Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Flower Bloom Animation: Modeling the Flower Petal

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Instructor Handel Eugene

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  • Duration: 07:27
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Demonstrating how to create the flower petal profile in Cinema 4D, then create thickness and geometry with the extrude object.

In this tutorial we demonstrate how to create the flower petal profile with the Pen tool in C4D. We then cover how to create geometry from our petal profile using the extrude object.

Less...

Transcript

Okay, welcome to the first lesson of the Flower Bloom Animation tutorial. In this lesson we're going to go ahead and create the flower petals from scratch. Let's go ahead and do that now. So, once you're inside Cinema 4D, what you're going to want to do is switch to your Front view. And to get to your front view, you're going to need to click on this little icon here, which will take us to our 4-up view. And here you can see our Front view, and we need to maximize that by just clicking on this little icon here as well. So, once we're in our Front view, what we're going to want to do is create the profile of the flower petal. And the way we're going to do that is with the Pen tool. And to select the Pen tool, all you got to do is click this little icon here. Now that we have the Pen tool selected, we're going to want to start at the base. And if you're familiar with the Adobe products, for example Photoshop, or Illustrator, then you should be familiar with the Pen tool. And good thing is, Cinema 4D's Pen tool works in a similar fashion as those applications as well. So, let's start at the base and let's just work from there. So what I'm doing, I'm just going click and drag. I'm just going to start creating the outlines of our flower petal. Now, I'm being a little rough with it. It's not going to be perfect. That's okay. I can go back and make some adjustments later on, as far as fixing some things. And again, I'm being really rough with this, not worrying about making this perfect on the first go around. But just trying to get something as a solid base for me to start with. Then I can go back and fine tune things. Now you just need to go back to where you started and you'll see this little ring icon, which let's us know that we're going to fill in our Spline. Now obviously, there's a lot of things to fix here, so let's go ahead and do that now. So with the Selection tool, I'm going to go ahead and start clicking my points. And right here, I'm going to hit T to scale this down just a little bit, take this icon, hit E to get switched to my Move tool, and just kind of start moving these around, moving these points around, get them looking the way that I want. Take this, bring it up, hitting R to rotate, trying to get this to feel a little bit better. I can select all my points by going to the Rectangle Selection. Selecting all these and hitting T to scale them inwards, little bit. Something like that. That can make them a little bit taller by hitting T and bringing them up. I'm going to move them over just a little bit, just to get them lined up with our origin down here. Just make a couple of tweaks here and there, but I think this is feeling good and should be good enough for our purposes. Let's take one final look. I think this will work. Yeah. Let's go ahead and use this. Just double click this on our Spline and let's rename it to our Flower_Petal. Now let's switch back to our Perspective mode, again by clicking this little icon here, or you can hit the keyboard shortcut, which is the middle mouse button, which will take us to our 4-up view, then we'll middle mouse over our Perspective view and we can full screen that as well. So let's zoom out and see what we got. So now that we have our flower petal, let's go ahead and create some geometry or some thickness with this Spline that we've just created. So to do that, we're going to need to use the Extrude object, which is located in this tab right here, under our Generator Window. And let's go ahead and select our Extrude object. Let's take our Flower_Petal for this Extrude object to work, for us to create geometry and thickness, this Spline needs to be a child of the Extrude object. So take this, click and drag, until you see the arrow pointing downward, which makes it a child, which is what we want. Right now we're in Point mode, which we automatically switched to Point mode when we used the Pen tool. We just need to switch to our Object mode, which is where we want to be. And we have our extrusion, click on our extrusion, click on the Object tab, and right now, our thickness is pretty thick for a flower petal, so we're going to want to bring our thickness down to, let's say, one. And, maybe, maybe, maybe even less than that, maybe even smaller than that. Let's click on this and put this to .1. We don't want this to be too thick. Okay. Now that we have our flower petal, we need to do one more step, and we need to add some resolution, some subdivision, some segments, to this flower petal, to allow us to deform it, and add deformations and such in our next lesson. So, the way we need to do that, is we need to click on our Extrude object, go to our Caps Tab, and under Type right here, it says N-gons, we need to switch that to Quadrangles. So we click on that, and nothing happened, nothing changes, at least from what we can tell. Well, something did change, but we're not able to see it because of the mode that we're in, the display mode that we're in. So, we need to switch to Gouraud Shading with Lines. And just to demonstrate that again, it was on N-gons, which gives us no segments, and then we switched to Quadrangles, which gives us segments, but right now, they're a little slanted, janky and diagonal. We want our segments to be divided evenly in a gridlike fashion. So to do that, we just need to click on Regular Grid, like so. And when we do that, it provides us with additional segments that we want and need. Now you can adjust how many segments you have on here, maybe that might be a bit much. But, just enough so that way we can enough segments to deform our flower petal properly in the next lesson. So that's looking good, and I think that's about it. And we have our flower petal that we can work with. So, in this lesson, we created our flower petal from scratch, modeling it out, drawing it out with the Spline object, and using the Extrude object to add thickness. In the next lesson, we'll go ahead and start deforming it with deformers.
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