, and let's
start off by saving this as a working file.
| | 01:01 | So let's go to the main File menu, and do a
Save As, and let's, in the Exercise Files, in
| | 01:07 | the sculpting subfolder, let's call
this one Sculpting-layers-WORKING.
| | 01:11 | Now, don't worry about the .c4d; CINEMA 4D
will automatically put that on there for you,
| | 01:18 | and I'll Save that.
| | 01:20 | Now we can get out of Point mode, and
let's go ahead and subdivide our object.
| | 01:25 | First of all go to the Objects manager, and
make sure that you actually have the correct
| | 01:29 | object selected. Then you can go back to the
Sculpting Layers, and click the Subdivide tool.
| | 01:33 | Now that starts the subdividing process, and
we want to click up to Level 5, so let's go
| | 01:37 | 0, there's Level 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
| | 01:45 | And that last one is going to
give us just the polygons we need.
| | 01:48 | So that's our base object.
| | 01:50 | Let's Command+S or Control+S to save the
file, and let's make a new sculpting layer.
| | 01:54 | Click that button once; let's go back to
the Window menu, and check our EXAMPLE file.
| | 01:58 | And in this first layer is where I did the pinching,
and I did the pinching just on the edges here.
| | 02:05 | So let's go back to the WORKING file, and we're
going to get the Pinch tool, and then rename
| | 02:13 | our layer. We'll call this one Pinching, and
now we're doing the pinching on the sides.
| | 02:19 | Now, under the Pinch tool, if you click on
the fx option, there's a random Pen Pressure
| | 02:23 | that's been set there already; I'm going to
hit Cancel. And that's going to create a really
| | 02:27 | nice behavior for the Pinch tool that makes
it very sort of uneven feeling, and that's
| | 02:31 | just what we want.
| | 02:31 | So let's go into the area that we're going
to focus on. Remember, I'm not going to do
| | 02:35 | the whole thing; I'm just going
to start in this area up here.
| | 02:37 | And let's go in and start to pinch.
| | 02:40 | And I want to focus on the
transition from the face to the sides.
| | 02:44 | And let's run the brush
down just a little bit.
| | 02:46 | You can see, as I go back and forth over
the edges here, it creates a nice transition.
| | 02:52 | Let's make the brush
just a little bit smaller.
| | 02:54 | Now I'm clicking -- oops; I middle mouse clicked,
and I forgot to drag. Let's middle mouse click
| | 02:58 | to get back to the Perspective view.
| | 03:00 | Middle mouse, and then drag to the left to
make the brush smaller, and let's get in just
| | 03:05 | in that area there.
| | 03:06 | You can see that it makes a
nice transition to the sides.
| | 03:10 | And one of the nice things about this process
is that it's very organic; you don't have
| | 03:14 | to get real precise with the tool.
| | 03:17 | I'm going to work my
way down the side there.
| | 03:21 | Let's make the brush a little bit
larger in this area. There we go.
| | 03:26 | You can see it's no real wrong answer
on this, except maybe to do too much.
| | 03:35 | But I think that will do nicely, and I'll grab that side
right there, undo that one; I missed a little bit.
| | 03:41 | I want to kind of go right down the edge to get
that transition, and grab that one. Oops!
| | 03:49 | Undo; I don't want to get the face yet.
| | 03:51 | I just want to focus on
the edges; there we go.
| | 03:56 | I think that's pretty good. Okay.
| | 04:03 | Let's save our working
file, Command+S or Control+S,
| | 04:06 | and then go back to the Window menu, and
go into the Sculpting-layers-EXAMPLE.
| | 04:10 | And the next step is the ridge pinch, and I've
got the same random Pen Pressure set there.
| | 04:15 | So let's go back now, and let's start
off by making a new sculpting layer.
| | 04:21 | Let's call this ridge pinching, and in the
ridge pinching layer we're going to focus
| | 04:27 | on just the ridges here.
| | 04:29 | And so let's zoom in on that area, and then
we'll run our brush over just that spot. Let's
| | 04:34 | make the brush a little bit
smaller, and then focus on that.
| | 04:38 | Oops, I missed that one a
little bit; there we go.
| | 04:43 | Bring the paint down that way a little bit.
| | 04:45 | And if you go a little crooked,
undo that, and you can get again.
| | 04:49 | Remember, you don't have to
be super precise with this.
| | 04:52 | I don't want to have two ridges, though, so
you want to be careful that you actually
| | 04:54 | hit the same spot twice. Make the
brush a little bit larger; there we go,
| | 05:00 | and that starts to really raise
that ridge up. There we go.
| | 05:08 | I'll work my way around there.
| | 05:11 | That's enough.
| | 05:12 | I'm not going to concentrate much on the rest
of the type, so I'll get just that little bit,
| | 05:17 | and run it down the edge there.
| | 05:19 | I think that's pretty good. Nice.
| | 05:23 | So that's a pretty good
job on the ridge pinching.
| | 05:26 | Let's save, Command+S or Control+S, and
go back and check the next layer.
| | 05:29 | So, in the example, the next thing I did was
to create a ridge with an inverted stamp.
| | 05:35 | So let's go back to the WORKING file, and the
Stamp option creates a pattern based on an
| | 05:42 | image on the surface of your object,
and there are some really cool Presets.
| | 05:46 | So let's click over on the Presets, and in
these Presets, I'm going to change the View
| | 05:50 | to a list, and then let's double-click in here,
and go into Sculpting, and then into Sculpt
| | 05:57 | Brush Presets, and let's go into Scratches.
| | 06:00 | Now, the scratch that I want to use for this
process is going to be, I think probably scratch_11
| | 06:05 | or scratch_12 will do nicely. So let's grab
11, and I'll double-click, and that takes us
| | 06:11 | into the Pull tool, and if we go back to our
Sculpting Layers, make sure that we're in
| | 06:15 | the right sculpting layer,
| | 06:16 | and then the Stamp option has been set; it's
loaded with a brush. Let's go out here, and
| | 06:20 | click once, and drag down.
| | 06:23 | If I drag left or right, that rotates it. I
want to drag once, and you can see that
| | 06:27 | when I do that, it creates an indention based
on that image that you saw on the preset.
| | 06:33 | Now, what I want to do is
to create an extrusion.
| | 06:36 | So I'll undo that, and I'll hold down the Control key,
and when I drag out, it's going to make an extrusion.
| | 06:43 | I think that's a pretty good size.
| | 06:46 | Let's go back now, and work our way
around the ridges with this tool.
| | 06:50 | So let's start over here, and kind
of work out an area on the ridge.
| | 06:57 | You notice that I'm kind of dragging along
with it, and I want to be careful about how
| | 07:01 | big I'm making these marks.
| | 07:06 | Now, I just made a mistake in all these brush
strokes; I forgot to hold down the Control key,
| | 07:10 | and you can see that I'm actually creating an
indention on my surface, and I don't want to do that.
| | 07:15 | So let's undo all those brushstrokes, Command+
Z or Control+Z, and this time I'm going to hold
| | 07:20 | down the Control key when I make my stroke.
| | 07:22 | So let's hold down the Control key, and I'm
dragging to the right each time I click, and that's
| | 07:28 | going to create that extrusion.
| | 07:33 | I can work my way around;
let's give it a little orbit.
| | 07:37 | You can see that it's creating those --
they look like little mountain ranges almost.
| | 07:42 | And let's go down here; yup, you've got to
remember to hold down the Control key, so that
| | 07:50 | you can actually invert that.
| | 07:57 | And I just remembered a very cool shortcut.
| | 07:59 | If we go to the Settings on the Pull tool --
let's raise that up here -- at the very bottom
| | 08:06 | is an Invert button.
| | 08:07 | This will save us from having
to hold down that Control key.
| | 08:09 | So let's click on the Invert button, and now by
default, the tool will create that extrusion,
| | 08:15 | and if you hold down the Control key it will
create the indention. So let's undo that last
| | 08:20 | stroke, and let's just do an extrusion around.
| | 08:23 | So now, with that Invert key
checked off, I can work a lot faster --
| | 08:29 | oops; undo that one -- without having to worry about
accidentally making too big of a mark. There we go.
| | 08:38 | I am going to add a little bit of
width to that bead. Yeah, not bad.
| | 08:49 | And so the idea is to make this little sort of
mountain range down your object; here we go.
| | 08:59 | I think that's going to do nicely. Let's get a
little bit of more width in this area; there we go.
| | 09:12 | I think that's pretty good. Let's save this;
Command+S or Control+S, and that's pretty good
| | 09:16 | for the ridge pinching.
| | 09:17 | Let's go back to our Window menu, and go back
to our EXAMPLE, and take a look at the layers
| | 09:21 | here; let's lower that down.
| | 09:23 | So that was our ridge with the inverted stamp.
Now we're ready for the Inflate brush, and
| | 09:27 | this is where it starts to look like a weld.
| | 09:29 | So let's go into the Window
menu, and go back to WORKING.
| | 09:32 | Let's make a new sculpting layer,
and let's call this one inflate.
| | 09:38 | Now, the Inflate tool moves polygons along
their normal, and so when I click and drag
| | 09:43 | with it, you'll see that's it's
going to bulge these things out.
| | 09:45 | Now, I don't want to bulge the whole
thing; I want to bulge a very small area.
| | 09:49 | And so let's make the brush nice and small;
about the same size as the ridge line itself,
| | 09:54 | and let's go through, and
start to drag through.
| | 09:59 | Now that's little bit too much Pressure, so
let's undo that. So let's make the Pressure
| | 10:03 | really low, and then come back
and drag across.
| | 10:07 | We'd rather do it multiple times
than have one that was too big.
| | 10:11 | So now you can just kind
of work your way down.
| | 10:14 | You can see it really starts to
look like that weld that we have.
| | 10:19 | If you stray outward a little bit, that's okay;
that's all just part of the marking process I think.
| | 10:30 | Let's get the end here a
little bit; there we go. Nice.
| | 10:33 | Now we come down here on the
front; nice. There we go.
| | 10:42 | Now I think it's really
starting to look like a weld.
| | 10:43 | There's one more step we have to do.
| | 10:44 | So let's save this, and go back to the Window
menu, and take a look at the layers example,
| | 10:50 | and the next thing is the smoothing.
| | 10:52 | Let's go back to our Window menu, and go to
the WORKING file, and here we're going to grab
| | 10:58 | this Smooth brush.
| | 10:59 | And the Smooth tool literally
does smooth out the layers.
| | 11:03 | You can see I just did that brushstroke
right there. I'll undo that.
| | 11:06 | Now, the first thing we should do
is make a new sculpting layer.
| | 11:10 | So let's click on make a new sculpting
layer, and let's call this one smoothing.
| | 11:15 | And let's use a very small brush; about the
same size as our bead, and a very low pressure,
| | 11:20 | because we don't want to smooth
too much, so about 5% ought to do.
| | 11:26 | Let's run that smoothing brush over the weld,
| | 11:29 | and what that does is it just kind of eliminates
a lot of the jagged edges; makes it feel a
| | 11:35 | little more organic.
| | 11:37 | Of course, you don't want to run it too much.
If you run it too much in the same spot, it
| | 11:44 | will really soften those things up too much,
so I'll undo that, and I want to have a little
| | 11:49 | bit of a jagged to them.
| | 11:52 | And what you do is just run that across, and
just run it down the front here too; very nice.
| | 12:09 | What you're left with is something that looks a lot
like a jagged weld on the surface of your type.
| | 12:13 | So let's review the layers that we did here.
| | 12:16 | That's one of the great things about the
sculpting engine is that you can start over, and turn
| | 12:20 | these things off and on at will.
| | 12:22 | And I'm going to work backward in time, so
that last layer was the smoothing. If I turn
| | 12:26 | that off, you can see it goes rough again.
| | 12:28 | And then we inflated it, and then we created
the ridge pinching, and then we created the
| | 12:33 | pinch on the sides, and
that is our base object.
| | 12:36 | So there's the base object, there's the sides
pinched, here's the ridge pinching, here's
| | 12:42 | the inflate, and there's the smoothing.
| | 12:45 | So you can see that's a pretty
decent formula for that beaded weld.
| | 12:48 | Now, keep in mind that the Sculpt tool is
way more powerful than what I'm using here.
| | 12:53 | What I tried to do in this example is show
you the kind of project that you might have
| | 12:56 | to do on a regular basis if
you're a motion graphics artist.
| | 12:58 | Now, if you're a hardcore modeler, and you're
having to create very intricate, organic objects,
| | 13:03 | I would definitely recommend spending a lot
more time getting to understand the layers,
| | 13:07 | and all of the other sculpting tools.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing objects for rendering| 00:00 | Once your model is all sculpted, and you're
happy with the result, the very last thing
| | 00:04 | you should do is prepare
the geometry for rendering.
| | 00:06 | Now, if you're working in a workflow where you
have to produce results that are low polygon
| | 00:11 | based, or you need to have an image map as a result,
then you're going to do something called baking.
| | 00:16 | Now, I'm not going to
cover that in this course.
| | 00:18 | For my workflow, I need to have the geometry,
and I want to focus on what the result of
| | 00:22 | the sculpting layers is.
| | 00:24 | Let's switch our Layout
back to the Standard Layout.
| | 00:27 | If you're already there,
you can stay in that Layout.
| | 00:30 | The result of all the sculpting
layers is stored in the sculpting tag.
| | 00:34 | If I select that tag, and delete it, my object
goes right back to where it was before the
| | 00:39 | sculpting layers were even done.
| | 00:40 | Let's undo that, and when I undo, it's going
to take a moment to put the tag back on.
| | 00:44 | There are two ways I can
handle this sculpting layer.
| | 00:47 | I could put the texture right on this object.
| | 00:50 | For example, I could make a new material, and
apply that material right to the merged object.
| | 00:55 | The thing I've noticed, though, is that it
takes a bit longer to render these objects when
| | 00:59 | they are stored like this.
| | 01:01 | There are two things we can do.
| | 01:02 | We can make the object editable by doing a
Current State to Object; that will commit
| | 01:06 | the layers to actual geometry.
| | 01:09 | Right now, all of the actual geometry is stored
inside the tag, and it has to pull the geometry
| | 01:14 | out of that tag, and display it to us onscreen
every time we want to do something with it.
| | 01:18 | The second thing we can
do is to freeze the tag.
| | 01:20 | So let's take a look at both ways.
| | 01:23 | If I know I'm not going to need the tag anymore,
and I just want to commit the geometry, then
| | 01:26 | I'm going to right-click on the
geometry, and do a Current State to Object.
| | 01:31 | What that does is that
commits the tag to the object.
| | 01:35 | You notice that it put it under this
null object. Let's hide the original.
| | 01:39 | Hold down the Option or Alt key, and then click
twice on the status dots here, and you can
| | 01:44 | see now here's our object.
| | 01:45 | And it's got a second material tag on it; let's
delete that, and take a look at the geometry.
| | 01:52 | If I select the object, not the null, and go
to Display, and change it to Gouraud Shading
| | 01:58 | (Lines), you can see it's a very dense model.
| | 02:01 | Zoom in on there.
| | 02:03 | But it's all super clean geometry.
| | 02:05 | It's all quadrangles.
| | 02:07 | It looks really, really nice.
| | 02:09 | So let's hide that result.
| | 02:11 | So that's one way you can do it.
| | 02:12 | Let's reveal the original object.
| | 02:14 | Now, the original object has the exact same
geometry, but this geometry is stored in the tag.
| | 02:19 | So what we can do for this one is click on
the Sculpt Tag, and there's a little button
| | 02:24 | called Freeze here.
| | 02:25 | What the Freeze button does is that it locks
the state of the object in memory, so that
| | 02:29 | it doesn't have to keep going back to the
tag, and pulling it out of the tag every time
| | 02:33 | you need to do something.
| | 02:35 | The nice thing about the Freeze button is it
allows you to interact with the geometry.
| | 02:38 | So, for example, you could put
deformers on this geometry.
| | 02:41 | If you don't click the Freeze button, then
the geometry won't respond to deformers.
| | 02:45 | So let's click that Freeze button, and you
can see the sculpt tag turns gray, and now
| | 02:51 | the object is ready to go.
| | 02:52 | And there's also the
Allow Deformations option.
| | 02:55 | I want to turn that on, so that in case I want to
put a bend deformer on this, I would be able to.
| | 03:03 | Let's change our Display back from Gouraud Shading
(Lines) back to Gouraud Shading, and that's it.
| | 03:08 | So that's the last step in the process for
creating models with the sculpting engine.
| | 03:12 | Hopefully this gives you a really good idea
of what the power of the Sculpting tool is.
| | 03:16 | Keep in mind that it's incredibly deep, and
we're really just scratching the surface here.
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