Yo, so, let's get started.
As you've already guessed from the lesson title, we're going to talk about 3D.
Man, I feel like Allen Carr.
The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr.
And it will be even easier if you start relaxed, with an open mind.
Leave your preconceptions behind.
You are about to embark on a fascinating journey of discovery.
Enjoy the show.
Thanks, Allen. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Of course, like many, I often put this topic off.
There were always those who threw me off, like this guy, for example.
Using only AE and, of course, titanic willpower and persistence,
this dude created a cool short film.
I won't lie, it's impressive.
I even tried to create something using his method.
You know, to speak with you more substantively.
Just three hours and... voila.
Of course, his video has undeniable advantages.
There's charisma, unique graphics.
You can see how cleverly he turned AE's shortcomings into strengths through stylization.
This is what I was blabbering about earlier.
And most importantly, he aimed high.
You've probably met people in the industry who created incredible arrays of work through sheer persistence and the absence of a personal life.
It's one of the ways to rack up likes and get noticed.
But we're talking about the easy way, and that is far from it.
Let's go. Let's launch our Cinema 4D.
After the gray AE, which reminds me of the Necropolis castle from Heroes of Might and Magic,
this interface is a rainbow puddle with unicorns.
By the way, I want to say right away that while you can get away with not updating AE at all and work with version 6.5,
it's better to install a newer C4D.
The guys there are adding a lot of interesting stuff.
A little bit of simple theory.
In Cinema 4D, and not only there, all objects are divided into parametric and polygonal.
Parametric objects, for example, all those you create in the primitives or splines menu,
have a number of simple settings that are responsible for the overall shape of the object:
size, width, height, or, say, rounding the edges.
But polygonal objects are created for more detailed editing.
That's right. Specifically, polygons, polygon vertices, and polygon edges.
The most basic thing is how we can create objects and how we can edit them.
Let's start with simple forms.
Let's go to our primitives and, for example, select a Tube.
In order to better understand what's happening,
let's switch to a different display mode.
Go to Display and select the second option from the top.
Okay.
All objects appear in the Object Manager, and we can see the settings for these objects in this window.
Parametric objects have a tab called Object.
Here we can change some basic settings.
You can take any object and play with these settings to understand how they affect the final shape of the object.
Well, the simplest ones are:
radius, outer, inner, the object's height,
and everything in that spirit.
We're more interested in these lines.
These are segments.
Segments are what connect the polygonal world and the parametric world.
Each parametric object has settings for the number of segments.
If we, for example, change the Rotation Segments, we will thereby affect the smoothness of our shape.
Thus, by changing the number of segments, we can, roughly speaking, turn our shape from one type of tube into something like a nut
by reducing the number of segments.
Let me stretch out our model and add more height segments.
Later, when we convert the model to polygons, we'll be able to edit these segments.
That's the whole trick: with parametric objects, we set the overall shape, while in polygonal mode, we have access to the small details that make up that shape.
By the way, almost every parametric object has a Fillet tab, which is responsible for rounding the edges.
Here we can, for example, increase or decrease the rounding radius and also refine our shape.
Or decrease the number of segments as well.
In this case, segments are the steps of the rounding.
The more segments, the smoother our edge will be.
Everything here is visual and clear.
I think it's all clear.
Essentially, this is the basic algorithm for setting up the initial shape of your model.
Naturally, to configure your model better, you can zoom in, zoom out, and rotate this model in space.
There are three main icons here that are responsible for all this.
The first icon, if we hold down the left mouse button, allows us to move it left, right, up, and down.
This icon is responsible for zooming in and out.
This icon is responsible for rotating our model in space.
What if you need to see how the model looks from above, and you're like, "Kriaa!"
There is, of course, a set of hotkeys, combinations of which allow you to not have to click these buttons.
I most often use something like Alt and hold down the cursor.
And in this way, I can rotate a little, rotate and change the viewing angle.
In addition to all this, we can also change the view mode.
If you went to school and had drafting classes and drew isometric models there...
Or maybe someone studied engineering at university and had descriptive geometry...
Then you should remember this kind of thing.
You can do the same thing in C4D.
We can use the mouse wheel.
For those who don't have a mouse wheel, you should immediately go and check if everything is okay with your Porsche.
Just kidding.
For those who don't have a mouse wheel, you can use this icon.
If we click it, we'll see that we have a display here, as I said before, of different views.
Well, while we have such a simple object in the scene, we don't need these views.
We just know now that such a possibility exists.
Let's switch back to our 3D space.
Let's finally convert our parametric object to a polygonal one.
We can do this by selecting this icon, clicking on it, or by pressing the 'C' key on the keyboard.
After that, we see that in our Object Manager, the icon for the tube has changed; it's become a triangle here.
"Polygon Object," the tooltip tells us.
And here, our polygon has lost those very parametric settings of the object.
But in return, other possibilities have become available to us.
Specifically, for now, we'll look at these three icons.
They are responsible for the fact that we can now select points, edges, and, directly, polygons.
This gives us new possibilities for editing the object.
If we just hold down the mouse cursor, we can select entire groups of polygons, or we can also select entire groups of points and, in principle, modify them somehow by dragging them in space, rotating them, or doing something else with them.
Naturally, for editing polygons, there are quite a lot of different tools.
Throughout the course, we will be looking into C4D and using them somehow.
Let me tell you about a couple of these tricks.
For example, I want to select these polygons and somehow move them out into space,
so that only this plane moves straight out in this direction.
If I just move the polygons now, the adjacent edges will also be pulled along,
and I'll get some kind of sarcophagus. I don't want that.
I can use a tool like Extrude.
If we right-click in some empty space... well, you can also right-click on the object...
a whole context menu will pop up.
There are a ton of different tools here, and throughout the course, we will be referring to them.
You can explore them on your own.
For example, I'll take the Extrude tool.
What does it do?
If I now click in some empty space and hold down the left mouse button, I can now move the polygons out in this way.
And there are plenty of such mini-tricks.
You can, for example, take and delete these polygons after that.
Rotate our model.
And there you have it, we've already created a map for the first Doom.
Or something along those lines.
Or, for example, there's a tool here called Knife.
A very cool thing. It always amused me.
You can use the knife to make additional cuts on your model, splitting your polygons into constituent parts.
It sticks to the cursor; you need to press Escape to make it stop doing that.
Well, and, for example, select... you can select the same Extrude tool again
and somehow modify your model even further.
Anyway, of course, we won't go through all these tools now, because we're talking about some basic principles of working in Cinema 4D.
Right now, the most important thing is for you to grasp the basic principle of creating and editing objects.
Alright, let's get rid of this object for now and talk a little more about other things, like splines.
We can create splines here.
There's also a Pen tool. I don't think I need to explain much about it.
You can use the Pen tool to draw lines like this.
To finish creating a spline with the Pen tool, you can either close the loop or press Escape.
It will stop at the point where you pressed Escape.
The Pen tool also has initial settings. You can, for example, select a linear type
and draw such angular curves with the pen.
I don't recommend drawing with the Pen tool in the 3D space because, if we pay attention, everything is tilted right now.
It's better to switch immediately to some view, for example, the Top view.
And draw your curves here in this way.
Well, if we switch back to the 3D display mode, we'll see that our spline lies on the plane, just as we drew it from above.
Besides being able to draw our own splines with the Pen tool, we can also choose parametric splines here.
For example, let's choose N-Side.
These splines also have an Object tab where we can adjust some values.
It's the same principle, but this is a two-dimensional object, so there are fewer settings.
A very cool thing that's here is that, for example, we can create more complex shapes from these splines.
For example, one spline will be in the shape of a polygon, and the other in the shape of a circle.
And if I now move our circle... we need to select the whole model and shift it like this.
Using Ctrl, I'll select both the circle and the N-Side, go to the spline settings, and, for example, choose to union our splines.
Then we'll see that our spline has been combined. Let me remove what we drew.
In this way, you can create more complex shapes.
You can explore the splines here yourself and see what you can do with them.
Actually, you can do a bunch of things with splines in Cinema 4D.
But we are interested in the modeling part.
Let's choose some parametric spline. For example, I'll take a Star.
And then these splines can be combined with modifiers from this next tab.
Let me tell you about a couple of them.
The most commonly used one is Extrude.
Let's select it.
And if we now move our spline into the Extrude object, we'll see that we've turned it from a 2D object into a 3D one.
The Extrude object also has its own settings.
In the Object tab, we can increase the extrusion amount of this spline.
And now, if we go to, for example, the settings of the spline itself, we can change the shape of the original star,
since it's parametric.
And, accordingly, create some kind of model
just by combining a spline and a tool like Extrude.
Besides that, of course, the Extrude object has other mini-settings, like you can set caps.
You can either turn them off completely and get a shape like this for cookies,
or you can, for example, turn on Fillet Cap
and add edges to our model.
These caps have their own settings.
Here we can, for example, increase the radius of the edge, increase the number of steps, make the edge smoother, and so on.
So, this is another path for modeling in Cinema 4D.
You can also use your own splines from Illustrator and transfer them to C4D and make them 3D.
Let me use one more modifier.
I'll create a Circle spline and duplicate it.
In Cinema 4D, copies are made like this: you can hold down Ctrl on the keyboard
and just drag your object in one of the planes, release the mouse,
and it will automatically create a copy in the object window.
Or you can do it right in the object window if you don't want to drag it anywhere but create a copy in the same place.
Just hold down Ctrl again and drag your object that you want to duplicate until this arrow appears.
And again, you release the mouse button.
And, accordingly, we have another copy.
Let's keep two copies, and using these two copies as an example, I'll show you how the Loft modifier works.
If we drop it in, select our two objects, and move them into the Loft,
we'll see that the Loft creates geometry, roughly speaking, between our two copies.
We can duplicate the geometry again in this way and change the settings of this geometry.
Duplicate it again.
You can experiment and add some other shape to the Loft.
Basically, this is another way to create models.
We'll talk about it in more detail a bit later.
I think that at this stage, this knowledge will be enough for us to start moving forward.
Now we can safely move on to the next lesson and start creating some simple shapes using only these techniques.
Actually, the simplest way to start learning anything is to just start doing something in that direction.
Or take an order for a 3D video from the Armenian mafia, after getting an advance payment and promising to do everything in the best possible way.
But we will use a slightly more humane method.
Let's go.