- [Athanasios] So what we're going to see today are a couple of projects. I've got a
double whammy, two presentations back to back. And for some reason Maxon managed to
convince me that that's in my best interest. I just bought into it. So you're
going to bear with me for a bit. We are going to see two breakdowns of two
different projects. The first one is an advert I did through a very talented
studio called Tantrum. I think the webpage is throwatantrum.tv, but it's guys in
Toronto where I live and they're right next to Mr. X, for anyone that knows one
of the biggest studios on this planet, does a lot of stuff. Anyway, I was lucky
enough to work with a group at Tantrum for a very small preroll for Ford. And let me
show it to you, it's very simple. So go to Noseman folder. And let's go to full
preroll in AB and let's so the deliverables. And let's open them. They
were already open and I'm going to maximize and loop. Oh, this is the other
Quicktime, okay. There you go. It's as simple as this. And on it's own, it's not
extremely exciting. But I'm going to tell you what I had to work with and you'll
understand exactly why it could be interesting. I did this for three cars.
And the third one somewhere around here. There you go. So you can see wheels
turning and spinning and suspension and all that. What I was given where three
Photoshop images in CMYK. So let me check them out, supplied images. My eyesight is
failing me, anything closer than three feet is terribly blurry.
People say it's my eyes. I think my hands are too short but that's another story. So
here are the vehicles. I'm going to open these up in Photoshop. There you go. So
this is a CMYK image of each and every one of these. And basically I had to work with
this because the client wanted this to be the final visual, flipped of course, they
wanted this to be the final resting position. Now, what happens in advertising
stays in advertising but that's another story. They manipulate the shape of a car
in two dimensions to get it to look good. That doesn't mean that it's perspectively
correct. And there's never information about it. For example, they can copy and
paste the wheel from the front to the back or the back to the front. And of course,
when they just scale it down, it's going to have all sorts of problems. So I had to
work around these things. So I had to isolate aspects of the car and basically
the process is to create a model of the car where I can re-project this image.
Then I need to correct the actual mesh to accommodate for the particular image, then
model the rims, model the tires and model, sort of, the rearview mirrors, the
mirrors. Then do everything else, like the animations and the rigging and so forth.
And lastly, I had to use the Take system in order to separate it so I can composite
it and post. The final project looks something like this. Noseman, there you
go. Ford preroll and let's go to Ford Mondeo, double click on this. Now there's
one thing I'm going to turn off. I think this goes fast enough, just need
to lower the textures because they were quite high resolution. So rewind. Now,
funny enough this is actually what I rendered as the final sequence. And
because the actual lateral motion of the car I did in After Effects, there's no
reason I should do it here because the timing can change and so forth. As much as
you can do in post, when it's simple stuff like this, do it in post. I mean, there's
no reason not to. And what I did, I rendered the background separately, the
shadow separately and other stuff, and the car separately and then I just composed it
in AfterEffects and added motion blur which hides all the issues. So let's take
a look at the car for a second. You can see that there are all sorts of tears and
so forth but nobody cars because that's part of what's not visible. From the
particular point of view, the car looks fantastic. I'm doing my view now until I
get back to the original, there you go. So from this point of view, you see no
problem whatsoever. So let's begin with the breakdown of this because it contains
a little bit of everything, a bit of texturing, projection, a lot of modeling.
All right, number one, the first thing I had to do was isolate the set. I'm going
to begin with the simple stuff. This was a photo of the set because they actually
shot a proper commercial and they were on a set and they wanted me to replicate this
but with a continuous background. So all I could take from this is this little
backdrop and it's very simple to actually isolate that in Cinema 4D. So what I'm
going to do is create a material, go to the "color channel" and add that... Where
are we? We're here and we got, not deliverables but the supplied images and
get the set. Now, one thing I do is I just go and make
my camera exactly the same resolution as the image when I'm doing simple stuff like
this. So that's 6016 x 4016. Fantastic. And I'm going to create a background
object and drop this on the background object. Fantastic. I'm going to get rid of
everything I don't need, things like grids and all sorts of things. Now, mind you
maybe I need the grid temporarily. A big part of what we do for these kind of
projects is eyeballing. There are tools in Cinema 4D to calibrate the camera based on
all sorts of rectangular objects and perspectives and stuff like that. But in
this case, you will see how fast eyeballing it is and you can't bother with
the tools sometimes. And that's one of the rules, if you can actually quickly do it.
And it's acceptable, just go and do it, don't try to be too scientific about it.
So, we can see...there you go. I mean, how tall is this? I don't know, two times a
human's height which means the horizon will be right there in the middle. Even if
I'm wrong, it doesn't make a difference. Number two, let's make a plane. Sorry, I'm
testing the thing. I'm trying to irritate Rick on the back. So, +Z and what I'm
going to do here is just move it left or right and drag this on this with Command
pressed so I can make a copy. So it's still frontal projection. Now you can see
it's a bit blurry. In order to clean that blurriness, we go to the material itself
and tell the editor that we need something a bit higher resolution and you can see
it's cleaned up now. So what I'm going to do in this case, I can even turn off the
background, I'm going to eyeball this so I get pretty close perspective.
You don't have to be too accurate. And if you have this on, you may be able to see,
there you go. There you go, that doesn't look that bad. And I can always make it a
bit, there you go. I cropped it. Now, if I want to fine tune my plane, all I have to
do is go to the plane, add... I'm not suppose to touch this but there you go,
one and one. So I got rid of all the subdivisions and we're going to make it
editable. And very simply select these points and bring them up, Eyeballing 101,
just move things around, there you go. Now, if I get rid of my background, I have
this isolated thing. Now watch this, this is the best way to break it. I'm going to
navigate my camera and I broke it. Did you know that Cinema 4D has two undo systems?
One for your actions and one for your view? So you can undo your camera moves if
you want to. So, the question is how do I move my camera without affecting the
actual projection of the image? What we have here is a frontal projection, a
frontal projection of an image is we are projecting from the camera we are viewing
the world. And what happens is that keystoning and perspective counteract each
other so we get a proper image. There is another way to do it. I'm going to click
on this button and create a camera for my scene. Now, the camera I created is
actually in the exact same position as the camera I'm viewing the world through. And
what you can do is change your materials projection to camera mapping. And of
course it's going to be all destroyed. Then you link the camera to the projection
and calculate this. So now, what we are doing here, watch this. What?
So someone has turned off the cameras here, gotcha. So we're using the camera as
the projector of the material. And this allows us to control the material using
the camera, okay? And if we want to move the object now, I can't do it directly
because it's going to lose that projection but if you make the camera a child of the
object, you can actually do whatever you want and the texture stays put. Now, a lot
of people can convert this to a UV map but sometimes, just sometimes, you may end up
having some little issues. And because I do not want to have any issues, I leave it
as is. One more camera in my scene makes no difference, I can turn off the
visibility and I'm good with that. So, this is a simple way of creating a
background from an image by eyeballing, the method of eyeballing. It's served
humans for about 2 million years. Is that a deer? No calculations, eyeballing. And
we're here. So, let's continue with a bit more complex stuff now. I have to refer to
my, I have a PowerPoint presentation but I actually have to write it and I don't want
to waste your time. So I'd rather go with my notes. So let's go and see what we have
here. They were kind enough from the company I worked for, they're from
Tantrum, to ask me if I would like some 3D models. And I was like, "Yeah, if you can
find 3D models of the car." And they went on Turbosquid and there's this fantastic
artist called Squire. I think he's Russian or something like that, maybe he's from
the Eastern part of Europe. I don't want to insult anyone but his models, which are
fantastic, the best cars you've ever seen outside the actual CAD data, the data that
the factories provide, is made from photos.
So I knew that I was going to run into some inconsistencies. So I knew that I was
going to have to play around with the model. And a big part of this presentation
is actually how we're going to fix that. So we went and we found the Turbosquid,
where is the Turbosquid? There you go, Turbosquid. And let's go and grab the
Escape since we're working on it. And there were 3D studio models, 3DS. And as
you all know, Cinema 4D opens around, I don't know, 15,000 different formats, no,
joking. All these, we can save and open all these formats. So this is the car
which is all nice and dandy. Now the problem is that there are a lot of issues
with the details. They just wanted that photo. They didn't want anything else,
anything different. So, I just need the shell of this object, of this model, just
the shell. So, number one and bring out your notebooks because tip time. You want
to get rid of all the materials in a scene. You open this eye, you open the
tags, you click on one of these materials and you double click on this and go edit,
delete. Okay, that's simple enough. And then you go "function," "remove
un-used materials." So no more materials in our scene. Close the eye. The next
thing is I want to get rid of certain elements I do not need, antennas and roof
racks and all that. So let me turn off my grid now and let's go and start selecting
things, Alt+H to get my car in the center. So, very quickly I'm going to show you
another little trick. If you go to the preferences which are right here,
preferences. I think it's in the interface, these two entries, "insert new
object at, " and "paste new object at." And it has a list: top, previous, next and
so forth. This is very handy when you want to do things like copy-paste, where the
object is going to be pasted in relation to a selected object in your object
manager. So, this is how we're going to do this. I'm going to set this to "child." So
that, for example, if I have a null and I select an object and I cut it and I select
this and paste it, it's going to paste it as a child, which means that if this is
hidden and I select all these, or random objects and cut them and paste them, I can
paste them in a hidden null. So very quickly, I can hide geometry I don't need.
So, what I'm going to do here is "expand object group," and delete the null. How
is that going to help me? With my selection tool and "only select visible
elements" to on, I'm going to select surfaces which I need to keep. I want to
keep them. So that's going to be the front of the car, a door, kind of the roof here
and something like this, this, this, just roughly, good. Go around, I want this,
good. So, I Command+X to cut them and I'm going to make a null and Command+V. So now
I'm going to start isolating all the parts I want to keep, get rid of everything else
and then start playing with the things I've got because this is actually
around...the whole thing is 140 elements. So it's quite a few things we don't need
here. So let's go select this and this, good. Do I need this? Yes, I do. I need
this, maybe. And this, cut, paste, close it. Let's go pick up this. It's all about
speed. This is the kind of stuff that you don't really need to think to do. I
generally don't think, but for people that do think, if you want to just do things
without having to think about them, this is the ideal time.
You can listen to music, you can discuss with other people, do a presentation while
you're looking around the car and pretend you're looking for something although you
can't do that because your brain is pretty much fried. Cut, paste. Half of what I say
is not true but that's not my problem. Okay, it seems that I've got all the large
surfaces or outer surfaces of the car. Certain parts which are going to leave
voids and holes, it's part of the process I'm going to show you anyway. So don't
really stress about it. Excellent. So I'm going to select this, go all the way down,
Alt+G it into a group, hide it and unhide the other thing. So now I have the outer
shell of the car which unless... Oh, we just need the lights in the back, go
quickly grab this and grab this. I think it's about symmetrical, cut, go here,
paste, close, hide that. There you go. So we have the outer shell of the car, not
bad. Nothing else. Good. Just check out the geometry, it's a bit triangulated and
all that. But I don't scare easy. There's an inner shell here which I'm going to get
rid of, excellent. There are a couple of other things we need to get rid of,
excellent. The reason I'm not going to a ready-made model, I've got this ready, is
that I really want you to see that the actual process of doing something like
this which people may think it takes hours and hours, it's not. It's minutes. Now,
what you tell your client is another story, okay because this is tough. I'm
sweating, maybe it's the hoodie but that's again another story. Okay, I think I'm in
a good state. So what I'm going to do, get rid of this,
select everything and right click and do a "connect objects" and delete. So we have a
unique mesh now that contains everything. Mind you, if we want to select a group of
polygons which are connected, so if I didn't want the front, all you have to do
is go to your move tool in your polygon mode and you Shift+double-click, there you
go. If you Shift+double-click actually, it's the same as selecting one polygon and
saying "select connected." So it's an easy way of going and saying, "Oh, I
Shift+double-click and Shift+double-click and adding all sorts of parts of the car."
This tip alone is worth your time. I think we can go and have some beer now and be
happy. Okay, you're not laughing much at my jokes. It's either that you do not have
a sense of humor or I don't have one. It goes both ways. Okay, so the challenge now
is to find a way to simplify this model so that I can manipulate it in the easiest
and most fluid possible way. Now watch where the problem is. The way I'm planning
on manipulating the model is by using the sculpting tools. The sculpting tools can
be used in...outside the context of sculpting. I'm not here. So if you right
click somewhere here, I'm trying to find the right click over here, you can say,
where are...my icon size large so I have a nice big menu. Excellent. So, what I can
do is get my pull brush and you have to middle click and drag upwards to change
the pressure, middle click and drag. You have to drag, though. Middle click and
drag sideways to change the size, or go and change the numbers. If I want to
manipulate this geometry because the parts are unconnected, I'm going to end up with
issues like those. So I need to create a unified shell of this car. So when I start
sculpting, all the polygons are going to move because I need this to have no holes.
We can do a projection, I don't want to see what's going on on the other side.
That's why I need to make it one mesh. I'm not going to do the whole process because
this took more than five minutes, more than five minutes, okay. So the number one
thing I want to do is clean this up a bit. If you select all your polygons and you
right click, I don't have right click. Okay, I know what's wrong. I need another
tool. So what I'm going to do is select all these. I had the pull tool selected.
I'm telling you, I'm tired, I can right click but I had the pull tool selected. I
should have another tool selected. So sorry for that, right click and go
"untriangulate." Click on this little gear button which will give you a menu, a
little pop up window which will get rid of "evaluate angle," press "okay." And
Cinema 4D does a great job of untriangulating surfaces. Mind you, the
reason this is so clean is that it was originally quads, okay? If you take an
arbitrary, triangulated model, it won't be that good. But as far as it goes for these
kinds of things for example, you're going to see some weird triangulation here but
the model now is nice and clean. Good. So how can I go and patch this up? There's
some very, very simple techniques we can use. One of them is in any component mode,
if you right click, you'll find something like "close polygon hole." What this does
is if you hover over an open part of your model where it finds boundary edges, it
will try to create a polygon that closes that hole.
But here, we don't actually have holes, we have rows. If you go inside, you will see
that we have rows, there you go. There's no closed surface. The closed surface
that's being selected now is the inner part of the light. So I need to do
something to get rid of a lot of this detail which I don't need, namely all the
little bevels that are folding in. I do not want that. That is actually giving me
a hard time. So, then we're going to go to the least known tool of Cinema 4D. Anyone
that has used the "Phong break selection," raise their hand. Yeah, smarty-pants. So
the "Phong break selection" is one of the most powerful selection tools you will
ever find in Cinema 4D. And basically what it does, it selects continuous polygons
that are within a threshold of an angle. Currently, when you select it by default,
it uses the Phong tag. But if you deselect the Phong tag and change the value, it
will select groups of polygons that are within a certain angle. And many times,
when something's designed, for example with bevels and stuff like that, you know
that those curves are going to have a sharper angle, whereas the rest of the
surface is going to have much more smooth angle. That way, you can go and start
selecting parts of this model rapidly, okay? And charge your client by the
minute. There you go. Oh, but I see people that may be clients in here. So what I'm
going to do, and the other thing about the specific tool, the Phong selection tag, it
actually has a great visual cue to show you which area complies to the specific
rule. So, already you don't need to go and search things. I feel that that angle kind
of works with me, work with me. So, let's go and do that. I'm going to
just click and then Shift+Click, Shift+Click, Shift+Click, Shift+Click. And
believe me when I tell you that all the inner surfaces are being excluded. So I'm
just Shift+Clicking and even if I make a huge mistake I do not care. I've been paid
the invoice anyways. Now, honestly, I mean is this easy or is it easy? And I'm not
going to do everything because I've got the model somewhere and time is precious.
Good. And this. Excellent. And all we have to do is, I'm not even going to do the
undercarriage in this case but you understand how this whole thing works. I
should have had the undercarriage as a separate object but I still have the
model, I can open it and copy it and paste it. I'm going to invert my selection and
I'm going to delete. Of course we have some points left around, select all, right
click and optimize. And we have a car that doesn't have the bevels anymore, okay?
That was a good four hours work. No, it wasn't. So now we're going to use another
tool because I need to go and do the following thing. Let me give you an
example here. Rule number one of presentations, when you have a screen in
front of you, you don't have to look there to see what you're doing. You can get
carried away sometimes. So what I'm going to do here, you can see that this is an
open gap, it goes all the way down and it goes all the way to the end of the car. I
want to create a kind of a hole, just an island. So I'm going to use a tool called
the bridge. In edge mode, I'm just going to go and do this and this actually
creates the edge of these two polygons. I've closed on side. I'm going to go here
and close this side. And actually, I'm going to sit around here for a second and
kind of create a few bridges so I can close off these surfaces. Now, accuracy is
not what we are trying to achieve here because this is going to be sculpted and
it's going to be further manipulated. Now that I've created those islands, going to
do this here as well and here as well. It's good if you go with equal size
polygons if you have a mild case of OCD like myself. My wife doesn't think so,
though. She thinks I'm messy. It's all lies, it's all lies. Okay, I've closed
these holes and what I want to do now is find a way to see where are these holes?
Right? Where are these holes? Aren't you wondering where these holes are? How do we
find them? Well, we go to the "mode" and we go to the modeling tool. Now, funny
enough, these reside in a place where it's difficult to find. It's difficult to find,
product manager of Maxon. So, there's a wonderful, wonderful, if you have Cinema
4D just go to the "Mesh Checking" and turn the button on. Then get drunk and watch
the show. Anyway, what we're looking for, the mesh check is a fantastic tool that
allows modelers to identify certain attributes of the mesh that may deem
problematic what you're trying to do, 3D printing requires water-tight measures and
all that. You can't have reverse polygons and although everything works fine inside
Cinema 4D, when you want to use that in other software that are not so good at
handling all these cases, you can go and isolate all those cases.
But, we're going to use this in a totally different way. I want to find the holes.
So I'm going to turn off everything except "boundary edges." So now, this gives me a
green color of everything which is a boundary edge. So my eye now can
concentrate on these areas. Had I done a good job of closing all these up, I would
just see the islands and then everything around but, nevertheless, if I go to my
"close polygon hole" now, I know where to hover my mouse in order to find these
areas. Now, when you are doing "close polygon hole," what it's created is a
huge polygon. And as you can see, it closed that hole, closed the hole. Now,
someone's turned on the N-gon lines. And you can go here and just wait until it
flashes and you click, wait until it flashes, and you click. See, I didn't
close the hole so it's selecting the whole thing. But once you've created those
little hole islands, you just go in and click and it closes the holes, click and
it closes the holes and you go on doing that until you patch all your model.
That's another six hours work. So, when you get to the point where your model has
all the holes patched, make sure that you triangulate your N-gons. So you select
these holes, you right-click and you say "triangulate" or remove N-gons, okay. Or
sometimes, you may even need to go to your knife tool, cut through it a couple of
times so that your triangles are a bit more symmetrical. So now I can right click
and remove N-gons and this looks slightly better. Let me open one of those models
where I actually spent many hours fixing. Open, and let's go to “Processed models
for NAB.” So boundary edges, this is the model and what I did after patching those
holes just because I forget to tell you, I actually went to my top view because we
know that most cars, at least the ones made in the Western hemisphere are
symmetrical. So what we need to do is cut down our car right in the middle. So you
find those points which belong to that part of the car and of course I forgot to
turn this off, so let me do this one more time. And cut this and go all the way
down. I'm not going to show you exactly how it's done. And we have a half a car.
Once my car is water-tight, and let's go and check our "mode," "modeling," turn
this on, turn everything off except for "boundary edges," this is the state where
I got it to just to show you that once you've done all your islands, you're going
to have a couple of holes left which you can't really see, just turn on that tool
and make sure you find them nice, green color. And sometimes it doesn't look like
a hole but it is. Nobody really cares. There you go. It's so easy to isolate them
especially if you don't have the polygon selected like I do. There you go. So
pretty much we've patched the whole car in 12 hours and 30 minutes. The next thing we
can do is put a symmetry object and just do that and that's actually the wrong
model. And we have a whole car. If for any reason these points are not
right in the center, that's not a terrible issue. We're just going to go and select
them and move them to the 0,0 point. I'm going to select them all and make sure
that the 0,0 point and that's that, no problem there. I'm not going to do it now
because I've got a ready made car. Let's talk about the re-projection now. So
modeling, are you happy with modeling? Good, applause, you love it. Come on,
don't be shy. I'm a vain person, you know. Thank you, that was depressing to say the
least. Okay, so let's go to our original model. We're going to go back to the 3DS
and all the hard work we put in here for hours, I'm going to delete it. Now, I
didn't do everything in the right order but that's not a problem. Luckily, Cinema
4D allows us to do certain things extremely fast. So, we won't have an issue
with that. So what I want to do is select my whole car, whatever, I deleted all the
unnecessary things. I've made it, I've connected it, excellent. And then I go to
my favorite tool, the "Axis center, " which actually takes a model and centers
the axis based on the geometry. Then I'm going to center my car. I have two cars
here. How did that happen? No problem. Select everything, deselect that. Good.
Did anyone realize what happened? Why did I make two cars? Interesting. So I have
this car, how does re-projection work? The answer is very similar to the plane. Only
we need to add a few more hours of work. So what I'm going to do here is first of
all, go to Photoshop, find our vehicle. I think it's this one. There you go, not
bad. Double-click. And what I'm going to do is make sure that
I have a background of a certain color. It's good to have a background because
when I see the edges of my car, I want to have a very good visual cue of if
something is part of the background, if it's a hole or not. If it's just white, if
it's a mask I won't be able to see anything, or if it's black or something.
So you put a very, very bright color here. The other thing you need to do is make
this RGB and don't merge, I don't need to merge. I'm going to make a very simplified
version of this. I don't even need the shadows. Everything else is fine, just do
that. And I'm going to save this. I can even crop it, depending on if you're going
to use other elements of it. It's better to have it cropped because everything else
is just visual noise, we don't need it. Now, one thing that you need to remember
is that at some point, I'm going to retouch and get rid of the mirrors because
the mirrors...you're going to see the problem now. They're going to look like
elephant ears when it's reprojected. So let's go to the desktop and let's create a
new folder, "Noseman rules, " not rollers, rules. And save the other car in the text
folder. Good, okay, whatever. Is it saved? Make sure it's saved. Then I'm going to go
here and save this as desktop, go to by "date modified," "Noseman rules," and
just save it in there. So, then again, I'm going to create a new material, put it in
the color channel, in the end you can put it in the luminance channel or something
like that. I'm putting it in the color channel because it's going to help me
compare the car details with the image details. So I can see where exactly
everything is. If it's in the luminance channel, I won't be able to see the actual
model undulations on that image. You're going to see the difference in a second.
Let's go here. Click on this button. Go to the desktop, "Noseman rules," "texture,"
load this in. Again, let me do my little thing here, my OCD thing, 4019 x 2482.
Next time I got like this, can someone read the numbers for me? There you go.
Interesting to say the least. Here's the car, okay. So what I'm going to do is put
a frontal projection, just like before. And make sure that number one, my editor
has a higher resolution so I have a bit of a better preview. You can see nice and
sharp. And number two, don't forget to flip the image, okay? It's imperative that
you flip your image if the image needs to be flipped. So, "flip canvas
horizontally," save this, wait for the blue line to disappear, go here, double
click, click on your color, click on this, reload image, flip car. See, I didn't have
to do it. Look at the color undulations here, we can actually see the wipers, we
can see the mirrors. If this was in the luminance channel, we wouldn't be able to
see those because we'd have a...you can't see them because luminance channel means
we don't have any color undulation. The color doesn't change. So that's why we do
it in the color channel. Okay, Eyeballing 101 when it comes to complex objects. And
that is, number one, find a common point. So you can see the bottom of the light and
that's the image at the bottom of the light. And you're like, "Okay, I got it."
If I rotate this, it will fit. It will fit in your dreams of course. So, we need to
make it bigger and you're going to try and do this and it just won't work. And the
reason is the camera lens. And you call your client and you say,
"What's the camera lens?" And they say, "What?" And you make a camera, you
activate. I'm just joking. And how can you find out what the focal length is? And
there's a rule of thumb, the wider the lens, the more perspective you have, okay?
So the smaller the number, those mm's, which means that anything that's closer to
you is going to look much bigger than anything that's further from you. And
using that rule, we're going to eyeball our focal length. And the people that
write algorithms to do that can take a holiday. So let's see what is bigger. Is
my model bigger? Or is my photo bigger? So what you have to do is just bring your car
to have a certain size here and you can see that obviously the model, I mean this
wheel is a wheel of a truck. And although the back seems to be in the right size,
this wheel is huge. That means we need a more zoom lens. And you go here and you
say, "Oh, how much can it be? Sixty?" And you do this and you scale, and you move
the common point and you bring the back here and try and find it. It's still too
big. Anyway, and you end up with the number 100 after at least six hours of
hard work. And what you will see with 100 is that funny enough... Let's bring it
here. Look at that wheel. I'm looking at the wheel arches.
I'm close enough, okay. That's what I want to do now, I want to be close enough.
Forget about the back wheel and all that. This is kind of getting there, kind of
getting there. And believe me, because this image has been probably skewed in
Photoshop, maybe not but I can't guarantee it. You cannot spend half a day hoping
that no one touched it in Photoshop and there's no way for you to measure it. You
need to go with hope. So you say, "I'm happy with this. Let's lock it down."
Select this, "camera mapping." Actually, that's cool. Send this to the client and
be like, "I was in a weird creative mood." And just turn this off and now a car. And
here's Bugs Bunny's ears. Now what happens with the mirrors is that because they're
protruding from the car, that means that we go around because of the projection
angle, you're going to see them on the car. So, all you have to do is just go to
Photoshop and Photoshop them out. I mean, the cars I used, the final ones, look like
this, Ford Preroll and we go to Ford, let's go the Escape, text and this is the
final image I projected on the final project, retouched a bit. I'm very good at
Photoshop as well so I can just do these in my sleep. Mask out these, get rid of
the bottom parts which I added as models, put some mask there, got rid of the top.
This car had a rack, so it was the only car that I actually had to add something
on top, it took me at least four hours. And then I used the model, the mirrors
from the actual 3DS model, unified the model and just reprojected a second image.
This was the image I used to reproject on the mirrors, that's why I haven't touched
anything else. So, project one image on the mirrors, one image on the car and
you're good to go. But what you see here is the basic idea. Of course, you're going
to ask me, how are you going to fix this? You're going to ask me. I knew you're
going to ask that. And because we have a static projection, if we change the model,
look what happens. Go to "plastic, " go to your sculpting tools. I love these tools.
I love these tools, man. Let's go and use the pull tool, good. And let's change
that. Now, I can go close and by pulling your geometry... Oh, this is not the one.
Sorry, sorry. This is the old model. No problem. Processed models for NAB, and let
me show you that. Where is my final thing? Okay, this is because... I'm going to show
you a nice little tip here. I think I'm missing a material here. There you go, I'm
missing a material. Did you know that you can go to your "texture manager" and you
select this and you say, "Okay, relink textures." And you're wondering, "But
where am I going to look?" If I knew where it was, it wouldn't be missing in the
first place. You just select one of the folders where you pretty much think it's
in there and you press open, it's going to search in all those folders and it's going
to find it. And Mary Ellen just went... Okay, it's the cool stuff. Okay, I need to
find that car so I can show you that sculpting thing.
Come on. Is this it? This is it. We did find it. Okay, this is not the bridge
action I did but you understand what's going on. I'm just going to make this
editable and just drop this here and show you what the repercussions are from the
sculpting. So, pull. Now when I start pulling this, you can see that the
geometry is moving. And I'm going to put it in the luminance channel, and now
you're going to see that it just works. So from a specific angle, from this angle
here, regardless of how much I messed with the geometry, what you're going to see is
a proper car. Now, you want to see how it looks like from another angle. Weee! Okay.
But if you combine a decent reprojection and you actually spend your 25 minutes and
then just find tune the sculpt because if you see how the actual cars look from the
final ones I did, you will see that they're very decent models. So let's see
that. Anyway, the sculpting just...so I don't forget, if you want to push it back
down, you press Command and it pushes it back down. Pull it up a bit, just go
around and bring the geometry so now I'm pushing the geometry. When you see the
color coming through, bring that over. Then I'm moving the texture on the model
by changing the geometry, okay? And it goes the opposite way, when I dig in,
geometry moves that way. And funny enough, from that particular angle you need, it's
going to look perfect. And then you're going to ask yourself,
"How much degree of freedom do I want? What did the clients say?" If the client
says, "Make it look at it like it's kind of skidding in." And you say, "Right." You
take your car, you have a couple of drinks, you go out, you skid your car, you
crash, you measure the distance, you calculate, 20 degrees. And you're like,
"You know something? It can hold. It can hold. When are you releasing me, officer?"
That's what you say after the crash. And let's open the Escape in it's final form.
So, it's Escape, Escape, good. And you can see, where is my camera? I can go to
cameras if I can't see it. And use camera as default. That's how my car looked after
I measure the 20 degrees. But my wife didn't because I parked it sideways. So
this is the car, the actual final car. It's perfect for what we need and a bit
more, always make it a bit better. It's perfect. So, just add your motion and the
particular scene is ready. So the projection stuff...do you understand the
concept? Okay. Make your frame as big as your pixel resolution of the image and put
it in frontal, eyeball it, play with your camera focal length to adjust the car. If
you get used to this, it will be a big part of your workflow if you want to put
objects into 3D scenes and so forth, you can use the tools. But some scenes are
made for you to do it by hand. The joy of rotating the camera and nailing it and
saying, "I'm better than an algorithm." So, no questions about this? Because now
we're going to move to the other step which is how do you model a rim that has
radial symmetry not divisible by two? Yes, please? So the question was, do I
manipulate the projection to fit the model? Or the model to fit the projection?
Or both sometimes? So, you manipulate the projection when you're doing the original
placement of the car using the frontal projection, that's the projection
manipulation, basically. Once you've nailed that, that's locked down and then
you find tune the position of the geometry to comply to the actual projected shape.
And the better job or... One thing I was working on, and I'm going to show you
retopology, a big thing. I didn't have to use these models. They were just there and
I thought, I'd use them and it kind of catered for the situation. You can
actually model your own low polygon car that will accommodate for the particular
case fairly easily using the polygon pen and so forth. And if you want to see a bit
of the polygon pen and how we do reprojections, by a raise of hands, who
wants to see retopology using the polygon pen on a car model and so forth? By raise
of hands. Raise your hand, Steph and Mary Ellen. All right, now we have... You know
how to do retopology. Okay, you don't. Good. Well, I'm just going to show you a
couple of tips. It's going to be a couple of minutes. So let's go back to our 3DS
model thing because the more options you have in order to do a project, the more
you can choose depending on what the requirements are. Some processes fit
different projects differently. So let's go and find our Turbosquid models
and get the Escape and load the 3DS. So this is going to be very, very quick
because it's relatively easy to do. And I'll do this for the third time in a row.
Unfold this, go delete, they get rid of all these, okay. I had to do that. I mean,
the music is too loud. So since we already have a model, sometimes, we'll do
something which is called retopologizing which means basically we use something
that's already there but it's too high resolution to be useful for what we are
doing. And we're actually going to model on it by using that underlying geometry.
And the ideal tool and one of the best in the industry, drum roll, is the "create
tool," "polygon pen." All you have to do is go to one of these modes here and...
Sorry, polygon mode, excellent. And with the polygon pen, we're going to put the
reproject result. So we're going to go in point mode actually. And I don't even
think we need to be in a mode, polygon pen. No we do need to be in a mode. When
you use your polygon pen to paint using points, with the reproject result, you can
see every time you press your point, the point actually goes and projects itself on
the geometry. So you don't need to be in any particular view, you just start
drawing points on your car and the polygon pen will actually stick it on the same
surface. And what I'm going to do now is because the polygon pen is extremely
smart, just like I am, I'm going to Command+Click and drag edges. And as I'm
dragging these edges, you will see that those points are, see that?
That is because where this point was, there was a hole. This ended up here
because there was a hole in the mesh over here. So just make sure that when you're
doing this, that your points don't end up in the void as you can see because
reprojection means it's firing a ray, as we call, a trajectory and hits the first
geometry it finds. If it's a hole, there is no geometry so it goes to the other
side. So just be prudent and once you get the hang of this, oh my. In a few minutes,
I mean hours, you'll be able to model a car that has enough geometry to
accommodate your projection needs but not enough to give you a headache. So you can
get way retopologizing this car in, I would say, half an hour, 45 minutes and
it's going to be very streamlined and you can keep the rearview mirrors if you think
as a present. So this is what you have to do, points mode and make sure that your
reproject result is on and everything else is an automated process, okay? Now, I'm
going to add ever so slightly to this because it's a bit cool what I'm going to
show you. I'm going to turn on my Gouraud Shading lines, and I'm going to do
something odd. I'm going to space this out. I'm going to just pull it out a bit.
I'm going to get rid of my rearview mirror. So, Shift+double click somewhere
here. It's not working. Oh, it did work. So I'm going to select these, make sure
I'm going to select "connected" and get rid of that. I don't need this so I'm just
getting rid of that. So select, "connected," get rid of that. Anyway,
we're in a good position. If I take this polygon, let's assume you
realize that, "Ah, rats. I wanted high resolution." No problem. I'm going to
subdivide this thing. So right click, "subdivide." Good and let's say we want
one more subdivision. That's the shape I want, that's what I want. And I didn't
want to go and paint all these one by one. But now, I wanted it to comply to the
shape of the car a bit better because the polygons are small, I'm going to get more
resolution. No problemo. You go and get what's called a "shrink wrap deformer"
which you put under the polygon. And you tell the shrink wrap that I want the
collision object, the target object, to be that. And if I turn this off, you will see
that it has been reprojected on the car. Did you know that Mary Ellen? No, you
didn't. I feel much better now, for some odd reason. So what you can do, once you
retopologize the car with very big polygons, you can actually subdivide it,
then use something called...let me undo because the projection with the shrink
wrap deformer is done on a normal basis. So a normal is a line that goes right
through the center of the polygon and it indicates the direction of the polygon.
So, if I was to... Remember, I just moved it out? What if I've retopologized the
whole car? So let me get rid of my rearview mirror one more time, there you
go. So, remember this little guy was here, okay. What if I want to move it away but
not in one direction? All you have to do is select your polygons and do a normal
move. This moves each polygon in the direction of it's own normal. So click and
drag. It's what the extrude tool does but without adding the geometry.
So if I had a car shell, and I wanted to bloat it so then I can subdivide it and
then shrink it down using the shrink wrap deformer, that's how I do it. I would not
move each polygon or do something like that. I will actually do a normal move. So
it will kind of grow bigger. So that's another way to do retopology using the
shrink wrap deformer and just using your polygon pen and it's an interesting avenue
to investigate. Good. Let's move to car rims. Now, the main problem with rims is
that nobody knows which ones they're going to use until the 11th hour. So, certainly
we're not going to use the rims that were on the 2015 model which was the one we
bought on TurboSquid. So we have to model the rims. Now, you can scour the internet
or the interweb and find all sorts of interesting photographs. And that's what
actually saves the day. And let me show you some references. It's not rules, it's
this one. There we go. So let's go to the downloaded references. And this is the one
I'm going to use, this was the final rim and this is the one I undistorted in
Photoshop and this is the best rim I found for this one, the best image which is
atrocious but it's good enough to work. And then I have different references, this
one, this one, this one, this one. What else? This one was very good to get the
volume, plus the fact that there are very small parts of the visuals so I can get
away with quite a lot of stuff. And then I found the manual. This is the other rim I
modeled which was much harder to do but we don't do hard today.
So let me show you how to approach modeling a rim like that. I am going to
open only one file and sorry for moving back and forth. So, download references. I
think it's number one, just so that I can tell you what I'm thinking of when I'm
making the rim. So, number one, try and find a face-on image of something so you
can get the basic idea of the shape. It's very tricky to understand what's going on
especially if you have radial shapes if you see them under an angle, believe me.
It took me several hours to figure this one out. So, what I'm going to do is go to
my front view and I'm going to load by going to the options configure, or
pressing Shift+V, go to the back and load that image. So, preroll, NAB presentation,
download references, rim. It's not that one of course. It's always the other one.
Good. So now I've loaded an image and you can load images in your orthographic
views, okay, but you already knew that. Good. Now, the good thing about this is I
can rotate it, I can change the transparency so it's nice and discreet.
And I can do things like scale it and move it. So I can center it, put it exactly
where I need it to be. Okay, now let's do something which has nothing to do with 3D,
it has to do with logic. This has a five point radial symmetry, okay? But they're
not all equal. So the designer thought he'd make our lives difficult. How do we
find out? How do we work with this? Well, one thing we do know it's a radial
symmetry, five part. Number two, if we take any fifth slice, that has symmetry