Model a cartoon hand - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Hello and welcome to another Cinema 4D Weekly. You know, sometimes in life you just need a hand. Bad jokes aside, what we're going to be covering today is how to model a cartoony hand like the hand you see in front of you right now. So we're going to be covering some modeling techniques, some box modeling, subdivision surface modeling techniques, short cut keys, and if you've never modeled before maybe this is going to be a great little intro to how you can get into modeling. It's not as hard as you think, so let's go ahead and dive right in. All right, so here we are in Cinema 4D. Let's go and start with a box. So most models just derive form a very humble cube, that's their beginnings, and what we're going to do is we're also going to start with a cube. And we're just going to make this cube a little bit wide on the size X, and we're just going to add a couple more segments to the segment's X. And you can't see any subdivisions right now, that's because we're not seeing our edges. So if we go to display, Gouraud shading lines, you can see there are our little segments there. And what we're going to do, rename the cube to hand, and we're going to make this editable by hitting the C key or coming over here and converting that parametric object to a polygonal object. All right, so this is basically your palm, and what I'm going to do is throw this inside of a subdivision surface. And what the subdivision surface is going to do if I make the hand a child of it, it's going to smooth everything out, okay? And this is really nice, it's much more organic looking, and we can basically model just using this subdivision surface and adding onto this base geometry we have here. Now another thing I like to do is go into display and going into isoparm so you can actually see what's going on with the smoothed out edges, okay? So if I go back to edge mode, you can see all those edges there. But what I'm going to do is go into polygon mode and select the bottom three polygons by holding the shift key down and just selecting these three polygons, and I'm going to extrude these to make my three fingers. This is going to be like a little Simpson's hand, so we're going to have four fingers. And what I'm going to do to bring up my modeling tools is hit the M key. And when you hit the M key you have all of these different other keys you can hit once you're in this model mode. So if you want to extrude, if you look all the way down, you go P, Q, R, S, T, we're going to go ahead and extrude our model. So I'm going to hit the T key and then I'm going to extrude. Now what you're going to see is this is going to basically add onto and extrude the polygons that are already created. Now this is fine, I'm just building up the palm, but what I want to do is basically extrude out three separate fingers. So when I clicked and dragged to extrude again, I'm going to go here and uncheck that preserve groups, and you'll see that now I have three nubs, basically, for my fingers. And if I move this down you can see there are my fingers. And if I move this all the way down you've got some very stretched out fingers. Now they look kind of odd at the end, but what we can do is actually up the subdivisions on our little extrude there to subdivide our little extrude there. Now, let's go ahead and I'm going to Command or Control + Z to undo that, and what I'm going to do instead is extrude out from here. And now you'll see we have all of those nice two added subdivisions there, so this is nice and evenly subdivided here. And now what we can do is go into edge mode, and we're going to use another menu by hitting the U key, and this is going to bring up all of your different modeling selection kind of short cut keys in other modeling commands. So if I go and look down and I see L for loop selection, I'm just going to hit L, and that will allow me to just select a loop of edge, and edge loop, okay? And what I can do is maybe go and hit my model tool and select those edges and move this out. And what I can do is go U, L, and select these edges and go to the model mode by hitting the E key and just kind of moving these edge loops out. I'm basically just giving form to my fingers, having them curl a little bit. So U, L again, selecting this edge, hitting the E key to get the move tool and just moving that out. And we'll do this for the others here as well. So U, L, end, move this forward hitting the E key. U, L, E key, U, L, and then E key for moving. So hopefully, get really good at modeling and efficient, and you want to just memorize all these different short cut keys and commands, okay? So another thing we can do is go into polygon mode, and what I can do is make these two fingers on either side a little bit shorter. So what I'm going to do for that is go U, L to get a polygon loop, and I'm just going to hold the shift key down to select all of these polygon loops. And what I can do is hit the T key to scale, and just scale these down, E key to move, and just move these on up, okay? And again I can go and get my edge tool, U, L, to grab my edge loop and select that in U, L. And I can even add to this by holding the shift key, get this bottom loop here. And then I can actually hit R to rotate and kind of bend those edges that way, okay? So really handy stuff, and there's our three fingers. Now we can keep adjusting this. You can see that if I go to my polygon mode I can select this bottom polygon and just rotate this, so it's not so distorted. Rotate that, and maybe move this down. You can keep tweaking this forever, but it's very handy to use these short cut keys, U, L, for loop selection, and then using R for rotation, E for move, and just moving these out. And if you ever want to deactivate your subdivision surface and see your underlying geometry, hit the Q key and that'll deactivate your subdivision surface. You'll see that the check marks turn to an X. If you want to activate it again just hit the Q key again. Okay, so you can see that we started from a lonely box, we extruded it out a bunch of times, put it in subdivision surface that smoothed out all those edges, and now we got the makings of a well, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hand, at least for now. And these edges are a little boxy, so what I'm going to do is select both of these edges, holding the shift key down to select both of them. And I'm going to right click, and this is going to bring up my context-sensitive menu. And what I can go is just go down to dissolve and I can dissolve and get rid of those edges that we had there, and I can go and adjust these edges, maybe move them up a little bit just to round that out. And now we don't have that, like, boxy edge any more, okay? So now what we can do, I can hit the zero key to bring up my rectangular selection, click and drag, and select all of these edges and maybe just move them up a little bit. And then what I can do is go to my polygon tool, and hit the E key to bring up my move tool and just move these polygons to give myself, or give my palm at least, a little bit more thickness. So it looks a little bit more organic, okay? So that's looking good, maybe move this polygon out, this polygon in. It's always important to always select one of these axis arrows, so you're going along a single axis. Now if you just started clicking and dragging, you're just going to really distort your model, so let me just Command, Control + Z to undo that. Now let's go ahead and make our thumb. So our thumb's going to be right about here. So if I hit M to bring up my modeling short cut keys and hit T for extrude, I'm just going to click and drag. And what I'm going to do is remove those subdivisions there, don't need them anymore, and there's a little nub for my thumb. And what I'm going to do is just hit the R key to bring out my rotation tool, and then E key to move this, so R to rotate, E to move, and I can even hit T to scale this down. And I am going to extrude this out again, so M, T to extrude, and then hit R to rotate and E to bring out my move tool. And I'm moving this along the Y Z plane by hovering over this little red little angle here and just moving it that way. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to extrude this one more time, so M, T, and shrink that down. And now we got a pretty fat thumb right now, so let's go and hit U, L, and bring our polygon loop selection. And we can hit T for scale and scale that down a little bit. We can also go to edge mode, go U, L, and grab that loop. Hit T for scale and scale that down there as well. And then we can also hit E for the move tool and kind of bend our thumb a little bit. So U, L for this edge loop up here, rotate, maybe move this up. Again hitting the E key would select this edge. Move this up, that's looking pretty good. We can move this there, rotate, U, L, and move this up. Another thing we can do if you wanted to move this loop up the mesh, instead of moving up where we're kind of distorting things. So if you make your edge selection here, you just want to move it up, if you hit the M key, and if you look you can see there's a slide tool. It's actually the letter O is the short cut key, so if you find that. So if I hit O this will allow me to slide that edge loop selection up and down the mesh, which is pretty cool. So that's a couple ways to move your edge loops. So I'll go and grab this edge loop, shrink this down. Maybe move this down like this. I think that's lookin' pretty good. Now, again , we can keep tweaking this, scaling, and all that good stuff, but I'm calling this pretty well done. I'm thinking that's really good. Now if we wanted to make the actual arm, we just select this polygon here, hit M, T, and just extrude and then extrude and extrude. And that's a really skinny wrist, but we can again go to edge mode, U, L for edge loop selection, scale that up. Same thing here, scale that up, and just right up on the line there. It's looking really good. Now once you get really proficient in this it's going to be muscle memory, second nature, just really blowin' through all these short cut keys, and man, modeling becomes just, you know, you don't even think about it. Your brain is working, your fingers are hitting short cut keys, and man, you don't even think about it any more. So there we go, we got our nice little cartoony hand using some box modeling techniques. And hopefully this gets you into modeling a little bit more. It's not that hard. Everything starts from a box and everything grows out from there. So practice those short cut keys, build your muscle memory, and have fun modeling. I'll see you in next week's video. So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn library. Visit my website, eyedesyn.com for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial. Join my Facebook page for daily MoGraph inspiration and keep up to date on all my latest MoGraph creations on Instagram. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you here again next week.