lundi 26 octobre 2009

How to model a room using Cinema 4D

The only thing that annoys me about cinema 4D is that there are limited free tutorials and “how to’s” on the internet and that if you really want to get into the programs more advanced features you have to either spend hours searching the net or go out and buy an expensive book. Like most people I don’t have the money to be spent on expensive books, nor the free time to spend searching the net for hard to find how-to’s which have been relegated to page 550 of googles search results because the pay for sites are much better at SEO.

So without much further ado I bring you the first in my series of Cinema 4D tutorials, you might find the titles or subjects quite odd but then again they are subjects which I have searched google for and come up with nothing so I thought I would share how I went about doing what I had hoped to be shown how to do.

Perspective Views

First things first, open up Cinema 4D and press F5. This brings up the following four viewpoints in the main screen (in Clockwise order) Perspective, Top, Right and Front. This is most useful for getting things aligned right and knowing how they will look along all three axis. If you then press the middle mouse button on any of these views then it will enlarge to take up the entire view upon which pressing the middle mouse button again returns to the four view, view.

First Cube Atributes

Next select a new cube and select its attributes, as you can see (above) I have made it 100m tall and a width and breadth of 250m. I also changed its vertical position to 50m so that it is flush to where the X and Y planes meet. This cube will be the outside walls of our room therefore rename it to “outside” by double clicking on its name within the objects browser. The next step is to produce the shell of the room and the inside wall, we shall be using a Boole element for this.

Seccond Cube and the Boole

Duplicate the outside wall and then create a Boole element. You can duplicate an object simply by selecting it and then pressing Ctrl + C followed by Ctrl + V, well it’s the only way I know of. Rename this duplicate outside cube, inside. Then change its size so that you have a 10m thick wall and that its height is 10m taller (that is X=240, Y=110 & Z=240 if your too lazy to think). Next place both cubes within the Boole using the objects browser the outside wall being on top of the inside wall as shown above, when quickly rendered you should result in something looking like the image below.

Initial Render, example of the rooms shell.

Now you have the basic walls of your model, you need to give it a floor. For this you could simply raise up the inside cube by 10 meters and then later on paint a texture on the floor face for the carpet, wood veneer, etc. Or if your lazy just produce another cube resize it to the dimensions of the inside wall and have it so its height is 10m and place it on the floor. I choose the first option for this tutorial as it allows me to fit in showing how to do selective texturing as well as being the most efficient so far as render times go.

Window settings

Now the room has a floor and four walls, it needs a door and some windows to finish it off before we texture it. These can be done much in the same way as the room was created. Therefore rename the Boole element “Walls” and place it within another Boole element, then create another cube and resize it to the dimensions you want your window to be at and place it on top of the walls Boole in this new Boole. Sounds complex but it really isn’t the above image shows you what mine looks like and the below image is the rendered result.

Rendered Windows

Now I’m sure you are able to make some more windows and a door without my guidance, so I shall leave you to that and continue with the tutorial. To texture our room we need to first make it editable, so the first thing to do is select the inside and outside objects and press C to make them editable (as shown in the below image).

Example No. 7

Next select the button marked number 2 in the above image so you can begin to select the faces of your model to be textured. You might have to spin the perspective view to underside the room to be able to select the boxes floor rather than its top – or at least I had to. Now you should have the bottom face of the inside cube selected the perimeter of which will be shown as red. Now from the Selection drop down choose set selection (see #1 in image below).

Making selection for texture.

Now you have the floor selected within your object browser double click upon it and rename it to floor. Now create or load a texture and drag it onto the inside object within the object browser and double click on its icon once it appears there. Then within the selection text space enter “floor” or what ever you named the face selection. Now when rendered you should get something similar to what you see in the below image, just the floor texture being rendered.

Texture selection settings.

You can use the above technique to texture the rest of the room, having different textures for different walls, etc. A rug can also be placed in a similar fashion, but I shall cover that in a separate tutorial i’m going to write tomorrow.

Material Settings

As a bonus I shall now continue with some radiosity rendering to make the scene look ultra cool. First off you need a floor and sky element in the3D world. Now as this is a mock up you don’t need to use any form of detailed sky texture for the sky, as they take ages to render and when your just mocking up anything longer than 60 seconds is an age so save all the detailed texturing until you have finished the room and filled it with what ever you think of filling it with. Create a new material and give it the same settings as shown in the image above, the brightness is set to 170% because it provides the final image with a lot more dynamic range, for more information see this tutorial here. Next go to render settings and select Radiosity, the following settings are best chosen to give the highest quality render with the largest dynamic range and least amount of incorrect visible artefacts.

Radiosity settings.

Just incase you cant make out the settings shown in the above image they are as follows: Strength:100%, Accuracy: 90%, Prepass Size: 1/1, Diffuse Depth: 1, Stochastic Samples: 300, Min. Resolution: 20 and Max. Resolution: 150. You will also need to go into the Options within the render settings (four down from the Radiosity in the above image) and turn off Auto Light. Now your ready to render, this will take a while and Radiosity has to make a lot of calculations but the end result it worth it. My version took 4 minutes to render, that is with just one texture and at 640×480 but the quality of the render is ultra high and well worth the wait. The time to render will increase the more object you include into the scene and the more complex the textures you use, but overall the wait is really worth it in the end. Below you can see my final render and the end of this tutorial.

My Final Render of the room. Love the floor!

I hope this has helped someone, if you have followed this tutorial then please leave a comment. Also if you have any questions or ideas for tutorials that you cant find anywhere then please leave them below in the comments section and I shall have a go .

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