Complex objects are made of pieces and shapes

So my dad used to tell me a joke, and I never found it funny. So I'm going to call this an old saying. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Now the same is true for modeling real world objects using CINEMA 4D. Take a look at the project that we're going to be working on through most of this course. It's an antique stereoscopic viewer. Sort of like magic eye from the Victorian era. This project is especially well suited to display modeling tools in CINEMA 4D, because of its simple manufacturing processes.

But even with a simple manufacturing process, it still seems like a fairly complex object when you just look at it. So let's go ahead and take another look at this object in a different scene. I'm going to tap the V key on my keyboard, and pull open another open project. What I've done here is randomly assigned colors to all of the elements in my scene. And this allows you to better see the different components that make up our model. We've got a few major components. We've got our card holder here, which we can pull away. And that card holder is made up of sub-pieces.

It's got the card inside of it, and it also has this wire frame that's holding it together. Now this wire frame is also inside of what's called the symmetry object, which is giving us additional complexity. So that two wires is actually made up of one wire. And our base here is made up of a rectangle, which is actually created out of a rectangle that had another rectangle cut out of it. If we look at the other side of our object here, we've got the mask that holds our face, and this piece which I'm going to call the nose guard.

But it actually separates the, the two pictures for the viewer's eye. It's just a couple of simple cubes which you can pull apart. The base here is another simple piece, a simple extrusion, and it's got a hole in there which was made from a simple circle. Here we've got a metal piece that was just bent into shape with something called a deformer. And as we look at the mask here, we also see that it is made up of a number of simple shapes. Got the front part. And as we look inside of it, each of these different elements is just another simple piece. Looking at each of these, they don't seem that difficult to make.

And that's the key thing to remember. If a modeling task seems too daunting, you go back to that old joke, one bite at a time. What are the major components of this object? What are the major parts? And inside of those parts, what are the pieces? Just start at the top and work your way through.