Victorian House Set Extension with Projection Man: Modeling the House: Part 01

Photo of Joseph Herman

Instructor Joseph Herman

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  • Duration: 14:56
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Now that the camera is calibrated, we start building a model of the house with the polygonal modeling tools in Cinema 4D.

Now that the camera is calibrated, you will start building a model of the house with the polygonal modeling tools in Cinema 4D. You'll learn how to extrude polygons to form the basic shape of the house which we will eventually project upon.

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Transcript

- In this video I'll start building the low resolution geometry of the house that will be used for our projection. What I'm going to do is I'm gonna open up a new view panel here. Now, this will give me another window onto our scene. And what I can do is, I can do some of the manipulations and modeling and modifications in this window while I keep an eye on what it looks like in the other window. So, I'm gonna pop that up so that the bottom of it is sitting right on the floor. Since the cube is 200 centimeters width, height and depth I can change the X position to negative 100, the Y position to 100 and the Z position to 100 and that will align the cube up so that its right edge is exactly at the origin. Now what I'm going to do is make that an editable object and remove those points, so we just have a little polygon facing right there with its right edge aligned to the center of the world. Okay, now I'll switch to the line tool and I'll drag up that line, I can work in the main viewport and if I hold down the Control key while I drag the edge up, then I'll extrude that edge and create another polygon. So we've done that, I'm gonna move this left side to the left a bit, then I'll choose the knife tool and I'll go ahead and uncheck restrict a selection and choose loop mode and I'll make a cut right around here. Okay now I've got some more polygons to work with. I'm going to switch my view to lines mode so this way I can see the lines in the geometry while still seeing the image behind them. I'll also use the world coordinate system for transformations. Extrude out that little edge. Now I'll switch to the points mode and I'll start fitting these polygons to the shape of the house. Now the question that comes up when you're doing this is how exact and how perfect do you want to be in the representation of this house with your model? And that's a very good question and it really depends on your own feeling about it. This is a very short shot, it's only going to be a few seconds long and basically you're not really gonna see it for that long so if it was a scene that was going to be used very extensively in a lot of shots, you might wanna build out every particular piece of geometry exactly as in the way that the house is built. However, you're not really trying to create a new model here you trying to do an illusion. If you're gonna get so perfect on the model you might as well just go ahead and create a model and texture map it and light it and then you'll have a model of the house. So, the thing is, is that you wanna try to do these projections shots quickly so this way you can move on to other things, and that's the whole beauty of it. So we're going to create a form of this house that is going to mimic the house pretty well but it's not going to be exactly the same geometry. So as I said, it's up to you how much you want to recreate the house. Right now I'm just holding down the Control key and extruding out polygons in the shape of the house. So I'm going to move this one down to the bottom and move it back a little bit on the Z-axis. Let's switch to the edge mode here and go ahead and make a cut with the knife tool right about there, on the roof. And we'll make another cut right here, as well as one right about here. Once again, I'm using this other display window to work in and it makes it a little bit easier in some ways. I can go ahead and work in the main viewport window or I can work in this window. So I've gone ahead and I've extruded the shapes of this little rooftop thing. I'll move this up a little bit more to about here, then I'm going to switch to scale tool and I'm going to scale that in and taper it in because that's what the shape does. I'll go ahead and move it along the X-axis and come up and get that shape to be pretty much what it should be. Then I'll select this edge, hold down the Control key to extrude, and extrude the shape into the house like that. Now I'm going to make a cylinder and the cylinder is going to be used for that corner of the house because there is a shape of the house where that looks like cylindrical. So we're going to move this cylinder somewhere right on that edge, right about there, and I'm going to switch to the other view panel to Gouraud Shading with Lines so I can see what the internal structure of the shapes are, there's our cylinder. And now what I'm going to do is uncheck caps, I don't want to use caps here, and we'll go ahead and we'll scale this out a little bit bigger so that way we can get it about the size of that thing and move it up. So there I've moved it up a little bit. Now I'm going to choose the rectangle selection tool, uncheck only select visible elements, and select those points and move them up a bit to right around here. So I'm going to double-click with the edge mode on that edge and I'm going to extrude them up, holding down the Control key again, little bit about that much, switch to the scale tool and scale that out a bit. So I'm just keeping an eye on what the house is and using that as a guide while I'm building out this geometry which we're going to project on. Once again, let me stress that we're going to be projecting a photo onto this geometry. So there's a limit to how precise you need to be because you're just not gonna see it so you don't wanna be too general because then things might look weird. But you don't really want to get too crazy about modeling everything in the scene. Sort of up to you and your style of working. Okay, that looks pretty good. Next I'm going to move this and extrude this part of the roof down. Now exactly what angle that should be, I can take a look at it from the right side and you can see that I can sort of mash the slope at the top and I'll just sort of match the slope as I go down and I can switch to a right view, not the perspective view to really sort of get that to be where I want it. So now I'll make a cut with a knife tool on this part of the roof, switch to the points mode, and I'll move the points around and try to get that edge where the roof kind of intersects with itself over there. So I'm gonna try to match up that edge as best as I can, then I'll extrude this part out, extrude these edges down and make it match the structure of the house. Make another cut. Once again on this edge I want to get it to be able to contain the projection but not really worry about making it be exactly the way the geometry is built because there's a little lip on that part of the house or that part of the roof, but you'll never really see it in the final thing. I wanna have my polygons be quads so I'll draw that line in there. Now you can see that these shapes are all quads, these polygons are all quads so you might wanna keep an eye on that too. Okay, what I'll do now is I'll switch to the polygon mode and I'll click on this polygon here because I wanna start building out the porch area in the front of the house, so I'll extrude that out, make a cut there and select this polygon, extrude this out to the right and then I'll extrude that down to here and I'm starting to build the staircase. Well, the porch has these pillars that hold up the roof of the porch so we want to make these support pillars by extruding up this shape to about here. Keep in mind that if you hold the Control key while scaling, you'll also extrude out the edges as well so whether you move or you scale or rotate something with holding down the Control key if you do it on an edge or a polygon, you'll be extruding it. So now, let's make the right side of the banister, we'll extrude that out, move that edge down and the bottom of this hand railing kind of snakes around or curves around to the right a bit, so I'm going to extrude and rotate that so it sort of mimics that. Now I'll make a few cuts here, move that over and start making the other pillar, the one on the right side, once again, scaling and moving. I also want to extrude out this part of the top of the pillar so think of it that you're making an object here that you're gonna project a photo on that's the whole concept of all of this. It's not about making such a great model it's about making something that is going to catch the picture when you project upon it. We'll scale those out a bit. Now I'm going to go ahead and extrude that out a little bit and make the rightmost pillar. Okay, what I want to do is extrude out with the Control key this part of the roof of the porch, move it down, and start fitting into place where it should be, just right about there; maybe a little bit more there, that works. And then I'll extrude the right side of the house which is sort of out of the picture and this part of the roof. Now I don't really know what the house really looks like because I haven't really been there. In other words, I don't know all the details of it, but I think that this roof above the porch kind of circles around to the side of the house. So let's switch to a top view and I'll put some cuts in this shape, like this, and then I'll switch back to the top view and arrange these lines so that way there just a little bit more aesthetically pleasing. If you're on a set, like on a movie set, and you think that you might be doing some projection mapping, you should walk around with a camera and take shots from different angles. Not only will that give you a better idea of what this thing is that you're building, but you can actually use those other photographs when creating the coverage renders or the renders that you're going to project on the geometry. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. So now I'm creating this little roof type of shape above the main entrance. I'll also extrude these walls down on the backside of the porch, as well as this one here, which contains the main doorway; this wall over here kind of slants into the left. In the next video, we'll continue building out the house geometry.
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