Modelling In Cinema 4D: Building a Character and a Simple Scene

1. Introduction: Modeling is definitely the foundation of working in 3D. I think I find it the most meditative part of process too. Hello. Today we are going to be digging a little bit deeper into Cinema 4D's modeling tools. I'm Russ Etheridge, animator from the UK. I've been working professionally for a good number of years in the motion and animation industry. I really love sharing my process and talking about the way I work. Cinema 4D is really well-known for its ease of use and the modeling tools are no different. By the end of the class, you'll have modeled an organic shape in the form of our character, and a hard surface shape in the form of our sailboat for our character to captain. We'll be making a simple gray scale render that's going to look like this. At least you've got something to look at. We won't be covering the full color render in this class because it's modeling class and we won't have time, but I will be making a rendering class in the future, so keep your eyes peeled for that, and maybe if you fancy it, make it move just a little bit. Nothing complicated, I'm an animator after all. This class will be perfect for people wanting to level up their modeling skills. It's also a great next step if you've recently completed my intro to Cinema 4D for 2D animators. Last time we looked at just some simple shapes in the form of modeling skateboard. This time you'll go away with the skills to create an impressive range of models for your animation. We'll be covering illustrating references for modeling, which will be correctly drawing objects from multiple angles to use as references, organic modeling in the form of our character, some hard surface modeling in form of our sailboat, and we'll also be creating sea boat for all to sits on, and a couple of bonus videos, one will be making our scene move, and the other one will be doing a simple render to show a fun model. I hope that once you've completed this class, you will have collected a bunch of new tricks and techniques to boost your models to the next level. Let's go. [inaudible] computer 2. Class Outline: Today, we're going to model a character selling a boat. I chose this because I felt it was going to be simple enough to cover in an intermediate level class, but also complicated enough that I can show you a really wide range of techniques. People who work in CG often talk about two types of modeling. One is organic and the other one is hard surface modeling. Basically, organic modeling is things that are curvy and lumpy, bumpy, more like people and animals and things that you get in nature, I guess organic as it's in the name, a hard surface modeling tends to be more things that are more like cars and furniture, machinery, things that have a lot of straight lines and maybe more symmetrical in some ways, I guess, but a bit more mechanical in nature. But in reality, there's a lot of crossover between the two categories. The tools that you'll use for organic modeling can be used in hard surface modeling and vice-versa. That said, I think modeling a character and a sailboat will give you a good range of techniques from both categories. We'll be doing water as well. I'm not sure what category that falls into but we're going to be doing that too. I've set this class under intermediate level, so I'm going to assume you have at least some working knowledge in Cinema 4D. I won't be covering the interface, but I will be talking about each tool and how it works as I use them. If you want to really ground-level introduction to Cinema 4D, check out my previous class which is getting started in Cinema 4D, where I go through the interface and it's really like for the beginners. It says it's for 2D animators, but really it's for everybody as well, so check that out. Also, another quick note is that I'm using version 21 or R21 of Cinema 4D, so if you're using a different version some of the buttons might be in different places. If they are different, I mean, you'll have to either do your own research, or a really useful thing if everybody can help each other out, is leave a note in the timeline of the Skillshare video where things differ, and that way everybody wins. I recorded these classes as I went along, I wanted to give you a really good insight into the way our work as well as all the little tools that I'm using along the way. It also gives you a bit of insides my create process too. I also take a few wrong turns along the way which I'm keen to live in, but then I step back and explain where it went wrong and how I fixed it. Your task will be to follow along and create your own character in a boat. Feel free to tweak the design. I think it's going to be more satisfying if you do it like that, but remember to keep it simple. If you start adding hair and clothes and lots of other paraphernalia on your character, then it's going to get a lot more complicated so keep it really simple like mine. He doesn't even have any eyes, so yeah, just make sure you keep in mind how long it's going to take to model every single extra detail that you add in. Great. Without that all way, let's have a look at what we'll be covering. First, we'll be looking at illustrating references for modeling, so we'll be looking at drawing the same object from multiple angles and making sure things line up so that it's a good reference. Then we'll be doing some organic modeling in the form of our character, which will mainly include technique called box modeling which I'll explain. Then we'll be doing some hard surface modeling which will be our sailboat, and for that we'll be using different techniques which mainly involve using splines and surface generators. Then will be posing the character into the boat, and to do that we'll be using modeling techniques. I'd just like to point out now and I'll talk about this later as well, that rigging the character and posing it into the boat would be a much better way of doing it. But modeling is a fine way of doing it if you know exactly what it's going to look like. Processes and modeling tutorial, so we should just do it like that. It's good practice anyway. I will be looking at rigging in later classes, so keep an eye out for that. Then we'll be creating some sea for our scene, we'll be making that using some textures with surface displacement. Then we'll be doing a parcel of refining our models just to bring it up to that level of final polish. Then we've got a couple of non-modeling-related bonus classes. The first of which we'll be making our scene move, no keyframing required. The second one will be making a simple render for our boat, which will look like this. I'm not going to be covering in loads of detail how I got to the final render that you saw at the beginning of the video, but this is just a way to show off your models. For that we'll be using the rendering plug-in called redshifts, so make sure you've got a copy for that section. Then at the end, we'll recap all our major steps, and I'll also give you a brief description of how I achieved the final look in the render you saw at the beginning. Great. In the next video, we'll be illustrating our references. I'm going to be doing that in Photoshop, but you could just as easily do it on pencil and paper and then take a photo of it. I can't think of an appropriate sailing PAN. Set sail. No, that don't good. Bon voyage, no, that doesn't work. I'll just see you there. 3. Illustrating A Reference: Let's get started. We could just leap straight into modeling, but it's much, much easier to work from a reference. Obviously when making your own original artwork, there's no blueprints you can just download off the Internet, so it's best to just draw it yourself. I like to start by sketching the final image in my sketchbook, just pencil on paper. Then once I'm happy with that, I'll bring that into Photoshop and break it down into its individual models, so the things I'm going to model separately. I'll then draw those from front on, so directly in front, directly by the side, because then that's a perfect thing to start modeling from. There's a few things to keep in mind when drawing your reference images. Let's switch over to Photoshop, and I'll take you through those now. We are in Photoshop and obviously, you could be doing this on paper. I just like to draw in Photoshop, because it's really easy and you can just load it straight in. You just save the file and load it straight in. I like to start doing all my references in my sketchbook. So I draw by hand, I find it much quicker. This is paged from my sketchbook, really quick rough sketches. I was just trying to get a shape for the character and stuff. But I did manage to get a little sketch I like. This one down in the bottom right, I quite liked. I think the proportions are looking quite good there. I'm just going to grab this, and I'm going to switch over to a new file, paste it in there, here we go. Now, I've just got this really loose reference. For modeling what we're going to need, and this is not going to be a very good reference to model from because it's that slight perspective, the character sitting in there so there's no real way to model the character, so I'm just going to use this as a reference. I'm going to do it properly, so that we've got some really good accurate measurements and drawings to work from when we're modeling. Like I said, I'm not going to take you through how to use Photoshop. I think you could be doing this on paper and then take a picture with it. This is just to get the reference for modeling. I think the first thing I'm going to do is make the reference for the character, so I'm going make a new layer here, and I'm just going to start sketching it out. I'm not going to explain everything I'm doing. This is like just draw it until it looks right till you're happy with it. I'm going to draw the character from the front first and then we're going to do it from the side, so we're going to have two separate references. We're going to have a front view and a side view. It's not good idea at the moment to draw sort beautiful posed character or anything like that. What we need is a very clearly laid out character so that you can use it really nice, if you're reference modeling, and to do that, you normally do a T-pose. When I say T-pose, I mean a character standing facing forwards and arms outstretched so they form a letter T-shape, legs together, arms outstretched. I might do a T-pose. I find it a bit difficult to see a character standing in a T-pose, you don't know if the arms are the correct length and stuff. I think I might draw a character who is standing with his arms down by the side, and then I'll adapt into a T-pose potentially. Because we're not going to be working these characters, it doesn't necessarily need to be in a T-pose. But if you're going to rig it eventually, it's probably a good idea to do your references in a T-pose anyway, so I'm going to do that. I'm just going to start sketching and when I'm happy with the front view of the character, we can start making the side. I think I'm just going do a knobbing head character like this, I don't want to do anything too complicated. He's in a boat, so I could do a little hat like a sailor's hat. But I think for simplicity sake, maybe we'll just leave it like this for the moment. I think he needs to be a very plain character sitting in the boat. Now I have the character standing from the front, I'm going to just adapt it to the T-pose. I just find it much easier because when I'm drawing characters, I know how long arms should be roughly anatomically. I'm not an amazing drafts person. What I can do now that I've got this is, I can just duplicate this layer and select the arms. That's good enough. I know in my head I'm going to be making these lines perfectly straight. I haven't drawn them perfectly straight because I'm free handing it. I actually only need to draw this one arm like this. I could flip it over and just have it on the other side as well, but because I'm going to be modeling using symmetry which I'll get into later, this is fine. I only need to do one side. To do this, if you're doing on paper, obviously use a ruler, but in Photoshop, I can hold down shift and just draw some straight lines. I'm just going to draw from the top of the head, from the top of the shoulder, and top of the feet, just some reference points and then from the floor. You know what? We don't really need to draw lines like that. Copy over. Okay, I think that's good enough. As you can see, obviously is not the most useful drawing and so similar to the front view, but it's quite good practice to do this. We can turn these lines off. There we go, there is the character reference done. Obviously, once we're in 3D, we can still fudge around with it a bit more. I'm not being super accurate here. Character is so simple, it's just cylinders really. So I'm going to save this as character reference. So what you want to do when you're saving your references is probably a good idea to put them in the text file. So whenever you make a cinema 4D project, wherever you save it in that folder, it looks for textures or images, anything you're using in the project in a folder called tex, T-E-X. In the same folder as where you're saving your Cinema 4D project. This is characterRef, just going to hide my character. Now, I can. Use this boat pretty much to draw over. So again, I'm going to do my side view. Also, this reference isn't exactly straight. We really want our references to be straight so that when we're modeling, we're not modeling at weird angle or something like that. I'm just going to draw a line here, so that's going to be the top of the hull of the boat. Again, in 3D I want this to be straight, so I'm going to just draw it perfectly straight unlike it is in my original drawing. We got something pretty good. The mast maybe is a little bit thick, but I'm going to do it like this. It's just a cylinder so we can adjust that in 3D. This is going to be a little bit of a fiddler thing in 3D as well, because it's quite difficult to draw a very symmetrical stuff by hand. Actually now, I do think we need to draw what the boat's going to look like from above. That's actually the more important shape of the hull, I think. I think the best way to do this is to use this hull as a reference. So I'm just going to rotate this up like this, and then work from this for the top-down view. So I've got my side view, my front view, and my top view. This is going to be very handy for making all aspects of the boat. So once again, we save this as a boatRef. Let's recap the main points you should keep in mind when drawing your reference images. Start with a sketch of your final image. I like to draw in my sketchbook, but whatever works for you. Draw your objects from straight on as in completely flat from the front side and maybe top, whichever you need for that particular object. You should draw characters in a T-pose or at least make your drawing able to have a T-pose version, because that's what you want to model really. A T-pose for a character is the most useful pose for doing anything else afterwards, whether that's rigging or modeling it into a different pose. Yeah, make sure you have your reference drawn in a T-pose. Make sure you use some straight lines for reference when you're drawing an object from different perspectives. It's all well and good doing some beautiful character illustration, but if the shoulders and hips don't line up when you're going into modeling, then you're going to have some major issues. So make sure you use a ruler, or in Photoshop, you can hold shift when using the brush tool, and that will give you a straight line for drawing your different perspectives. Amazing. So we have our reference drawn, it's all ready to go. In the next class, we will be looking at actually modeling our character. I'll see you in the next video. 4. Character Modelling - Part 1: Now that we have our models designed and are references drawn, is time to make a start on our character model. As the character is an organic shape, I'm going to use a method called Box modeling. It's basically exactly how it sounds. You start with a box and then you apply smoothing to give you your final smooth organic result. This type of modeling is good for simple and let's say less complicated models. But if you're going to do some really high level organic modeling, then sculpting tools is probably where you want to go. There are some sculpting tools inside Cinema 4D, which are pretty good, and there's also third-party specialist software; you might have heard Zbrush, where you can do really powerful sculpting and they have lots of tools in there. Go and check that out, if that's your thing. For this character shape, box modeling is the perfect thing, so let's get cracking. Okay, we're in cinema 4D and the first thing we need to do is load in a reference that we just drew. let's do that. If you've seen my previous class, we covered loading and references, I know that, and we were using a video reference before. I think quite a few of you had issues with that, but don't worry, no video references this time, this is going to be still images. When you click this button at the top right of the viewport window, you split screen into these four different views. You have your perspective view, obviously that's for viewing your 3D objects, and then you've got right, front and top. What we've done with our reference images, we've drawn. Well for the character I did a front and a side view, and then for the boat, we did all three; we did a front, a side and a top view. We just need to load in our image into the correct viewport and also align it properly. Let's do that now. I'm going to click on my front view first because that's probably for both of them, kind of the main view, go to options and configure. Then we've got a few things here, so we are just go to Back, and then click on the three buttons next to the image box. Go find your reference image. We're going to do the character first, so loading your character image, open that. What we want to do is move the image so that it's aligned with the axis. That means we should take this guy who's on the right and move him up so that he's feet are at zero. Because at the moment, he's just over here. You can just start modeling like this, but we want the side and the front to line up. To do that, we need to move them into the correct place, and we can align them with the axis points here. To do that, you scroll on the offset. Let's do the X offset. You hold on "Alt" and make final adjustments. I'm on a PC, so it might be different on a MacBook. There we go. I might make him a little bit more transparent, cool. We can just ignore the side view in this. Just make sure when you're in front, you're looking at the front one, and the next thing is we're going to do the side, sampling the side. Let's go to Options, configure [inaudible] three dots and back and load in your character reference again, and move this person over. We can readjust it afterwards. They don't have to be perfectly aligned, but let's just start with that. Once we start modeling, we can see maybe we can adjust the reference or you can just start winging it. This is such a simple character that we don't need to be the accurate. If you do really need to be accurate, like if it's a client job and they've sent you an illustration that says it has to be like this, then obviously you need to be a bit more accurate when doing that. Let's start some modeling. We're going to do box modeling for the character, because it's really fleshy round shape. It's going to be a good way to get into doing box modeling with the help of a sub-division surface. We'll probably end up with one object for the body, and one object for the head. We could do it all in one go, but I think in illustration it looks quite nice that there's a dividing line between the head and the body. Obviously humans aren't separate objects, but let's see how we go. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here and click on "Cube" and scale it down. I switch quickly between the split view and the full-size view by doing middle click. Wait, let me just check the scale. It's always quite good to check your scale. [inaudible] check this cube. If I drag this off, it will tell me roughly the height of this character. This is always a really handy quick measuring tool, 280 centimeter. He's quite a tall human, but that's alright. What you could do in the, let me just show you. If you go to the back, you can change the size of the image, and obviously that will change the size of whatever character you're doing. I think it's fine for modeling, but once you start rigging, I would always say, just work at real life scale when you're rigging, because that's just like a standard thing that you can say to everybody on a project. You're going to be like, "okay, where everything is going to be, make sure when you're modeling something that's going to be the size that it is in real life." Obviously, you can model any size in 3D, but constraining it to real-life proportions is a really good idea, particularly when rigging. Because it can be very tricky to scale rigs or scale things that already have animation, so going back and fixing that later is really difficult. Anyway, that being said, let's just carry on at this size, because we can just scale the guy down when we finish modeling. Let's start with the [inaudible]. It doesn't really matter right now, but let's get this cube to roughly the right size. Then the next thing I'm going to do is make this cube editable. Press "C" let's go into 3D view and get rid of one face. I'm going to do all the modeling in a mirror object. Because this guy's symmetrical down this y axis, I only want to model one side of it. Because once I've modeled one side, we can just flip it for the other side. Whenever you're modeling, just keep in mind that if anything is symmetrical, you only have to model it once and then flip it. Now it's time to actually bring up our modeling tool. All the tools for modeling are in; if you go up here and go to Mesh, they are pretty much in here. When you're modeling you're going to be using "Mesh" and you're going to be using "Select" a lot. If you go to the layout, there's a modeling layout, arranges it a bit better for modeling but personally, I like to just have all the buttons out. So I go back to startup. What I like to do is go to "Mesh" and I just pop out all of these options. Once I've got, I'm going in here a lot, [inaudible] pop this out or I use "move a lot," I pop this out. Once I've realized all the palettes that I normally use, I just leave them out and I'll save the layouts. I now have my rust modeling layout, which is this, and it's just old panels popped out. These are the ones that I use for modeling a lot. I've got "Select" here. I'm going to be using this panel layout. You can try and match it if you want, but I'm just going to be saying the tool that I'm going to use at any given moment. They're either going to be in select or they're going to be in Mesh, so you might have to do a little bit of hunting, if you want to use exactly the same tool as me, if you're following along step-by-step. But I think for this class, because it's intermediate, I'm going to expect that you know the layout of Cinema 4D, and that you are just here to see what modeling tools that I use in a particular situation or what my general techniques are. If you do make a layout and you want to save it, just to quickly show you, you just change the panels to whatever you want and then you go to Window Customization, "save layout as" and that will just let you save the preset and it will show up in this layout menu in the top right, and whatever you name it, it should appear here. I've got plus modeling, I've also got rigging one here. Great. Now we've got all our tools handily available. I'm going to grab these four points here, and move them to the middle because I'm going to be making symmetry object, mirror this plane here. I'm going to go to set point value which is here, so we apply that. Now we have all these points exactly on this axis, and it's time to make our symmetry objects. So you make symmetry objects popped up there and drop your cube into it, and then we go [inaudible] and we move my cube. When you set point value, you can change the coordinate system. You can do to object to world. I probably should have done it to world. But it's just better that the cube x is at 0, the coordinates one's at zero, I must have dragged it by accident. Make sure everything is zeroed out, because it's much cleaner and neater like that. I'm also going to add a subdivision surface object now as well, and I'm going to drop my symmetry into that. Also, I'm going to switch my display to [inaudible] lines. Now we can actually see what we're doing and also the subdivision surface; it gives you a preview of the final object. Actually it's the object you have to work switching it on and off, because obviously the characters are not going to look anything like that. It's going to look a little bit more like this. It's going to be smooth and rounded. Great. Then the majority of the time, I'm going to be extruding surfaces. I'm just going to work through it and explain what I'm doing as I go. I'm just going to break away from our modeling quickly and go to this cube. I just want to draw a special attention actually to the extrude tool just because it's probably, it's difficult to say the main tool, but it's definitely one of the most used modeling tools out there. It's just here in with the Mesh. It's like one of the top options obviously because it's one of the most used things. You go to extrude, these options will pop up, and just to give you a extra bit of detail here, then I probably will be going into the rest of the tools. You select a face and then you press "Apply," and that will just extrude that face. Pretty simple. You can also change the offset, this slider here, it will change the amount that you are extruding. There's a few different options here which is difficult to show with just extruding a space, but they're for different situations, so maximum angle, I think we'll maybe extrude, and group things together. Maybe if you've select these two faces what happens? Extrude. There you go. If you change the angle below 90 degrees it will ungroup those faces, and if you change it above 90 degrees, it groups these faces because this is exactly 90 degrees, the threshold will be 90 degrees for this one. But if you're extruding undulating surface, it will have different angles. You can actually vary the amount of the offset here. I don't really ever use this. But that's an option. You can also set the number of subdivisions that happens in your extrude, so you don't have to hit extrude a million times. If you know how many you're going to need, you can just set it there, which is pretty handy. Then you can say whether it creates N-guns or whether it creates caps. If you're just extruding from a plane without a back, if it's not part of a closed object or you might just be extruding an entire surface of something. If you've just got something on this, it's just one. This is just one polygon. You click "Apply", it won't create a cap at the other end. It will just literally extrude that one polygon out and add the walls. You can press "Create Caps" and it will add an end on there. Few other things preserved groups, and blah blah blah. Have a play around, extrude. There you go. It's pretty simple, but also it has got a lot of options and it's very powerful. Great. Let's go back to our character modeling. It's really handy to switch between Only Select Visible Elements, switching that on and off quite regularly. It just means that select, for instance, here, I want to select this line in the body and just move it. I'm going to move this one up here. If I went in here and selected with Only Select Visible Elements on, and now I went like that. It wouldn't select the back ones. So I move this up and go up, there is still a line there. Just be aware that you're selecting through the object. I need to do another subdivision up here. The next most important tool is going to be cutting. I'm going to do Loop and Path Cut. There is Line Cut as well, so I could easily just hold Shift and make a perfect line here and then make a cut. I like Loop and Path Cut as well. I mean, either way on this one is fine. With line cut you have to make sure visible only is off again, so it cuts all the way through the object. Otherwise, it will only cut on the front surface. I'm going to use Loop and Path Cut for this one so it makes a clean loop all the way around. Obviously I like what the loop is doing. Sometimes it looks correct from one side and it's gone all wrong on the other side. Let's go check our side because haven't checked the side yet. This is becoming a bit big. Actually, you know what? This is the wrong way. I've got it on right, and it actually needs to be left, because here in my head, if you look at the z-axis, the z-axis is pointing backwards, and this is the front of the character. I'm thinking the front is going to be on this side of the z-axis. This drawing is backward. If we select "Cameras" and go to Left, that's correct. The legs are really close together. I think that's okay. If I was actually modeling this character for rigging, I might not have put the legs super close together like this, because you basically need a bit of a crutch gap. If I don't put a subdivision in here, you can get problems when you're trying to move the legs around. That's okay. Let's just see how we go. I think I'm not 100 percent sure how many subdivisions we'll need, but we add them as we go, which is the beauty of this system. Start making our links. First subdivision, I'm going to make this just roughly around the knee. It's going to move down for the foot. I assume it's going to be always at the bottom now. Let's check. How is it looking? It looks a bit more like a tooth at the moment. Let's just keep going. The next thing I'm going to do is do another Loop Cut. Maybe this way. I might need to do another one here as well. That must be there as well. This is because I know that for the bottom of these legs to make them cylindrical, we're going to need this many subdivisions. Let's check our reference. This is how we get the legs closer together. There is still a gap here, but it's going to be very small. Something like that. Let's just keep making these legs around. The legs basically need to be cylindrical and the body is an oval, so the fiddly bit on this is how to smoothly transition from two cylinders into one 3D oval. I think we're going to need some more subdivisions around somewhere. Obviously, I'm trying to keep the subdivisions as minimal as possible, and I don't really want to make triangles if possible as well. Let's just keep fiddling, and see where we go. When you make a cube or any primitive in Cinema 4D, it gives you a phone tag, which is this automatic smoothing thing. Estimate things. Let me just quickly expand the form. If I make a sphere and turn it to a good red shading. You can see this is actually quite smooth. If I turn it off, it'll be really clear. Just delete the tag. Then you can see all the facets. Back in the day before the days of Phong, I don't know. This was like early CG, the Phong thing had to be invented. It's a really quick way so you don't have to subdivide it. The other way of making it smooth is just to give it millions of subdivisions. To make it 100 percent smooth, I need to give it nearly 400 segments to make that look smooth. I don't know if you can see in the video, but I can still see it. I mean, it's 223 subdivisions and it still looks blocky to me. The way around that is obviously this phong tag. Now it's smooth. Then you only have to worry about if you can see the actual edge subdivisions. If I increase segments before so I can't see the edge subdivisions and that's about there. That's only 50. This now looks like a perfect sphere. It's only 50 segments. This is the power of Phong. That's my Phong appreciation for you. You can see that there is a line here at the moment, and that's because Phong angle limit is on 40 degrees. Obviously I want to turn that off. I'm just going to do Angle Limit off. If I put that back to 40 because when I'm dragging this around, I'm going pass the 40 degree limit here. See how it pops in and out. This has been distracting because it makes you think that you're moving it way further than you are. Let's see if we can get these a bit more cylindrical because it's still oval. This is going to grow rich here, then I'm going to smooth out somehow. I'm drawing him flat all the way down the front and then his got a little back. If you take the original reference, you don't really see him. Let's not worry too much about his bottom area. I mean, for my OCD, I like to have the character complete, and also maybe for the sake of your guy satisfaction, it might be useful just to see me making it look good. But let's not worry too much about that area, we're not going to be able to see it. I don't like this. This is really unsatisfying limits, so let's just carry on working, I would like to smooth off. Let's give him a back. Why not? Everyone deserves to have a butt. Let's move this foots in line with the front, like the illustration. It's almost touching this other thing, but we might need to do maybe a bit of overlap. I hate overlapping stuff though because it can cause problems later on. Actually I want this leg. We have our torso and our legs in a good place. I just wanted to pause there and take a breather. Let's recap over what we've been through so far. First, we landed in our reference images into the front and side view and we made sure that the scales were the same, so that when we're modeling, the model lines up the reference correctly in both perspectives. Then we made our starting cube, we split it in half, put it in a symmetry objects, and then put that in a smoothing object, so it's all ready to start modeling. We used a combination of tools to then shape our cube into the torso and legs, mainly focusing on Extrude, Line Cut and Loop Cut. We then talked about the importance of switching between Selects Only Visible Elements on the selection tool to make sure that you're only selecting the parts of the model that you want to actually edit. This character modeling bit is the longest section, so take a break, go and make us have hot drink and when we come back, we'll carry on with the arms and the feet. I'll see you there. 5. Character Modelling - Part 2: Hello. Welcome back. In the last class we got as far as modeling the torso and the legs, so let's carry on shaping our character. The symmetry object welds the points together. If I turn this off, you can see these points that actually are on the symmetry. It is really important to make sure that you don't move these points. Because if you move these points, it breaks the symmetry and you can't get it back manually very easily, there's a tolerance. If the symmetry object has two points inside of it that aren't part of a complete polygon, they're open like this. They're part of this open surface pattern symmetry off, you can see. There's two important things I need to be explaining right now. It's the two very important things to do with the symmetry. It tends to symmetry on and off because when you make an extrude, it will add this face here and obviously, we don't want this face. This should be open like this bit up here. Its made an extra face here. If you're extruding along the line of the symmetry, you need to make sure that you go in and delete these faces. Let's do that first. I'm going to face mode, just delete these two and we're good to go. That is why I think we were having this crotch issue as well. I switch this back on. I've split it open. Sorry about that. I make this a bit undignified. The other thing is the symmetry has this, let me go back to this, welds tolerance. What that means, if I switch it back on, you can see if this point is on the same place as it would be in its own mirror, then it welds them into one point. It's no longer two points, it's no longer a point and its mirror, it just becomes one point. I hope that makes sense. Intuitively right makes sense. You don't have to fully understand it, but you get when you make a symmetry object and these are in the same place, it welds together. If I undo that, it goes back. This is now one continuous object. If you've moved your points, it's no big deal. You can totally fix it quite quickly. Let's say I've been modeling, and now when I turn my symmetry back on, I've got some holes here. That's fine. You can actually go to the cube and you can go select. If you go to the edges mode, you can do an outline selection. Now it will just select the outside of the objects. Like if there's a hole in your polygon object, it will just select the outline of that. Then you can hold down control and click on points, and that will select the equivalent points for those edges. Then you can go to set point value, go X set. That's a zero and it will be moving in to the zero of the object depending on the coordinate system you select. You can go to world, but our object is in the middle of the world, so it's just going to move to the same place. Click '"Apply" and now its lined up all of these along the x at zero, for the x-axis. As long as your symmetry objects hasn't moved in relation to your cube and everything is zeroed out when you hit your symmetry object again, everything will be back to normal. Great. That's looking much better. I think there was a bit of an issue going on, more of an issue than now anyway, with the crotch area. We can't go way beyond. It's on the end of the world if we go beyond there. What I'm saying is if you try to subdivision this, it's now overlapping here, which is not very good, but it looks fine on the subdivision. Maybe there's a better way that someone knows how to do this, but I think I'm just going to do that for now because I want the legs nice and close together. It seems to be the cleanest and simplest way of doing that for the moment. He's looking a bit square in the torso area. So let's address that. Be careful with your only select visible elements button. If you don't realize that you've got other points selected than the ones you think you're moving around, and you do lose a little careful manipulations on the things you've got selected. Then you change your view around and you've just moved some crazy thing on the other side of the object. It's a little messed up and you say undo everything. This has to be a bit of a smoother transition here. The next thing I'm going to do is get these arms going, so I'm going to do another extrude here. It's going to select the top and extrude. Let's move these to the top. Something like that. Nice. I think the arm is going to come out of these two. Then I think I'm going to make another subdivision across there. I'm going to follow this T-pose. They're looking a little bit too fat. I basically want this to be a square because this going to be a cylinder. It should be basically a square. I'm going to get my loop cut, and I'm going to make a cut there. Be careful when you extrude from faces like this because it's not flat. It makes them expand as you extrude, so we need to shrink this back down a bit. If we look along the side, you can see. I don't like that, you can actually use the set point value. Then maybe there's a way to align these points. I'm not sure. There probably is an easier way, but I just use the set point value, set it, and then move it afterwards. So this here. Now they're all just nice and flatly-aligned. I think I'm going to put another subdivision there, to the armpit. Something went wrong with OBS Studio and made me realize that I hadn't actually saved yet. Always make sure you save, Go to File and Save. Even if I'm even going to make something super quick and I'm never going to make another version of it, I do like to add a number at the end just in case. Because you never know. Then if you add the number O one at the end, you know that's version one. If you want to keep this project hour it is and then save a new project, you can just do File Save incremental. Now it goes to boat character O two. The amount of times I've been saved by messing up a project somehow it's crashed, it was got corrupted or I've gone down a route and I can't undo it anymore, summing all that, I can just go back to a previous version in my life and saved. Where are those limits. That's mostly the body. It's just the arms and the feet that we've got left. Let's take another break here. We're making some good progress, but let's just take this moment to go over some of the key points we've been covering. Make sure you check your extrudes after making them. Sometimes they can make faces where you don't need them as well as weird angles. Make sure to double-check it's looking right. We talked about how the symmetry object welds points together within a tolerance and you can set that tolerance inside the symmetry object options. We use the set point value tool to really precisely move points to where we need them. One really useful case is when you've moved them accidentally in a symmetry object, and you can move them straight back to the zero of the world. There was a couple of points where I left only select visible elements off and it messed me up a little bit, so make sure to keep checking your model from different angles to make sure you haven't messed anything up on the other side of it. That very neatly brings me on to saving regularly. Make sure you're saving and keeping backups of everything. Incremental save is a really useful feature. We're making great progress. In the next video, we'll be finishing off our character in the T-pose. I'll see you there. 6. Character Modelling - Part 3: Hey, so we're doing really well. The character is definitely the most involved single object of the class and we are on the final stretch. I know I've drawn it sideways. This is just so that you can see the feet in the drawing. Because you can see the feet here, this reference image makes absolutely no sense. It means his feet are sticking out both ways. If you were to model that literally so that it looked correct, you'd have I don't know, disk feet or something. Obviously, anyone would stick out. I think I'm going to stick him out this direction on the side view because when you stand frontwards your feet face that way when you face sideways, unless you're two-dimensional. I'm just going to explain what happened. Basically, I went ahead and model these feet and I don't really like the method I used, it was quite long and fiddly. I think I'm just going to take you through a much better method. I went away and I took a break and then I came back and I was like, "See there's a much simpler way." I'm going to show you that now. I shouldn't have extruded it from here. Basically, I should have taken a ring here and just bent it around so that the bottom is the toe. Even though this is fine, I'm just going to quickly redo it, save a new version. Let's start again from here. I've got hole in the bottom here. This handy little tool called Close Polygon Hole. You can just click on that like that. This is called an N-gon. In Cinema 4D, N-gons are polygon faces which have more than four sides. Polygons can only have three or four sides and N-gon is a polygon with more than four sides. What it does, you can see these light blue lines. It's actually just automatically made where the subdivision will happen. The automatic version here is I don't really like it. If we smooth that, its made this weird shape. Actually what I want it to be is just how it was before, which is a subdivision here and here, and then you've got four four-sided polygons rather than here, it's made four three sided polygons and one four-sided polygon. It might seem really nitpicky and annoying at first and it's like, "Whoa it's working so whatever." But it is really important to think about the surface, because it's the way the subdivision surface then smooths it, it gets messy. Also, it's more difficult to manipulate this thing. It just gets messy. This is not particularly messy example but it does get very messy. I'm selecting the line cut tool and turn "Visible Only" on so it doesn't cut straight through. I'm just going to make two cuts here like this, there we go. Now we're back to what we had before. Now I'm just going to extrude this. We want that, I'm definitely going to want another cut here and I'm probably going to want another cut for the toe. Let's just quickly do that. Loop path cut. Probably, let's do one here. [inaudible] these, I'm just going to rotate them like this. This is what I should have done yesterday. I'm sure there were some people out there going, "What the hell? Why is he doing a lot that? ", and it's because I didn't see the solution immediately, these things happen. We're already 90 percent of the way there. What we need to do now is just round off this front and pull this down a bit and we're done. Much quicker, much faster I reckon we can pull out this one point here and that will just round off the front. I'm going to put another subdivision here for the toe. Just want to see what it looks like if you undo [inaudible] the line cut. It's good. That's it. I promise I'm leaving the foot alone. But that was a much better way of doing it. Is because dealing with the laser subdivisions on toes is really hard and just having a nice, neat cross like that is way simpler. Let's sort this back out. I think it's too long so just smooth this back a bit, I just want it a bit rounder because [inaudible] and I think we just pull these up a bit. I think that will be right right. Because it's hard to know what's going to happen at the shoulder. Maybe let me just pull this down a bit. This is probably better. Maybe these ones as well. I think the join here is still looking a bit weird to me but I think I'm going to move on to the head. Oh no wait, we need to do the hands. Let's do the hands. I'm just going to do these really simple mitten hands, just the thumb hands. I think hands in 3D are literally the worst thing ever. To model them, it takes forever, to read them, it takes forever. Imagine how many little joints there are in your hand. This will be a little bit of a fiddly join as well because hands and wrists, especially in characters like this where you want them to be super graphic and really smooth and stuff. You want the wrist to be cylindrical or like the arm. But then this 2D join, it makes perfect sense that you continue that shape and have a little thumb but this end of this hand is not going to be like a round end, it needs to be a flat end because that's mitten shapes. But then if you want it to be round here, so you want to here to be round, and then here you want it to be flat. I find that always a little bit weird transition, not always a 100 percent sure on how to deal with it. We want the thumb, I think I'm going to make the thumb stick out here. My reference is off but I don't want to move my model so it could move the reference. It doesn't really matter if we lose alignment on the rest of that now because we're done there. I'm just going to move the reference. It's sticking out the front a little bit but that's how your hands are anyway. Maybe that's fine. Cut the bottom of the thumb. That looks nice. I think that's basically it for the hand. Obviously when you're rigging, you have to be a bit more conscious of where a bend goes. If you are going to rig this character, I would definitely not have one subdivision here. I'd have a couple because when the arm bends, if you just have this one subdivision, I could actually show you now. You can actually use the axis tool. If you've got any points selected, you can use axis tool and change the anchor point of your selection, which is really handy. If you're modeling, it's really useful and we'll be using this later when we pose the character. You can see here when I rotate this, it just completely distorts here. There's no way of distorting this without having more subdivisions. We might have to add some more subdivisions when we've actually posed the character because maybe it might deform in a weird way. But we'll just deal with that at the time. I think we're all good with the body. Let's move on to the head. The first thing I'm going to do is make a new cube, scale that down and move it roughly into position, something like that. I'm just going to put it where the neck is. I need a new subdivision surface, drop the cube into there and hit C on the cube to make it into a polygonal object. There we go, done. He's got a really tiny ball head. Just going to name this body. Might just name this body as well. I'm not going to use a symmetry object here. I would normally for a head because if it's going to be a more complicated object then obviously we can divide them down the middle again. But this is going to be so simple. There's just no point. What we need to do is pull this face up to the top and then start subdividing it. We need one right near the bottom and select "Loop Path Cut" and put one right down here. We definitely need one up here as well. Let's just put one up there for a moment, I'm going to pull this down into the body so that you don't see the seam so much. I might need to make this a bit smaller. It looks different. When you convert stuff into 3D it looks a bit different. I think that's looking a bit too big for me. I'm just going to make a bit small. Because actually I'm going to up this subdivision here so it's smooth. Maybe the best thing to do is actually to put another cut in here. Where's the nose is going to be? Roughly there. Let's try this. I'm trying to do it with least cuts as possible. You can do extrude inner. What that does is it just extrudes the polygon inwards like this. Be careful with that. It looks correct but obviously there's something weird going on here and that's because it's gone inside out. If you just make this smaller and it looks nice and clean. It's nose shaped, as in square. This might look weird, yeah it does look a bit weird. I think this is not good. Since these triangles, it pinches things together. This looks terrible. Let's not do this. We'd have to like cut here, cut here, cut here, like this, do something more like this so that it's all symmetrical on all sides and then we do a rounding business again. Now I'm just going to extrude this and I'm definitely going to need another loop cut down by the [inaudible]. The reason this is because this will make a nice smooth object. That's looking much better. This is looking pretty good. Now that I've come this far, it was actually not hoping for I didn't have to do that much fiddling just to make round the nose up a little bit. In symmetry, you'd have to have a subdivision down the middle, which would complicate things. I think it's looking fine. It's definitely looking not like the character I drew. Amazing. We're basically done with our character. It's not a 100 percent perfect. I could carry on fiddling forever. I think the proportions are slightly wrong. There's a few weird shapes here and there. Also, we could have modeled the head directly into the body so that we can remove that seam but it's fine. I think for our purposes now, it's all good and we can fix some of the problems when we come to pose the character. Also, sorry if I've been calling the character he, I have no idea what gender you're hoping that character would be. Let's quickly recap the main points that we covered this time. We talked about N-gons and why they can be problematic sometimes. Having good topology in your models quite simply means trying to do everything in quads which is just four-sided polygons and not using any triangles or N-gons. It just keeps your models clean. You're not going to get arrested if you got a lot of triangles in your model. But it's good practice because when it comes to smoothing, everything's neat and tidy and it will flows really nicely. The best way of doing that is to just try. When you're modeling a character, just keep in your head, "How could I make these triangles into a quad?" That kind of thing. Eventually you will just get better at it over time. Don't worry too much for now. You can mix triangles and N-gons. If it's looking good, then fine then go for it. But it's just good practice to try and make quads where you can. Also, we talked about keeping in mind where subdivisions should go for the intended use of the model. For example, our character looks totally fine in the T-pose with no subdivisions on the elbow. But we are going to be modeling the character with bent arms later on. It'll be good to plan ahead and make sure we've got subdivisions there for later. Finally, I just quickly showed the extrude inner tool. It didn't really work out for our uses but it's a good one to keep in mind as an extra tool if you need to make that particular shape. Let's leave the character there for the moment. I think it's in a good place. In the next video, we're going to be starting to model the boat. I'll see you there. 7. Boat Modelling: The character is ready to pose, so let's get him somewhere to sit. I figured the boat falls into hard surface modeling category, which means we're going to be using a lot more primitives, so spheres and cubes just as they come. But for the most part we can be using splines, which are basically beziers. If you don't know what spline is, it's basically a 3D vector line like you get in Illustrator but in 3D. We'll be using those in combination with surface generators, things like lofts and sweeps. Let's get boating. Great, we have our character. It's not perfect. We can continue adjusting it. I would normally move on to a new project for different parts of a scene if they're major parts of a scene. But this is so simple right now, I could just do it straight in here. I'm going to make a null and I'm going to call this character. I'm going to drop the head and the body into the character null, and then I'm just going to use these traffic lights here. I explained in my last class, but the top one, if you click on it to be green, it will always show no matter what in the viewport. If you click on it to be red, then it will never show in the viewport no matter what. The bottom one is the same, the same is true for in the final render. If you hold down Alt, then it just turns them both on and off at the same time. Let's switch back to our reference view. We need to switch this over to the boat. Do that now. I need to configure it back. Again, I'm going to move the reference so that it's in the correct position for me in axis. Probably one it doesn't matter too much, but as long as they all match. I'm going to put the mast along the y-axis, it just makes the most sense. I'm going to move this down to the bottom of the y-axis. Now let's have our side view. I want to keep the size the same again so that we can scale the character. The boat is going to be smaller than the character. Now, we actually need a third one, so we're going to use the top here. Because I didn't draw this symmetrically, so I just put it roughly where we need it. It's probably going to be around there. There's quite a few ways. The reason why I chose the boat as part of this class is because it's got an interesting shape, it's symmetrical down one side, so that's good. That makes it a little bit easier. But this shape, it needs to be one object. You could box model it. You need bits to be sharp. They're called the bow and the stand. You don't want these bits to be rounded. Obviously when you do box modeling inside a subdivision surface, it just smooths everything out. Also I want to show you a bit of a range of modeling techniques. This one is going to be a bit more to do with splines. I think we're going to be able to use the loft, but we'll use symmetry again so that we only have to do one side of the boat. Let's create a spline. All we have to do is just trace the outline of this. The thing we're going to use, multiple splines just to create ribs that will allow us to create the shape that we want. I'm going to stop here. I'm going to curve like that, maybe one here. Something like this. I'm going to drop that in a symmetry objects. I don't think I've actually really used symmetry with splines before. I don't know if it actually creates a loop or not. We drop this spline into the symmetry. Let me get my modeling. Bring up your modeling buttons. I need to just get these two and use the set point value to make sure it's definitely at zero on the x-axis. If you click on the spline, you can see here how it's got a double line. It's just because there's some subdivisions here. If I unclick this, if you can see it or not. Anyway, this is just a very subtle curve here and it's making a few subdivisions. I'm just going to for the moment I'm going to put something natural. I'm just going to make another one of these. If you do Control, drag and make a copy, and then we'll drop it into a loft. That's not what I want method. I think actually the best method is to have the symmetry outside the loft. Let's drop these two splines in their and symmetry onto that. That's better. We want the symmetry outside the loft. The same thing with the characters, we've misaligned these. If I go send this to front, that's better. I set this to side, left. That's perfect. We can already see that like what I was saying before. We don't know exactly where this is in relation to the master and it's slightly off because you can see the boat is not lined up, but that's fine. We actually don't need the top view anymore because we're only using that outline. Now we just move these splines into the correct position and we can move the top one up. I'm just going to change the direction of these because it just makes more sense if that one's the top one. Well, we want to obviously use the least number of splines. A really handy tool that I found out recently is if you go to scale or any of your transform tools, you can select modeling axis. Basically what I want to do is scale these down. If I scale this down now, the scale is down to the middle, and you can see it makes a gap in the edge here because it's scaling these ones which I want to keep along this line. It's scaling these ones towards the middle. If I select my modeling axis to be world, when I scale this down, then it scales down to the middle of the world and these ones scale directly along the axis line, which is absolute perfect. If that didn't happen, then you'd have to select these and go to set point value and make them zero. On this scale, let's backup again, and we just want to make this profile of the boat something like that. Now let's make another spline. Move this down maybe to there. Let's scale it down again. [inaudible] 3D view. It's quite nice. It's a bit steep at the sides. We can just move those in. That's weird. I guess because I've totally free hand that. Well, I think we can basically ignore that. I'm just selecting all the points and just scaling them to manipulate them. This way we can get a nice profile. I still want this shape. Now we've got this issue at the bottom. But still, I want to get this curve at the bottom. The thing with the loft is we're not going to be able to do that. Maybe we can. I don't know. Let's just see. Let's just get rid of that one. Make another spline here and move this down. What happens if we just move these down so that actually they're not two-dimensional anymore. It's like a 3D curve on it. That's pretty good. The thing is that if you look closely, it's making this weird. It flares out at the bottom here. Actually this is going to be a bit more difficult to adjust with, if we go to polygon modeling. It's making a bit of a weird line here. If I select these middle ones because these are the ones that weld together a set point value to be zero. This will work. We just need to get rid of these beziers. If you do hard interpolation and these bottom ones are hard interpolation of one of these. That's all right. I think that's fine. It's not the most beautiful boat bottom. Yeah, on any other tool you can basically go like if I change on the spline thing, if I change that to five, and like, Oh, what was the default? You can go back here and do Reset Default, then it will go back to eight, or you know, well, actually we don't really want them linear, we want them curve because it's making weird angles. We do want them curved, the Beziers need to be exactly lined up with the axis. If they were still an angle, you can switch on magnet snapping. If you click on this little magnet here, you can do snap to enable snapping, work plane snapping, you could turn all these things on. It is really good. I would definitely verse yourself in using this. Bow, I don't know, is this the bough? The bow is front? What do you call this bit? I thought this bit was the bow. This is the Stern, this is the, Oh, this' got a name. We could add some thickness. A nice easy way of adding thickness is using this cloth surface object and then you can drop your cemetery into the cloth surface. It is used for clustering clothing, so if you have a cloth simulation, it's made so that you can add thickness to clothes because it's easier obviously to simulate cloth if it's just two-dimensional. I'm going to use it for making our boat thicker. Yeah, so don't really need much, that's looking good. I think I'm going to bring thong back because we haven't got a thong here at the moment. Does this work? This doesn't work in there. Yeah, there we go. Now, I need to decide whether we want a little bit of extra detail on here because we could add a rim around the boat. I think that'll be nice to add a little bit of extra detail to the boat. Yeah, we've got a little bit of a notch there, but that's all right. I got, one on that side as well. I think we could flatten the boat into geometry and then smooth that out. That would probably be the best way, if you say in the render, that's the thing, I think basically leave things live until you absolutely have to go in and edit them, and at the moment that's not causing me enough of a concern I think. One thing is maybe this has got a bit of a weird shape. Great. Let's go and make this detail. Another thing I'm going to use now is an instance object. I'm going to just make an instance of this for the moment. Click on the top spline and make an instance object. We've got this spline instance, if you hide that for the moment, you can see this is a non editable version of our spline. Really handy because if I edit this spline inside the boat, if I want to change the shape of the boat, it will automatically update this instance of it as well, but we can do stuff with this instance. I'm going to make a sweep and then add a rectangle. Let's make a rectangle a little bit smaller because I'm want to add a trim around the top of the boat. Let's drop both of these into the sweep. Got a nice little bit of detailing around the topic of the boat. We didn't have to model anything. We literally just had to make an instance and a sweep nerves, and now there. Let's also make another symmetry object for this. There is a bit of an issue here. There symmetry object is not connecting these ones at the front. Very well. This is the thing we might have to go back in and fix later. Yeah, these two different scale modes. If you go to model mode and scale, it, if it's irregular object, it's fine. It will just scale the object, but it won't change its coordinate scale. It's literally changing the physical object to be smaller. It's not changing the coordinates, so it's actually a destructive scale. It's because the instance is referencing the actual size of its original spline, and because that's not changing, if I went in and scaled the original spline, it would scale the instances as well because it's actually changing the size of the spline. However, if I switch to object mode, then it does actually change the scale of the coordinates. If you watch with my spline instance, now it scales that separately, but it's actually a non-destructive scale, so I can just click on these coordinate scales and terminal back to one, and then it will be perfectly matching the original spline again because they've got the same scale. The reason I wanted to do that is because I wanted to see if I could just change the scale of this, because I think if I just make this a bit thinner we get rid of that ridge in the middle there. Basically, the spline is not in the middle of the extrusion. The loft is making the surface directly on the spline position. Cloth surface is extruding away from that, so I can't have the extrusion happened in the middle of the spline and the sweep nerves sweeps along the middle of the slide. What we're getting at the moment is an offset, the trim is offset. I'm just going to scale it to fit. If I scale it down on the x axis a little bit. Yeah, I'm getting a little bit of sweet distortion here. If I make this top splines, this spline instance is referencing this spline. Maybe let's rename this [inaudible]. Yes, so let's try changing this. If we select boat top and instead of natural, maybe do subdivided. Obviously, just made less subdivisions there. What does naturally like? Yeah, this got loads of subdivisions here or it's got an extra one and subdivide it, just so happens it doesn't. That's fine. Nice and clean. I'm very happy. The other, I mean, the other issue is this front bit solo, just this spline. Using these solid buttons here. You can do, just clicking on it will give you just that object that you've got selected, and if you go to Viewport Solo hierarchy, wherever object you've got selected, it will solo the whole hierarchy that goes below that selection, which is really handy. I wanted to try just adding a trim down here as well, so I go to my side view. Just do it by eye really, as if I was chasing something in Illustrator or something like that, probably end here. We can just copy this sweep actually. Basically, I just hold down Control and I copied this sweep object just so I didn't have to go and make a new one because I knew that one was in the same place, and also it can reuse the same rectangle I don't have to make a new rectangle and scale it down and stuff like I did. We start with the same size. I think it's too thick this way, so we can reduce that a little bit. Let's do the rest of the boat and then we can have a think about that. Perfect. Oh, yeah, I guess if you see the bottom of the boat, you might want like a rudder. Maybe there'll be a rudder. Hadn't thought about rudder, but for now we can add the mast and sails, so just making a cylinder for the must. I'm also just going to add a little bit of a bevel on the top, so I'm just going to click on the cylinder, go to "Caps" and do "Fill it." Maybe we can put a cube in there just so that it's got something to sit on if you do actually see inside the bot. From the camera angle, I'm thinking it's going to be like this, so I don't think you're going to see inside necessarily, but just in case you do, there's something in there, you don't see like a floating mast. I'm just going to make these sails. If we make a new node and just call it, Mast, then make it triangular. Now, that we've got our two sail splines, I'm just going to use an extrude on these for the moment. I think, what would be nice is if we add some rippling air through them. For the moment, just going to add a simple extrude, extruding along the long axis. If you go into the extrude objects and turn that to 0. I mean, I don't want them to have 0 thickness where they're going to be pretty thin. The x-axis is what I want, your axis may differ, and the easiest way to do this, I think it's just to grab the extrude and copy it. Delete a spline inside and put the other spine in. The last thing that I'm going to do on the boat for the moment is add a seat for the character to say on, because the next thing we're going to do is put the character in the boat. [inaudible] the mast to null, subtract these sales into the mast null. Just going to name this character Seat and I'm going to drag that out of this mast. This is not like rigging or anything like that. It's not going to move separately. They're a way you expect them to be. I'm just going to make a new null and call it boat. Eventually, the character will go in the boat, but for the moment I'm just going to drop all this stuff into the boat. I'm going to grab the character's seat, you probably not going to see the seat, so I don't really care about it too much, it doesn't have to connect to the boat properly. I'm just going to put it there so we know roughly where the character is going to go. Great, so that's the boat pretty much ready to go. Let's just recap some of the techniques that were used to make it. We used a loft object in combination with the splines, and then we put the loft object into a symmetry object, which at first I didn't know if it was going to work because I haven't done it before, but actually worked out really well. The symmetry object really nicely welded the half of the boat together, so that worked out really nicely. We looked at how you can change your modeling access in the scale tool or any of the other tools really, but it was really useful in the Scale tool to move the modeling access to the center of the world, which is, when you click on the scale tool, you can just go to the options, and that helped us just really easily scale then change the shape of the boat. Whereas it would have been more difficult if you left the axis in defaulting to the middle of the spline, you'd have to sort it, change shape or change the points of the individual spline, so that was really useful. I mentioned using the snapping tools when you need to be really accurate with your modeling and point placement, that kind of thing. I didn't go into loads of depth with it, but it's definitely good idea to familiarize yourself with it. When you open it up, there's lots and lots of buttons, but they're pretty self-explanatory, so just have a play around with it and I'm sure you can work out. We used a cloth surface to add a bit of thickness to our boat hall. That's a really useful tool, it's brilliant for whenever you need to give something that's flat, a bit of thickness without making it editable and modeling thickness. It's really live and it's totally adjustable whenever you go back to it, so keep that in mind if you ever need to do something like that. Then we used an instance of the top spline that we used to create the boat hole in the loft. We made an instance of that so that we could use it for the top of the boat trim is really handy technique doing that. Especially if you need to do lots and lots of objects that will runoff the same spline, you can just make an instance of that one spline and then you can just change the shape of it and all the other ones update automatically, so this it's really powerful that, using instances. We also use the solo function to focus just on the model that we wanted to change. Finally, we made some splines and put them in an extrude object, not to be confused with the extrude tool for when you're taking face and extruding it during modeling. This one is used specifically for adding extrusions to spline shapes. Amazing, so with the boat down, it's time to sit our sailor inside it. In the next video we're going to be doing some posing, so I'll see you there. 8. Posing The Character - Part 1: The bow is looking lovely so let's put our character in it. A big disclaimer for this section of the video is that this is completely the wrong way of doing it. I mentioned this earlier but really we should be just putting a simple rig into the character and then you can do a real pose like nice and easily, or you can change the pose really easily. But this is a modeling tutorial and doing a little bit more modeling is fine. I think it's good practice. Plus going into rigging is like a whole other thing. Really, it's hard to know which would actually be quicker in this scenario because we're doing modeling. We can just do that or if we did the rigging route, I'd have to go through all the rigging tools. If we know exactly where the character is going to be and what pose they're going to be in, then you can model it fine. It would be just as quick but obviously if you're going to be doing different poses or you're not sure if you're going have to tweak the pose later or obviously if you're going to be doing animation than a rig would be a much better root. Plus I'm definitely going to do a class specifically for character rigging at some point. Until then, let's keep modeling. Our boat is modeled, now it's time to put our character sitting in the boat. Unhide to the character. I'm going to go up to the object manager and hold down Alt and unhide these traffic lights. There we go, we've got this giant character. T is a shortcut for scaling. The best way of doing this. I think maybe we could move the hips down to where the sea is, so roughly there and then we can decide how big the character should be in the boat. Something like that would be good. First thing to do is, I'm going to go and hide the boat and I'm going to press turn the character seat to green. That way, the boat's not getting in the way of what we're doing. I could also bring the sail back because it might be quite useful because we don't want a character to intersect with the sail, we want to know where that is,. Actually we could probably do with having the rim there as well. That's good. I think that's quite good. That way we know where it's going and actually we probably could do the hull so we know where the feet are going but don't worry, we can get to that. Let's just start modeling. I'll just show you a quick useful thing. I see the sale is going to be blocking our vision on one side. It's going to be quite good to just see a wire frame of the, say on the mast. If you click on the sail and mast null or wherever you've put those objects and go to tags, this is why it's good to put it in a null because then you can just go to tags, render display, and that this display tag will affect everything inside the null. If you haven't put all of these bits into the same null, if they're everywhere, you'll have to make a separate display tag for each one of these objects. Click on the tag and then I'm going to click use at top here for this shading style. I'm going to put the shading mode onto lines. Now we've got our display at shading lines for everything in the scene apart from now the mast because this display tag is overwritten it. If I put this to normal bruit shading, the mast stays as lines mode. I'm just going to rotate the character roughly into the right position. I think if the character was rigged I'd keep the feet on the ground like that, keep the mast null at the bottom and then pose the character. What should we do here? I'm thinking maybe we should just put character down and then lift the legs up. I think that's easier because then we don't have to be grabbing the entire body because the head's separate, we can just deal with that separately and we don't have to model the head into place. We can actually just put a null and rotate it in there, we'll do that in a sec. I just got my original sketch up here and I like this pose because it looks like a little lonely guy in there. We could have him a little bit more relaxed but I like how you can see his knee like if he was relaxed his arm might be resting down on the side and he's leaning back onto the back of the boat. But this is quite a nice little self-contained pose but maybe it's a little bit too melancholic. Looks a little bit sad, I've drawn them up here in a bit more relaxed. I don't know. Let's see how we go. I'm going to try this pose first and if I don't like it, maybe we can change. He could be doing that pose but still be relaxed and he's just chill with this knee up. We still got symmetry on. I think I'm going to make it not symmetrical because obviously like when you pose stuff. One thing I like to do is even though I'm saving multiple versions of the scene, you don't always want to go back versions if you make a mistake. I like to actually, especially if I'm modeling, I'll put a null at the top of the scene so I make a new null, and I call this one old. Then every time I'm going to make a permanent change to something, a modeling or an object that I'm working on, I'll just make a copy into this old null. That way if going down a route and it's not panning out how I wanted it to, it's not really looking good, or I've done something that I can't undo, then I can just go back into the old folder and select an older version. I'm going to make a copy of this whole body thing into old by holding down control or command on a Mac, dragging and dropping it in there, and now I've got a copy in old and I'm just going to hide the old null, everything in here is going to be hidden. Now I'm going to click on the symmetry and I'm going to press sea, that's going to make one object out of the body. Go to side view and I'm going to make sure only select visible elements is off. I'm just going to select from the knee downwards. We might need to put some extra subdivisions in here. I'm going to switch back to my modeling layout just to remind people if maybe missed it before but these panels that I have out for modeling are basically all the panels in here that I use regularly for all modeling stuff. I tend to just bring out the main one and then start modeling and then if I need some extra stuff, I'll go in here, I needle these add tool, I'll pop that out as well. Then I just build up all the panels that I find myself regularly using to bring back that load out whenever you want, you can go to Window customization layouts, save layout as. I'm going to just start putting this guy into position. You can see how here the lines have now become inverted and honestly this looks all wrong. This is what I'm saying, the reason why it's better to have a rigged character is that you don't have to go through all the stuff like fixing your polygons but it shouldn't be too difficult. Maybe pose the torso first, so that we know where the knees are going to go. I'm just thinking about if you start doing things like this, then the main null position goes off. The character null is all nice and in the middle at the moment, as soon as you start moving the points off and all the axes go out but it doesn't really matter. We're not going to do any crazy animation on this. This knee null is going to be something like this. Don't worry about the weird angles, we're going to fix that in a bit. I'm going to imagine that there's another thing to put its feet on here. We've got some really weird angles going on, we're going to have to add some subdivisions so that we can make it all nice and straight. How's this looking? That's looking really weird. Let's add some subdivisions in. We're going to need probably two there. One here, one here, and probably one there. Let's see what we get, maybe we should do this before. Let me go back and add the subdivisions in. Sorry, so definitely, you're going to need one there and probably going to need two here. Let's try that again. Let's move this up. This is why [inaudible] first but its okay, let's bounce here. We'll get there. You just have to keep in your head, all the moves that you're going to do. Because look at this mess, you just open the scene and we're like, "Can you just fix these subdivisions?" You'll be like, ''What is this mess?'' It doesn't make any sense until you start straightening it out. That needs to go there. Is that right? Done something wrong. It's because it's two legs. Yes, it's two legs, let's go back. Actually instead of using these loop cuts, let me show you what's happening. He's got two legs when I made those loop cuts. I only did it on the front leg. Even though we've got visible thing, it doesn't apply to both sides because we got rid of the symmetry. We just add a cut on to the front leg. Actually the way we get around that is because these are just straight anyway. We can align, cut then visible only off, and it will basically do the same thing but we're always through. Let's make a couple of ways through that and then one there and one there. If we look, we've got basically the same thing but on both legs. I think the legs would be mostly symmetrical. We're going to need to check to make sure the smoothing is working here. Let's finish placing this and you can see. We're going to need another subdivision here. Use line cuts so it goes through both legs again and then pull this out and then use scale. I'll second that and then we definitely need some more cuts here. Let's just do that. I'm going to move the top of the body back to be straight. I want this curved back and then it's straight in the front. We can model that into the character. It's always good to check in real life so maybe look in the mirror. I think we may have discussed torso a bit too long anyway so we can bring that down because that looks bit more natural to me. If you look in the mirror and do the same pose, I've got mirror I was just checking, your knees basically come up to the top of your chest. Maybe the proportions for our character when I modeled him were quite way off anyway so we can fix that now. We need to sew the knees. It's not how your bottom area works. That doesn't really matter. We're not going to see that. It's probably better if this whole section come around here. Because what I've done is I've actually extended the legs. I've just bent the top of the legs rather than bending the hips. It doesn't matter if you see the back of the character when he sitting because it seen looks totally wrong. I see what I should have done is I should have put the subdivisions in here in this one between these two lines. Because here you've got both legs and it's making the butt look weird. I'm going to leave that now rather than undoing it. I'm just going to worry about the top of the knee because you're not going see where he's sitting. We get two more cuts in here so we can really control how his bend looks. You want them to feel natural, but because they're digital and graphic anyway, but in terms of their design, it makes sense that the poses would be graphical as well. I like the top of the knee. Just need to pull the button down a bit and maybe we can move this closer because in a moment we're getting these gaps between the body and the legs. It's getting better. Just trying to keep the volume of that cylinder as we go around. We're probably going to have to do a little bit of overlapping of these points. Like I said before, I don't like to do that much with such a low poly object. We might have to do it because as soon as they start overlapping, then it's going to be really difficult to edit. I'm just going to overlap until it's closed. Leave it like that now because now that I'm happy with it and it's going to close gaps. I'm going to do the same for the arms. I've got some subdivisions on here already. This is going to be a bit tricky because now we're going to be rotating it in. It could be around the knees. I guess you could be holding the rudder with the other arm doesn't mean we need to do a bit more modeling. I think that'll be good though because the scene is so simple at the moment. It would be good to have a little rudder there. I'll make this arm go around it's knee because we know that we want that there and as you know, I'm happy with the knees so it could all get messed up with the arms. I'm going to save another version of the body. If you've missed that, I held down control and dragged the body into the old null at the top. A good way to get this arm to go into the right place rather than moving it like this because then you don't know how long the elbow is. To keep the volumes of the limbs, you could just use the axis tool. If you press E, press on the axis tool and pressing E to go to the move tool. You can now move the axis around which you're modeling. If you deselect this, it will just reset back to where it was because the axis will default to the middle of your selection. But you can move the axis around. This is really handy if you want to do modeling like this. If I put the axis where the elbow is and then turn off the access tool, you now have an axis around which you can rotate the arm as if you had it rigged. Obviously this will just reset back if I deselect and maybe I'll change my selection, it will just default back to the middle again. If you just hadn't select the end here from the elbow upwards and move the access to the shoulder, turn it off again, it's the same as if you were moving the arm for the shoulder. It's obviously not deforming these points so we're going to do this manually. You don't have to move it and guess where it should be. I'm just going to follow what we did; how many subdivisions we used here. I'm going to put a loop cut here. I'm pretty sure we're going to be another one there and also we probably need three subdivisions here at least. I'm going to maybe count intuitively. I'm now going to use this access to position the elbow. I'm going to sow sort the shoulder a little bit first before I go on to the rest of the arm. I'm going to use my loop selection and select that cut we made here and move this over. I'm just try and get some nice rounding going on in the shoulder. We probably need to move this subdivision as well. I'm just going to start my loop selection. It could go into lines mode as well and make sure that you've got all these points selected. But it's really difficult to see what you're doing in this mode is all the lines are overlapping. As best you can, keep in your head where the subdivisions are, keep everything clean, keep it as simple as possible. The shoulders are looking good. The top of the arm is looking good. It's going to bring up this arm and wrap this hand around the knee. I'm going to move my axis again up to the elbow. The spacebar just basically toggles between the current tool and selection. I just deselected that. Let's reset my axis again, so let's just move that back again. Here, double check where it is. Maybe the arms are too long actually, as well. It's possible that the arms too long. When I do this pose in real life, my hand doesn't end up there. Ends up more like around there. Let's just move that down and definitely going to need more subdivision for the wrist. Let's pull that now. Maybe the best thing to do is I'm just going put the hand right where I need it. Then we can model it, everything else around it into the right place. I think something like this. Maybe we could put something in his fingers bend around. It's all looking smoothed. I think that's it. Your elbow's more towards your body. That's looking good. We're going to need a bend in the fingers and maybe we could put a note. The [inaudible] looks alright to me. You're going to see it from here. Maybe we can just pull this down a bit, something like that. Looks perfect. Subdivision in the hands so we can bend the fingers, we're going to do a loop cut. I think we'll move the whole character back there. Actually maybe we could even scale him up. I was thinking he's going to be too big but no, he's looking a bit small. That's looking good. Great. This is a good time to maybe take a break and recap some of those techniques we've been using for posing the character. We set ourselves up for rigging not by using so low, which is maybe a method you could have done, but you can really fine tune the visibility of your scene using the traffic lights next to each object in the object manager. We talked about how I like to use a null at the top of the scene called old or backup or whatever you want. It's just a really good place to drop models before you make a destructive or like a big change on something. You can easily go back to it if you don't like the way it's going. I use this in combination with increments save and keeping multiple versions and hitting save all the time. It's all a part of the same thing so that you don't lose your work and have to redo loads of stuff. I also mentioned using their access tool when modeling so that you can just put the axis wherever you want. For example when we were selecting the arm, it was really handy to move the axis which would have defaulted to the middle of your forearm here to move it to the shoulder, so that you can then rotate the arm around the shoulder like that. Trying to rotate it in the default position and then by I moving it back to where it should be. It's a little bit longer, so it's a good place to start by just moving it to a more useful spot. The character pose is coming along really nicely. But we don't know where the right hand is going to go. So in the next video we'll be quickly adding a rudder to the back of the boat. 9. Adding A Rudder: Welcome back. This will be a short one just to add a rudder to the back of the boat so that we know where the characters on will go. Let's get to that now. The boat is looking pretty good. Character is getting there. What I want to do is put this back on to be holding a rudder. I want to add a rudder to the back of this boat now. I'm thinking it would be nice to have a little bit of detail in the back there. I actually went back into Photoshop and I drew myself a little extra reference for the rudder on the back. I went online and had a look at some pictures of boat rudders and just added it in. It's such a simple shape, we could have just guessed but I just wanted to understand how they worked in real life so that I can simplify it. I'm going to do is stick here, that's the bit that it's going to be holding. I'm going to say there's not a very big gap. We might have to lift the sails up. First thing I'm going to do is go to the pen tool and just trace this rudder shape outline. Just on the top here, make this little opening. In fact, maybe I'll just go all the way to the bottom and I'm going to make a cup there, a cup here, and a cup here. I'm just going to pull this middle one out. It's just that, if the back of the boat is suddenly visible above the waterline, then there's a bit of detail there for you. Made the spline to that now I need an extra to make it into an actual object. It just puts the axis defaults into the middle the world and what I like to do is just move the axis to the center of the object. If you go to Mesh Axis, Axis Center, this is just to reset the axis points if they've gone wrong or you want to change them. It's like an automatic tool for that. If you hit execute, it now centers. You can see the center of the axis and the axis to the center of all points and then you can say 000 is like the middle of all of them. If I put y down to minus a 100 and execute, it will move it down to the bottom of the object. Now, obviously because this extrude has defaulted to the middle of the world, we can just drop the spline in there. Either you can drop it, extrude into the spline and hit "Reset PSR". I've got another one here because a bit more easy access and then you can drop the spline into the Extrude. We need to change your extrude settings but do that in a sec. But I just wanted to show you as well another way of doing that is if I undo, so we go back here. The extrude is in the middle of the world. If you just drop the spline straight in the extrude. Now the spline axis is correct but the extrude axis is wrong. The extrude is now the parent of the spline and there's a little tool here if you go to Mesh Axis, center parent to. If you select the child and induce and then hit center parent to, it will center the parents access to whichever child you've got selected and in this case it's the spline. We hit "Center Parent To," and now if you click on the extrude that you can see that the axis is now in the same place as the spline. I don't want my axis all over the place. I really like to have neat and tidy axis. It's really horrible when you open someone scene and you need to make a lot of changes and they've just modeled staff and left axis random everywhere. They might like model it in the middle and then they'll go, "Okay, I actually want it to be here", and rotate it in some weird angle and then the axis is just in some completely arbitrary position, completely arbitrary angle and then it's really difficult to get the axis to be back into a sensible location like precisely as well. It just becomes a bit of a faff and you're trying to avoid faff, because let's all agree, 3D is a bit of a faff generally, lets try and reduce the faffness as much as possible. Yeah, I will see the extrude was going the wrong way. You can see if I just turn up the extrude like my spline is in the middle, is perfectly in the middle and then the Extrude is offset by certain amount, so the easiest way to deal with this is to set the extrude to be the width that you want. I think two is going to be all right and then just go to coordinates and hit "Minus 1." Let's now make the stick. I don't know what it's called. Let's call it stick. I'm just going to make a cube for the stick. Move this into place. Know what? Let's do a little bit rounding because I want to round. I know there's no rounding on this thing but maybe we will be adding that in later. We'll do a passive finishing touches and if there's any little bits like we can tie to the front up and stuff. I'm going to go to my Extrude and go to CAPS and have bevel shape. Let's just increase this a little bit. Rounded bevel, that's fine and then I'm just going to match that in this cube. I'm going to hold down control because I'm on a PC or Command on a Mac and just drag this down to copy it. Is that enough detail? I think that's fine actually, because this is so low detail anyway. If you start adding too much fiddly details in certain areas it'll start looking too complicated here and not complicated enough over here. It's just, you want a nice balance on complexity. Great. That was nice and quick and adds a lovely bit of detail to the back of the boat. Let's quickly recap what we did to make the rudder. We use the reset axis tool to move the middle of the axis to the rudder spline that we've made, is a really handy tool. I'm surprised we haven't used already actually, because I tend to use it all the time. It's quite powerful as well. It's got loads of options in there, so definitely familiarize yourself with it. We then use the extrude object again to add a surface and depth to the rudder. I made a really big deal about this axis and moving the extrude axis to the rudder and maybe I didn't say at the time, but it's not necessary. I just like to have my axis, like all lined up so everything is zeroed off inside each other. It's just really good practice to do that. 3D is complicated enough and you should be really doing as much as you can to reduce that complexity if possible so it's a good thing to do. Then we just use some primitive objects, just the standard shapes. We used a cube and a cylinder for the rest of them rudder parts. Great, so in the next video, we'll carry on posing our object now we know where the road is going to be. I'll see you there. 10. Posing The Character - Part 2: Great stuff. Now we have the rudder stick thing. I know what it's called. It just popped into my head, it's called a tiller. Tilling arm? I don't know, maybe it's not. But anyway, this stick thing is in the right place. We know where the character's hands going to go. Let's finish up the character pose. Great. I think that's my rudder done. Let's finish off this character. First things first because I've added all these new rudder elements. This is quickly tidy that up. I'm going to add a new null and call that rudder. We must do that now. I'll put this here because actually this might be a good null to animate, you know what, maybe we won't animate this rudder. I was thinking we could animate it rotating backwards and forwards, but I just realized the hand is going to be attached to the stick and we're not going to be able to animate this arm because this character is not rigged, so it's just going to have to be static, but that's fine. This is an animation tutorial anyway. Grab all the objects you've just made for the rudder and stick them in the rudder null, and we'll drop that along with the main boat container. Let's temporarily put his head on. The axis for the head is in the wrong place, so let's just turn the axis too alone and move that up to where the neck is. Let's go to side view so I can make it a bit more accurate, just move his head down. I think you should be looking up at the sail. He's obviously lost at sea. This is clearly what's happened to this character. He's going to be a bit sad, but maybe he's holding out hope. He's just a bit cold right now that's what he's huddled up in his bow. That makes sense. I'm just going to pull this back out a little bit, so he's got a bit more of a hunched over look like the illustration. I'm just trying to make it flush, more or less flesh, but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to model the hand going down onto the stick and then we can reposition it afterwards because it's easier to keep him nice and square like this for the moment while we're making major changes to the body. One here, and maybe another one here for sure, and then we're going to need another one for the wrist. Actually let's deal with the hand later because let's keep it simple for now. I'm going to move the axis again. There's going to be a twist in the hand because we need it to go this way, so I might do a bit of a twist here. Actually let's just put the hand in the correct position first, so we know all the twists. I'm going to set my access tool again, lift that down to the elbow because that arm is a bit too long, isn't it? Let's keep this away from the body so it can allow the sitting. Now we can just twist the hand into position. I just didn't want to have too much of a twist here because this is getting very messy and we're going to have to unpick this loop, select these shoulder points because this has been completely wrong at the moment. We're going to have to rotate this around, the same thing as we've done before with the legs and the arm. There's a much steeper angle here, so we're going to have to be doing some more and would stay in line with the shoulder. Maybe now is a good time to move these shoulders, so let's do that. Let's do this slightly scary move. The reason it's scary is because you can see when the character's square, you can see all these things are aligned. You can select them in a symmetrical way. As soon as you saw twisting things around, it gets really complicated and confusing. For instance, I want to pivot the body probably around this shoulder because I don't want to lose position on his shoulder. I'm going to go too far because I'm a bit scared of this move. Reason, because you can't just undo it. You're never going to be able to get that back in alignment again. You see how it's all gone up here, so rotate it in all these angles. That just looks like a jumbled mess now. I'm just going to double-check to make sure I'm happy with that before carrying on. As a result, we need to move the elbow back, but that's looking much more natural now. Get this shoulder looking at it, isn't good. Then we just need to bring these ones in closer to the body. Now let's move on to the elbow, make sure that's looking correct because this could be differently a bit if I move this in like that and then pull the elbow out to make it sharper. This looks like it gets too fat though unless it's going to skew it slightly, but that's okay. We're getting little bit messy now, but we knew that so I think it's okay. We're on the final stretch. I think we need another subdivision there for the wrist so that we can get this transition to the hand looking a bit smoother. We probably need to make quite a few cuts in this hand to make it rappel round. His thumb needs to be in line there, so we could potentially move this whole hand down a bit. Let's just move his head back a little. He's got giant chin in the tip. Now I'm just going to rotate this all the way around. I'm missing the point there, make sure we get all the points selected. If you are going to look really closely at this, then maybe it would be good to make it a bit more accurate. Obviously, it doesn't look great from here, but when you're looking at him from here, you think you're going to see this. You just need to get the idea that he's gripping it. Let's see. I think that's fine. Just in case you see the thumb or maybe we need to move this elbow down a bit. Actually now looking at this angle, it looks a bit too high. Obviously, when you grip stuff, you're a bit more like this. There's a bit of intersection at the back here, so maybe we can fix that because you might actually see that. Obviously, if the hand is here, it's going to be really difficult to select just the hand. There is a way to do that. If you haven't got a clear shot of something that you want to select, you can select the nearest loop selection. Let's say I just wanted to select the entire hand. If I did that, if you hold down Control or Command on Mac and click on the edges, it will give you an edge selection of what you've just selected with the points. Then you can go to Fill Selection and just select. It will select everything on one side of that, dividing selection. To transfer selections across to these different modes, you have to hold Control Command. If I hold down Command and go to points, it will give me a point selection of the same thing. I'm just going to move this hand, so it's a little bit more centrally aligned on the steering stick. Now I'm just going to select this because it's looking a bit stressed out. Maybe we just relax him down a bit. I know these are really small tweaks now and obviously these little tweaks so that can just go on forever. It's probably more useful to you for you guys just to see how I'm doing things rather than me getting my character perfect. I want it to look good as well because I could do this really quickly, but it would look terrible. It can be the square thing going on here. I'm just going to spend a couple minutes trying to de-square for his back. This is pretty good. We're pretty much there. Make sure you're hitting Save. I'm just going to do save incremental. Let's leave it there for a second. Obviously, we now need to go in and finish the scene. I think the next thing we'll do is the water. We'll get the water going and then we'll do final polishes and wrap this up. Well, that's the main chunk of the modeling out of the way. We have our character and our boat, and they're pretty much complete. It packs off in the back, not lows to recap in this one as it was more of the same of just moving the character into place, but there were a couple of things to point out. It's a good idea when modeling something that's like a complicated shape to try and keep the model square in the view point either to the front or to the side because as soon as you start rotating it, the mesh starts to look really complicated and it just gets more difficult to see what you're doing basically. Keep that in mind. Also we looked at how you can use loop selection on the edge mode and then use fill selection to select the whole part of that, which is really handy. You can use loop selection or you could make any loop as long as it's like a sectioned off part of the model, and then you can use fill selection to select the rest of that thing using that line of the dividing lines. It's a really handy thing to keep in mind. Amazing. I think the model isn't a really good place. There's still a few things that I want to tweak here in there, which I think it would be good to show you because it will be using some different techniques, but for the moment, let's get the water going, so we have something for this guy to float on. 11. Creating Sea Water: In this video, we'll be setting up some water for our scene. We're basically going to make some noise textures to use in combination with displacement. It's a really good method of doing it because you basically get the animation for free, there's animation options directly in the noise texture. Let's set that up now. I'm pretty happy with where we've got to at the moment, there's a lot of maybe some little tweaks that I would like to look at, maybe this front thing. But for the moment we need some water because at the moment he's just floating in mid air. Let's give this boat some ocean. The first thing I'm going to do, can't see where there is, is create a plain object which is just one of the standard primitives. It's got this number of subdivisions and I'm just going to increase that a lot because we're going to need it a lot for this to create a water surface. There are actually plugins that will give you ocean surfaces and I've seen seen actually some other tutorials on Skillshare on how to make a realistic ocean and everything is quite cartoony and graphic in here. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do, we're going to do it together. The way I'm going to do this is using displacement. If you want to model something that's got a real random bumps on it, then this is a good method. Like if you want to make rocks or you're trying to make some a lot of nature scene environments, that kind of thing will require random bumps and you don't want to be going in there modeling every single little bump. It's quite good to have a bit of displacement to get you going. Displacement maps are really handy in a number of ways. I'm going to create a new material. When did I make this? I don't even remember making that material. I must have double-clicked on the material books at some point. Actually, let's make it null and the character and the boat inside the null boat master. Let's create another null and make this water and then we'll put the plane in there. But just in case there was something else weird going with that material, I'll just delete it and we'll make a new one. If you just double-click on the materials panel or you can go to create new default material, does the same thing. Click on that new material you made and we don't need to worry about anything inside here because we're only going to use the texture box here in color. Click on the drop down here and select noise, and let's just leave it at that for a moment. We can go in and fit it with these settings in a moment and then drop that material. First we need to make displacement objects. Click on the menu modifiers are up here and click on displacer and drop that into the water null. Displacers like a lot of modifiers, they'll work if you put them either as a child of the object you want to deform or if they're inside a null with objects, they'll distort or modify any of the objects that are in the null with it along the same line or all children of that, where it is or if you want it to just affect one object, then you can put the modifier inside the object as a child of that particular object and it will just affect that one. We're only going to have the plane in there, I don't think we're going to have any more stuff being affected by this thing. It doesn't matter either way I'm just going to put it above, just I don't know. Drag the material, I'm just going to call this material something. It's going to be water, we have water [inaudible]. What you need to do to connect these two things together, you need to click so they just dropping it on there does nothing. You can actually use any material that you've got in your scene for the displacement. I like to just drop it straight on there so you know which one is controlling it. But to actually use this material, you need to click on the displacer, go to shading and go to channel and click color. Custom shader, you can actually just put a noise directly into the displacement map but there's something about that I don't particularly like. I've really liked this thing that you can just select a channel of a material down here. It's just because it just makes a bit more sense for me that I know that I'm using a texture as a displacement, and textures go down here. Did I mean if you've got a texture, then it's just in this object. I know there's something feels a bit hidden to me, so I like it just to be down here with all the other materials. You can put it in layers, I haven't covered layers in any of my classes, but this is the layer manager. This is a really good way of organizing a complicated scene and we won't go into that right now. But yeah, you could put it in its own separate layer so you can see differentiated from all the other materials. What we've done is we've put just to explain how this is going to work. In this material, we're using the color channel and I've put noise in the color channel. Which ever channel you select here, it will look at that channel in the material that you're going to drop in, and then you just drag the material tag for that material into here. I've just remembered another reason why using a tag in here is so much better is because you can transform it with the however this mapping is working, you can use the transform material tag tool here to change the orientation of your displacement or mess around with that. Because I'm going to change this away from UVW mapping to flat mapping, so go into the material tag and change that to flat. You go to texture mode so you can modify the texture projection because texture is a 2D, so well noise is a 3D technically, but for me it makes so much more sense if you just use it how it would be mapped onto a flat plane. You want this plane to be oriented with the plane. For me, this makes intuitive sense and you can scale it up and down and you can see, you can't have a direct connection with moving the noise around. This for me makes the most amount of sense when you're making a two-dimensional displacement. I should have said there you go, we've got water rather than talking about all these things. Yeah, and then in the displacer you go to object you can increase and decrease the intensity of that. Yeah, let's go and have a fiddle with the options. I'm thinking maybe something like that. I'm just going to have like really big water like something like this very soft, it doesn't need to be like that complicated. When we do a little bit of animation, which we'll do later as a sort of a bonus material for this class, I'll show you quite a nice way of that we can attach the boat to this so it has this like automatic bumping up and down thing. Obviously when if you want it like really small tiny little ripples, you're going to need to add so many subdivisions on here that it's just going to get ridiculous. You'd have to use some other, like using this displacer maybe not the best way to make really tiny ripples. You could use a displacer if you're using like a render time displacer so there's like a different way of doing that. In the material option there's actually, let me just use this material as an example. We probably wouldn't use this material for it you'd use a separate material that you'd put like it would be like the water material that you put on the water. But there's actually a displacement section here and here you can set how many subdivisions it does at render time so you can make the water object way way detailed. When you hit render, it will just add all that detail and then so you don't have crazy detailed mesh in your viewport, which would definitely slow you down. But because that's a render time thing, it would only happen in these. This material is the default Cinema 4D materials and anything that you do at render time with these materials is not going to work in a different renderer. I guess if you're learning Cinema 4D, it's definitely a good idea to at least learn the fundamentals of the default render systems standard and physical, they're both similar thing and they both use the same material system. But they're quite limited in terms of render time. They're basically, they're great when they were made but they're little bit old-fashioned maybe I would say now particularly since redshift and octane render is like this that run on the GPU have come out. There's just so much more power there and lot more options, and they're simpler as well. Anyway, I've gone off in a bit of a render tangent there. But yeah, just to explain the different types of displacement, for example redshift will have its own displacement system. This level of displacement we're doing here for the water is technically modeling because it's actually deforming the actual mesh and you can see it in the viewport, and this will come through whichever renderer you're using. But any of the material based displacement when you work on the renderer that you're using. Best thing now is actually to decide on our camera. Let's make a camera because we don't know how big to make the water until we know what you're going to be able to see in the actual scene and click on camera and make that selection. Now, if you click on this little target next to the camera that will make, I think it just makes this top left one the default perspective view, it makes that the camera view. You now can see the cameras written up here and then when you move this around, be aware that you're actually moving that camera object it's not just the default view, as its at this point that I like to make another perspective view over here. This is the default camera view and we're in no danger of moving this camera around. Oh, yes so I made it parallel. Thats way I like to set up anyway, you can do it however you want. I'm going to make a longer lens because I think this is always a bit wide from making nice photographic things it's quite nice to have a longer lens and normally take it to quite an extreme so maybe let's try. I'm good, and I'm going to make the actual render. I'm going to make it square because, I'm just going to post this on social media. For the moment, I'm just going to make this four by three, so that's going to be 1440 across by 1080. I quite like working in this format just because I like having four by three. It makes sense to me. It makes sense in terms of social media as well. I don't really want this water going off into infinity. So either I'm going to have a slightly steeper angle on the boat, but I don't want to see inside the boat because we're going to get water in there. We could try bending the water out. Let me just see what that looks like. I'm just going to drag a bend into here. This is probably something I'm going to completely undo. I'm going to try and making an infinity backdrop like in professional sound stages and stuff or photography studios that have this infinity wall, which is basically a white surface with a curve so that there's no angles and it just looks like a plain white background. I'm going to try doing that with water, just see what happens. If it looks really unnatural in there, just leave it. I'm just going to move the plane around. Another benefit of not having the modifiers inside as a direct child of the object is that you can move the object inside the deformation. So you can see even though my bend here is like this, if I move the objects, the object actually just goes through the bend. I'm just going to reduce the size of the plane a bit so that we've got too much geometry that's off-camera. When you're composing, I find these transparent sides a bit distracting because I can see the edge of the plane there, and you can get rid of that by going to Options, Configure, and going to View, and then you can change the tinted border pasty. I'm just going to move the camera in. I think something like that. This might potentially just look like a massive tidal wave [inaudible]. I think it's going to be okay, so let's see. Maybe we can just make it bend a little bit bigger or make it less. We'll make it a slight softer. It's good. That looks pretty nice. Probably I should have explained some of this before, but I'm just going to go in and fit it with the noise settings. I think I'm just going to go with this because this is like plane soft noise, looks really nice. I'm going to increase the subdivisions here because we're not going to be doing any render time subdivision increases. Let's just make this 300 by 300. Play around with the noise a bit more just to see what else comes out. Ideally, it would look like really realistic water. There's two ways you can go here. You either go really graphic or you go fully realistic. I think going graphic and subtle in this situation is better because in this way it's easier for us. Getting into making realistic water with ripples and stuff is just going to be really difficult. Let's just go with this. It might just look like glass, but we can always add another layer of small ripples in the material render. I'll cover some render stuff, but if it's getting too deep, maybe we'll call it a day. But I just want to go into noise here. I should explain what I'm doing. I'm going to Material and I'm going to go back to the Color tab and I'm going to click on the ''Noise.'' Now, in here, you get a lot of different options with the noise. There's actually different types of noise. If you click on this tiny button on the right here that you would never see. If you click on the main button, you get all the names. But if you click on this small one, you actually get to see a little thumbnail of these. There's lots of different things in here. They're all different stuff, but I guess they're just different mathematical formulas of making noise. You can click on these things and they've got like loads that was massively detailed. This one's made out of squares. This one looks like a mountain landscape. Once you get more and more into materials, you can actually combine noises. Noises are great. They're just fantastic for making any kind of organic material. The possibilities are pretty much endless with noise, it's a very, very powerful tool. If we were going to make small ripples on water, this is looking a little bit more realistic. One last thing I wanted to talk about with the noise is you can animate it. There's animation speed here. If I set that to one and hit play on the thing, you can see it's actually moving. I'm going to basically make the boat animate without animating it. I'm just going to the animate the water. You can actually add a movement which simulates wind a little bit, so this just makes the actual noise itself ripple when you do animation speed. If you put a value into this movement and give it a movement speed, wow, that's way too quick. There we go. We can actually see now it's rolling down. Still way too fast, but I want maybe the z, maybe the y-axis? Yes, we want minus one and then maybe minus 0.1, maybe minus 0.5, then we get some nice movement on there. Maybe this is a bit fast. Yeah, it's too fast. It needs to be a little bit more chill. The movement box just sets the direction and it sets like how far the movement goes in that direction. It's a bit of a weird system. I guess this is like a vector, isn't it? Then this is like speed multiplier. I don't know why that's a percentage. It's all a little bit confusing. Basically, water is normally moving in a direction, so the ripples are moving along because the wind is blowing them. That's why it always looks really unnatural if you you have zero speed and you've only got rippling. It looks digital noise because you don't really get this on water. It normally moves in a direction as well, so it's normally about the combination of both things. Then if you just make it move with no rippling, then it just looks like solid ground moving along. But I added another rippling on top of this one, a small one. It will probably look a bit better. But yeah, let's see how it go. I think that's pretty good. Maybe I'm getting a bit too much into the animation right now. I'm an animator. I just want to get through the design there and start making it move because it's find bit of fun. Great. The water is coming along really nicely. I did actually carry on working on the water after this video for that final shot. But I'll be talking more about what I did and the changes that I made in the wrap-up video. But for now let's recap some of the techniques we used to make the water. We started with a plane with a healthy number of subdivisions. Then to that we applied a displacement modifier. Then we made a standard material and added a noise shader to the color channel. We then drop that onto the displacement modifier and made sure that it was actually linked inside the displacement modifier and we use the noise to drive the displacement. After that, we needed to know how much water we're going to see, so we had to set the camera up for the scene and compose it with the boat. Then I decided that seeing the horizon was not going to be so good or it would complicate things, so I tried bending the back of the water up, which actually worked quite nicely. Then we knew how much we could reduce the size of the water by so that we're not slowing our scene down with unnecessary amounts of water that's going to be off camera. We then went into the noise settings to tweak the look of our water. At first, I thought a very simple graphic, water was going to work, but later on I decided to make it a little bit more realistic, which I'll talk about in the later video. Finally, we looked at some of the animation settings within the noise. When you combine movement and annulating, you can create a very convincing water effect. When you start combining noises on top of each other in a good way, some the speeds are balanced, then you can make some really good looking water results. Noise is very powerful, people. So remember that. Great stuff. We're on the final stretch. There's a few things I actually want to tweak in the model. It's definitely a good one to watch because there's a lot of more techniques that I'll use to push the model to that final level of polish. I'll see you there. 12. Modelling Final Polish: In this video, I'm basically just going to carry on fiddling with the model. So imagine this, it's six o'clock, Friday evening, you've spent all week making your beautiful artwork, you send it off to the client and they responded, "Great start." Then you have to spend the all weekend applying their feedback. It's really annoying, right? But when you compare your Friday version to your Monday version, you're probably glad that you spend the extra time finishing it off. There's a bunch of extra techniques here that I'd like to show you and that will really push your models to the next level. So let's do it. Great. So there's a few things I want us to do. There's the sailors, bothering me a little bit. This gap is looking too big. I I'm thinking now maybe we should have, that's it, I'm looking up my boat language and boom is what it's called. I'm just going to carry on fiddling until I'm happy basically. Then I'll just skip the bits which I think are boring for you guys. So I'm actually going to hide the water for the moment because we don't need to see that. I'm also going to hide the reference, because I don't need to see that anymore. Let's move this in. Also I think it would look better if it was taller. But yes, how about the front sail is smaller isn't it? Than it's normally like, maybe more this way. Mast will need to be higher and maybe we should make enough room for the boom. Yeah, I think it would make more sense if there was a boom there. I'm just going to copy the mast. I want to shift the camera up a bit to account for the extra height there. I think I like this asymmetrical look and in this case [inaudible] to the front of the boat. That's looking nice. I'm just going to move the camera back up a bit. I'm just going to do this manually. I need to extend the water up the top a little bit. Is anything else I wanted to do? I was thinking what would be really nice is we can add some ripples in the sail. We'll add the same ripples that we've got in the water. We'll just use the same technique in the sails to add wind going through the sails. Just really subtly. I'm a little bit cautious because I'm not sure how we're going to keep these attachments because obviously it feel rippling too much. These corners will start looking like they're not attached to the pole. You can add fall off to the displacement. So we can try doing that. Also, these are looking a bit too sharp as well, so I want to add a slight bevel on these sails. They're probably a bit too thick as well. Just make it super thin then we can add maybe 0.1, something like that. That's looking better. Basically, what we do need to do, let's go back to this. So if we're going to add ripples in, we need to have subdivisions on here, because at the moment, the spline is default to when you have linear splines of this. In fact, let's make them properly linear, because at the moment, these are actually tiny, little Beziers. So I'm just going to make him hard interpolation. There's no other weird randomness going on, because all these little randomness add up to a big, whole mess. If we click on these Extrudes and go to Caps, the Cap Type down here at the bottom is quite like a really important feature of the Caps. It's all tucked away at the bottom and it's not very clear what this does, but basically, it defaults to being an n-gon, which is just one giant polygon with lots and lots of sides. What we want is actually, we need some subdivisions in the surface. So if I tend to go rotating, you can see how there's those subdivisions and all these things that we've already made, but not in the sails. The sails have no detail in them whatsoever. If I switch some Cap Types from n-gon to regular grid, which is probably what we're going to need. In fact, maybe not, there's a new, I'm going to pronounce this completely wrong, Delaunay. If you go to Delaunay, that's why I'm going to call it Delaunay. Then it actually does this really nice randomized subdividing. I think I can't quite say at the moment, but I think we need to add subdivisions to the actual splines themselves. Otherwise, it's a bit clearer if we go back to regular grid, you can see that it's adding a grid in the middle, but the edges are still really long. The polygons get really long edges. That's because it's joining up to the points on the actual spline. So you need to add subdivisions to the spline. I'm not talking points like these points, I'm talking to intermediate points. So splines have like you can add detail to the spline in the middle. So uniform or add like a uniform intermediate point along the splines between these points, a subdivision level, which is just controlled by this number. The problem with uniform is that it can mess up your corners. So if you want sharp corners, uniform is not good method because it might skip over the corner. I think subdivided is a good one because it will keep the points and so it will give you this angle control, but it will also give you control over the subdivision inside the points. But be careful fiddling with these, because if you go down to low and the subdivisions go up exponentially, your computer, all of a sudden will crash. Oh, no, what have I done? I might have gone to zero there, which will just give you infinite subdivisions. There's no way to get out of it. I managed to make Cinema 4D crash there by turning subdivisions too much. So yeah, just be careful with that. Luckily, I'd saved. I'm showing the regular grid, but I think Delaunay is good for cloths, I think, because it will give you a bit of a random thing. You wouldn't necessarily see a grid if you start seeing polygons, so it just ends up being a bit more natural. We're going to try carefully making this a bit smaller. That's looking better, maybe three. So that's looking nice. Great. Let's add a displacement. I'm going to copy this displacement material, because I want a separate one and we're going to probably want to change the settings on it. I'm also going to just going to copy this displacer. Let's make a new Null, put it in our mast and just name that sail. You might end up doing separate deformations for each of these sails, but for the moment I'm just going to put it on both ends and just set up. So let's drop the displacer on there. Already I can see something going wrong, because what the displacer likes to do is if you look down this end, obviously we don't want it to bulge symmetrically like this. I think it's working on the vertex normal. It deforms each point by its normal. The normal is like which way the point itself is facing. Basically all these like up for all of these would be this way on this side and then on the other side up is the other way because it's their face in the other way. That's why we're getting this weird, weebly, wobbly intersecting look. We need to change the direction to planar. Also this is still got the water material in it so let's swap that for the sail displacement material. Also I think we need to go into here and go to Shading and drop this one on here. They're named the same thing unfortunately, but you can go in here, and if you go to Basic, you can type material sail and in here we can then this material water. Then we can double check that the water displacement has the water material and the sail displacer has the sail material. The material has its own direction and the displacer has a direction as well. Because noise in Cinema 4D is volumetric. It work still, but I'm going to rotate this around so it makes a bit more sense because we want it to be deforming in this direction. So if you just hit "Play," you can see it moving now. Looks nice ripples going on. I think that's all right, but you see how I mean here, it doesn't really make sense for the corners to be waving like that. It makes it look like they're detached from the sail. So it would be nice to be able to constrain these. In Displacer, you have this Falloff tab if you click on these fields. They change this a few versions ago. It's very, very powerful now, but I was way more familiar with the old system and I haven't really had time to dig fully into this one. It works the same way, so I know how to get the results that I used to be able to get. But I think you can do some really powerful stuff with these fields. The fields before were linked only to the actual object itself. Now, when you create a field for this, you can use them multiple times across at all objects that use fields. I would highly recommend looking into the field system in Cinema 4D, especially if you're doing motion graphics. It looks really powerful and I'm looking forward to digging into deeper myself. The simplest way of constraining these, I think is with just a couple of fields, maybe we can just use two box fields. So if you create a box field, maybe I should actually explain what these are because I just said they're gray and I didn't really say what they do at all. Essentially, is a field of influence for this modifier. If anyone has used MoGraph with cloners and all these effectors, they all run on fields now. So they have like an area of effect, and these fields control the way the effect works. You can do some really cool stuff with it, there's box fields and linear fields. These are the most standard ones than all these other shapes. But then you've got formula fields and random fields and shade of fields which are controlled by textures and materials and sound fields which you can put your own audio file in and have stuff running off the sound. It's really cool. There's loads of stuff. Any kind of deformation or stuff you're doing with clones. They can be controlled with all these different fun things and you can combine them in those different ways as well. Essentially what we want to do with this box field is turn off the displacement along the edge of the mast. It looks like it's constrained to the mast. If we just move this around, wait hold on a sec, let me turn up the displacer so we can really see what's happening. The moment is 10. Remember to put it back to 10 later. But if I just pump this up massive and then move this box around, you can totally see, when I move the box away, it's off. When I move the box in there, is displacing inside the box. The first thing actually we need to do is invert that because I want to put this box in the middle here, and I don't want displacement inside this box. If I select the box and go to remapping, hit Invert, now it will displace outside the box, which is exactly what I want. It has a fall off as well. The middle of the box is, if you think of this as a number or maybe a percentage then in the middle will be zero percent influence. Then by the time it crosses this gap here to the out-of-box, it will be a hundred percent. Let me put this back down to 10 and see how that's looking. That's looking good. I guess it would be constrained at that corner as well. We could put another couple of fields in. I'm going to duplicate that box field and just put one at the bottom down here as well because I want to constrain the big sail to the Boom Arm. Because I duplicated that box field, it didn't look like it was doing anything to me. The reason is, once you duplicate that field, you have to actually apply that field to the modifier that you're using. Because if you go to the displacer and go to the Fall off tab, you can see that only that first box here was in there. You need to drag the second one in there. Now both of these fields are working with the displacer. Let's add one more here. Another box field for that to normal and this is going to be, what did we call the front again? Bow. I think it bows and looking way smaller and then put this at the front here. But I'm guessing it is some kind of black and white field, on and off essentially. It's quite important how these work. If these all are normal, basically you can only see the top one but only the top one's working. These bottom ones are just covered up by the top one if it's all the normal, just like a normal in Photoshop layer sequencing. The same thing would happen if you had an image on the top here, you wouldn't be able to see the ones below unless you blend them together in some way. Rather than tending opacity down, which would make them all like a half power or whatever that would mix them together. But if you have screen, doesn't work, but if you do multiply, it does. I'm guessing these bits of dark or can be thought of as being dark in terms of the displacer. If you hit multiply on both of these top ones and then have the bottom one is normal, that will compound the effects. You can see here now it's all pinned apart from in the middle. The boom, the bow and the mast are all working now they're all pinned. Maybe these are a little bit softer because now that I can see that's working, they're being pinned a bit too harshly. Great, that's looking nice. I'm just going to go in and add a little bit of bevel because it's looking a bit too sharp to me. I'm just a bit scared that I'm going to knock this camera because I've got it in this place exactly where I want it and it's very easy to accidentally move it. I'm just going to go to tags, rigging, and protection. Then that just locks wherever object that has this protection tag. You won't get to move it. Just some of the locking options in here, you can limit its movement and stuff, which is really handy. This and click this and quickly find. Go into the sweep and click on this rectangle, which is the shape of the sweep. I'm just going to add a rounding onto here. Let's put too much at the moment. I was going to reduce that, more so, this doesn't need to be that sub-divided. It's really, really subdivided at the moment. I'm just going to reduce that angle. Increase the angle maybe the easiest way if we're getting a seam here now as well, because you'll just see that in the render and it will be a bit an ugly detail that I might get attracted to. Going to do the same for this whole ridge as well. Let's just make this a little bit of rounding on here, and just trying to reduce the subdivisions. If you don't do this subdivision reducing, and notice just like on one object here, but it really adds up. Eventually everything will be massively over subdivided and your seam will be really slow. Let's fix this front thing. I notice that there's a seam it has appeared at the back here as well. I'm going to get rid of that. I'm just going to, this boat top trim symmetry object. I'm going to make a copy of that into my old now, which is still up there so that we can always go back. Press C on this to make it into an editable object. Now this is actually a polygonal object. This is something you can't undo. You can undo it right now, but it's a destructive process. That's why I wanted to make a copy of it so we can go back to the sweeps if we want to. It's made all these things here, selection tags. I think some of these will be quite useful because I just want to select these end caps as you could probably just do others. But just to illustrate, you can restore selection and you can double-click on them as well. You actually get caps, so actually is just double-clicking on that selected both caps, which is quite handy and that's the sweeps. That was the front caps. This is probably the back caps. We don't want these caps either. We're going to join these together. It's all on here so we can quickly get rid of everything else. I'm basically just going to weld these ends together. I selected these two loops with that selection tool, stitch and so that will actually let you join these together. Lets you join seams like that. If there's symmetrical seams anywhere on an object, it will let you do that. The thing is about stitch and sew that I prefer about weld. Because weld let's you put it in the middle. Stitch and sew we'll pull one side all the way to the other. Unless you hold down control. If you hold down command, it will put it in the middle. Perfect. There you go. I'm going to try and do the same in the front. I think stitch and sew will work like this. There we go. You just drag where one of the points is, and if you hold down command, there we go. I'm just going to pull this out, they've got a bit of overlapping there. I'm just going to loop selection. Just literally move these away. We're going to have to do these manually one at a time. But it is not complicated. Loop selection. I think we'll see these black ones here needs to be pushed back, it's going to be a bit [inaudible]. Nice, I think well, that's pretty much perfect now, you need to just press [inaudible] Yes everything's looking nice and slick. I could bring the front point of this down until it just meets the top there. But actually there's another way we could do this is just make the top of it narrower. If you go into the sweep, you can actually go to the detail section in sweep object, and you can scale down one end compared to the other end. If I put another point there, because I just want to scale the top, just made a little taper. Great, I'm just looking at the character maybe his head is a bit too long. Is his head too long? It is a little bit of a long head. So maybe his nose is in the middle, I think that's a bit more sensible. It's looking a bit better, there is a way actually to do this automatically. We can try that. It has weird results sometimes but let's just see what happens. You select the problematic or the ones that are not looking smooth, and you can go to, have I got it up here? Iron. Iron will average out the points that you selected, you can see what it's doing there. It's moving them along an average that is decided between all these points. I think that's looking better, it's actually taking away the hunchback a little bit too. That's worked really nicely. That's really smooth now, so I'm very happy with that. I just had one quick thing I wanted to do on the model, and that is, this thing is just looking a bit thin to be now with fresh eyes, I think maybe it could do with being a bit thicker. Yes that's looking a bit better. Just need to get that toy boat vibe. I'm going to just do a loop selection on the outside. You have to select all the [inaudible] and then just transform it in this direction. I want it to just overhang. I'm just going to select Invert, just select the opposite, the inside. Keeping it as a sweep is really powerful because obviously I came into a problem there, okay, I figured out a way around it. But having made this an editable object and then modeling these together, I can't go back to this original sweep and just change the size of the square that was running along the sweep, I have to actually model it now. You can't go back to the sweep at all now because; well you can, but you just have to redo everything that we just did. It's a good idea to keep things as sweeps as possible unless you have issues that you have to get rid of. Unlike this ridge that runs along the keel because it's still a sweep, we can just adjust the size of this rectangle. I just want it to look a little bit more like Toy Town in a minute here. Full scale thing. Amazing, we're done. There's always something more to do, but for our intensive purposes, the modeling is finished and it's definitely been pushed up a notch. Let's quickly go through the extra tricks we learnt for the final polish. We tidied up the sales and prepared them for some wind ripples. There are a lot of extra little tiny Beziers on the points that I changed the hard corners. It's not an issue, but it's nice to have them all clean. We added subdivisions to the caps on the extrude objects so that we have some detail that will deform properly when we add the wind. It's important to set up your intermediate points along your spline correctly because the number of intermediate points determines how detailed your caps are; the subdivisions on the caps. But be careful not to add too many because as you can see, embarrassingly, as I was explaining it, I managed to crash Cinema 4D, so it was very sensitive. Always remember to save guys. After that we copied our water displacer and applied it to the sails so that we have a very similar type of displacement going on, on sails for the wind. Then we went through the fall-off system and how it can be applied to the displacer on the sails, so that we can constrain it to the mast, If it's moving too much close to the mast, it's not going to look like it's attached. We went through that. Obviously as I said, I'm not so familiar with the ins and outs in it, it's still quite new to me. But you just have to think of it like a stack of black and white images. This is how I think of it anyway. If you think of it like a stack of images, like your layers in Photoshop, if you don't use Photoshop, I'm sorry, there's a layer system basically. But yeah, essentially it is a good way of think of it, black and white images, so when you multiply them on top of each other, the black will show through. If that's the one that you want to be blending together for us, multiplier worked well. But like I said, it's not something that I'm super familiar with, made it as a better way of blending them together. Is like fiddle with it until it works thing. I'm sure there's a way of visualizing it better. I need to look into it, but I'm sure there's a way to actually maybe visualize it. If there isn't, there should be. But yes, so definitely do your own research on that. Like I said, there's loads of things you can do with all the different types of fall off in there, this is pretty powerful. We also went through the protection tag, which I applied to the camera, just so that you don't accidentally move the camera. You can do other things with that tag, you can basically limit the movements of things that only move a certain distance. I don't know if you're using it for controllers or something, it's quite useful. Another tip is that if you do accidentally knock the camera, if you pressed instead of Control Z or Command Z to undo, if you do Control Shift Z or Command Shift Z on a Mac, and it will just undo camera moves. Because you could knock the camera and then make a lot of changes in your scene and then go, "oh, my camera has moved." It can be quite big deal if your camera has moved. If you do Command Shift Z or Control Shift Z, it will undo just the camera moves and all the stuff that you've done in the scene will stay as it is, so that's a good one to remember. Next, we made the sweep object, which was a trim around the top of the hole. We made that an editable objects so that I could go in and join the places where I wasn't joining properly using stitch, so that worked really well. But obviously, we can't then go in and edit the sweep object options because there's an editable object. That's the downside of making things editable. We also looked at the tapering options inside the sweep object for the keel, which is that line, the bit of trim that I did around the bottom of the boat. There are some other options in there which is really useful so have a look; there's twist and things like that, so check it out. Finally, I used the iron tool to smooth out the pesky angles in the character's back, which kept becoming visible for me. Just selecting all those bits which were bumpy and using iron to average them out, so that they're nice and smooth, so that was handy. Well, we made it through the client feedback and I think we might get sign off on this one. We're not totally done though. What good is a beautiful model without doing something with it, and I'd really like to add a bit of movement and do a render so we can show it off. The next couple of videos I've put up as bonus classes, they're not really to do with modeling, but they're pretty handy. In the first one, we'll look at getting the boat moving and animating on the water, just simple stuff and in the second one we'll look at some rendering, so I'll see you there. 13. Bonus: Animation: Hello. Welcome to the first of two bonus classes. In this video, we'll look at making the boat actually sail on the water. It will be super straight forward. The water is already basically moving, all we need to do is attach the boat to it. We don't have to do any key framing, so I guess what we're doing isn't technically animation. But what's great about this method is that the scene can be as long as you like, the boat will just keep moving forever if you want. There's a few ways of doing this. I'll take you through a couple of ways and we'll end on doing quite a good method. I'll show you that now. The way I'm going to do the boat animating is we somehow need to link the main null of the boat to the surface of the water. There's a few ways of doing that. Let's say I make a new null. Let's just make this null a bit like a sphere. If you go to Object in the null, you can make it a sphere and just turn it away from camera, make it X, Y. Then we'll just make it bigger. Actually I'm going to color it as well. If I go to Basic, I'm going to display color on, then make it some color. You can actually change the icon color in the Object panel, makes it really visible. This is perfect for controllers like if you're making a character rig. These are perfect for the controllers of the arms, and legs, and stuff so that you can click on them nice and easily and they're visible in the Object panel as well as in the view part. I click on that. Then in Tags, if you go to Rigging, I was convinced that in Constraint, you can go to Clamp. Then in Clamp, you can select "Surface", then you put your target, which will be this water plane. Then it moves, but it only moves up and down. I was really convinced there was a way to make it roll as well with the axis like point in the direction that the surface is facing. But it seems to only take position, doesn't actually take rotation. I can't remember if I'm just doing it slightly wrong or maybe that wasn't. There is definitely a way of really easily clumping a null to the surface, but I've just forgotten what it is. I'm going to use a slightly different method. This is a bit more of an easy method anyway. Actually, there is a way, just to explain. This is a bit of a complicated method, but just to explain it, you can use a clump like this and select the plane. You've got the position. There's another issue with this one as well, actually, before I go into it, is that this will walk around. If you go away from the scene and then come back again, it might be in a completely different place. Maybe setting a 0, 0, 0 keyframe here to make sure it just always goes to that point would help. But every time I move away, come back, these numbers are all slightly different. It's just walking around. I think if you close the project and reopen it, it might just load in a totally different place. Anyway, let's see if having a 0, 0, 0 keyframe, that thing worked. What you could do is duplicate this and move it slightly and then have one of them point to the other one. You could actually just add another constraint here, just add an aim constraint, to the second one, for example, and just drop the first target in. Now you've got a working thing. But that thing where it walks around the scene, it's just a little bit fiddly and also having two things like this, it's all a little bit complicated. I think the easier method, more sure-fire method is using a cloner. I went away and I came back, and I did actually remember how it worked. It was really easy and we were so close. You actually, in the Constraint tag, you go to Surface like we did, then in this As box, I mean, this is why I forgot how to do it, it's because it's so unintuitive. But you click "As" and then you go to Normal. It says to surface mode, fixed position, align y, so it's a line in the y-axis. As, I mean, I think the default is none. Then you set that to normal. Then you can change the distance. I'm not 100 percent sure. I mean, I guess that pushes it away from the object. It's pretty handy. But if you set the difference to zero, and now you get full constraint to the undulating surface. I'm still going to show you the cloner method because I do think it's a bit more intuitive also, cloner's are really good. I don't know, it's a work-around, but this is probably the best method. But there are benefits to using the cloner as well. I mean, all these methods work. When someone opens your scene and they've seen that you've used this constraint and turn it to normal, they'll go, yes, that's a sensible way of doing it. If they open your scene and you've done it with a cloner, they might go, "Why have they done it like that? Why didn't they just use the constraint?" But this is the thing, there's a million ways of doing everything. Nothing is like the correct way in inverted commas. But you can do it with one Constraint tag using clamp. There you go. Then what we're going to do is make a cloner. Just click on Cloner object and then drop the boat into the cloner. If you've got the default settings like this, it will just make three copies. Actually that's not going to do anything. We need to set the mode first to object and then drop the water plane into there. So I've made a cloner, dropped the boat in, and I've changed the cloner mode to object. Then in the Object, target object for the object mode, you put your water plane. I'm just going to name that water surface. That's nice and clear. Now you can see water surfaces in my object. Obviously we only want one copy, unless you want a fleet of ships. We just want one copy. You can actually, if you adjust this seed, it will basically go through every single subdivision, every single point on this surface. If you keep messing with the seed, it will slowly, I have to choose the right direction. If you hold Shift, it will spin really quickly. We just want to put it back to where it was. That's maybe the best thing to do, just copy the boat for the moment and drag it out. That way, we can line it up perfectly with this one. If you go to Transform in the cloner, it gives you some axis to rotate. Just make that. Minus 90, 1890 did it? Let's try and get it as close as possible. It's hard to know if you're moving in the right direction. That's further away. You want it to be around there. There we go. It's a little bit high. If you click on the '"BoatMaster" inside the cloner, so I just deleted the other boat. We don't need it anymore. Then do Alt G, that will put the selection that you've clicked on inside a null and also keep the same coordinates. So it's pretty handy. Then I'm just going to call this boat container. That way we can just move the BoatMaster along its y-axis. If you you to coordinates in the BoatMaster, let me just explain what I did there, which I probably should have explained before what I was doing. But if you go to Object mode and then you drop the water surface in there, it clones onto a surface, because you can say here Distribution Surface and it will lock to the surface basically. Then clicking "Align Clone" here, which has defaults to on, will make your clone orientate to the surface. If there's any bumps in the surface, it will orientate to those bumps. Now hopefully we should have a nice rocking motion on that boat. It might be actually a little bit too violent because boats don't lock to the surface of the water. Maybe that's not looking so bad, but we could smooth it out. It's got this weird, random motion, I think. If it locks to the actual shape of the object, it's not moving with inertia, if that makes sense. I'm going to try a couple of things now. I've got a couple of ideas of how to fix this. I did anticipate this would be an issue. Because boats have a bit of weight, they'll rock around, but it will be more like an average of the water movement. I'm just going to check my frame rate, it's 25. I might make it 24, it's just my favorite frame rate. I prefer 24. I'm going to reset this to 200. I should have done this at the beginning, but it's fine. We can do it now because we haven't done in animation. I'm not going to do any keyframing in this. This is just going to be whatever automatic things happen. This button over here, the one I just clicked on, is if you turn all frames to off, it will try its best to run at full speed. If you have all frames on and you've got a really slow scene, it will go step through each frame as it loads each frame. If you've got all frames on and their scene is too heavy, it's probably running slower than 24 frames a second or whatever your frame rate is. If you switch it off, it will skip frames to try and match the frame rate, so at least you get the correct speed. I'm going to try one thing to try and smooth that out now without adding any more stuff. That is a delay effect. So if you go to MoGraph, you click on your Cloner, make sure you've got your cloner selected. Click on MoGraph, go to Effector here. Then add a delay. We should be able to smooth out that movement. That's what I'm hoping anyway. We'll check that in a sec. But I just wanted to explain if you didn't have your cloner selected and then you just created an effector, it wouldn't attach it to that cloner if it doesn't know what you're making it for. You'd have to then go into the Cloner and go to Effectors and drag in the delay effector into the effectors box here. Anyway, so let's just see if that's had any difference. Hard to tell, maybe not. Maybe we can just turn this up. There's a few different modes. But if I turn this way up, we should be able to see if it's doing anything. Yeah, it is working. Now that's way too slow. If we put this maybe at 78. Yeah, here we go. This is working. I mean, 90. Ninety looks pretty good. I was also thinking maybe we could make it so the head is not rock solid. So maybe his head stays kind of steady compared to these movements. But I think for this class, maybe we should stop at that. Because seeing this is a modeling class and not an animation class, it would take a little bit of rigging. I'm not sure we could do it inside the cloner. I would say also the thing about the delay effector, it will also maybe give you slightly different results each time you render. Just be aware of that. You could actually not have unrepeatable animation here. Brilliant. Our scene is moving. There is actually a slight issue with this method, with the cloner method, which I'll go through in the next video. Full disclosure, I didn't actually use this method at all for the final render, which I'll talk about in the last video. Let's quickly recap some of the key points that came up when making the boat move. First, I went through changing the display options on nulls, which is super handy if you are making controllers for a rig or something like that. It just makes them more visible in the scene. Then I went through the Constraint tag and showed you how you can constrain something to the surface of an object. At first, I had some issues getting it to take the rotation, but there is a hidden option there. I mean, I say hidden, it's not hidden, it's just named in a way where it's not completely obvious on first glance. But there are a couple of ways of getting the angle. Like I showed you, there's a way of using two nulls. Or there is actually an option in there where it will take the normal of the surface. But the main method I wanted to show you in the video was using a cloner to easily attach an object to a surface. What's quite powerful about that is the cloners can do other things as well. You can add effectors like delays or loads of other things, or you can even use it for its original purpose, which is making multiple copies of something and they're all attached to the surface. Although it does feel a little bit like a workaround, I think for the boat, it probably would have been best just to use the null with the Constraint tag. But it works. That's the important thing. But none of that matters, particularly because I didn't use any of these methods in the final render, which I'll explain in the last video. Like I said, we then use the delay effector to slow the boat down so that it doesn't match perfectly with the water. Because when you've got something totally attached to something that's undulating like that, it's just going to literally point in that direction, even though it has weight. Like in reality, a boat has weight. So we needed to add that delay effector to add back in that inertia that the weight of the boat would cause, stopping it from just rocking randomly backwards and forwards. The scene is effectively finished now. Well done. But unless you're going to load up Cinema 4D in front of your friends and family, there's really only one way to share this with your granny, and that's to do a simple render. In the next video, we'll have a look at doing that. 14. Bonus: Rendering: We're on the final stretch. I think I may have said that before, but this time it's actually true. What we're going to do is make a really nice just plain render, no colors or anything too fancy. Just so that we can actually show off the model. For this part of the class, I'm going to be using a render called Redshift, which is a plugin. It's a third party plugin for Cinema 4D. Cinema 4D does actually come bundled with Redshift, but you have to select it. If you don't have it, try and figure out a way of getting it. The demo version is fine. Let's get back to our scene and finish this off. I'm just going to set up a gray scale render quickly with you guys. I'm going to do this in Redshift. If you don't have Redshift then you can probably just skip this section, but I think because Redshift comes bundled with Cinema 4D now, it's probably quite safe to assume that most of you will have it. This is my main window and now, and it's just get really nice results later. We're not going to do any materials. We're just going to have a plain white material on there. Then we'll just set up some lights so that at least you can have something nice to look at these gray scale renders are quite nice to look out when you're showing off your models. Go to Create Redshift material. Material and Redshift material would have been created. This is the Redshift node graph. I'm not going to explain it so that you can go and use Redshift. I might do it separate Redshift tutorial eventually but for the moment, I'm just going to explain what I'm doing just to get the results that I want. This is the output node, so this is just what you plug in to go to the surface of the object that you're working on. The main meat of what you're changing in terms of how the material is going to look happens here, and then you can plug loads of other stuff into it. Then things are going to change, click on the material node, and then in color, I'm just going to make this a little bit lighter because it's dark gray and I going to make it lighter gray. In reflection, I'm going to turn the weight down to zero. I know that does is just remove all the reflection. Now drag this onto everything. I think it only needs to be dragged onto the cloner cause the boats contained in there and the water and now everything's the same color. Next I'm going to do is switch to the perspective view and add some lights. Let's go to the Redshift tab at the top, go to light, and it's going to create one area light, angle it this way, and move it back. This is going to be my key light maybe could do without adding any other lights. We're just going to start with one for the moment. I'm going to change the shape of it to a disk so that it's bit more like a Sun going to make sure that the shadow of this line is not in camera. Maybe we should just move it pretty far away, something like that will probably be fine. I'm like emulating where the Sun would be and I don't want the boat to be backlit compared to the camera. Let's unhide the cameras so we can see what we're doing. I'm just going to bring up the Redshift viewer. I've got a shortcut button here, but if you go to Redshift and then Redshift Render View. Hit go or play on the Render View and we should have seen with a light behind it. The next thing we need to actually do is make sure we set Redshift to our render. Go to Render Settings up here by clicking on this button and set your Render to Redshift, and then they should have changed to something like this. I click on the Redshift tap or word down here, and we're going to change some settings in GI, because Redshift defaults to having no GI, and one of the best things about having a GPU, render, such as Redshift or something like octane is at least the speed at which it calculates this. You just always want GI on because it looks amazing unless you're doing some specialists, you might as well have it on. I cant remember, the best self this but evidence, cash-in, evidence point cloud works very nicely. This is such a pleasure for me because I come from the early days of rendering. I started working in 3D in the late 90s. Being able to turn the GI bounces up beyond two or one, that's a massive luxury. I'm just going to go for six, whether you can actually see that or not , I don't know. It will add like really subtle detail. We'll just add to the overall impression that this realistic lighting. We need to do in the render settings for the moment, I just wanted to send the GI on. This is going to be our sunlight, so I'm just going to name it sun, increase the intensity up. Let's just go crazy. Three hundred. That's not that crazy, say 3,000. That's way too crazy, 500? Something like that. It's going to increase the angle so that we get bit more of a shadow. You can see we're still getting really dark shadows on the site and that's because there's no light filling this side because the sky is black, so there's no light reflecting into the shadows. The next thing I'm going to do is create a dome light. Now we can see the whole scene is being really brightly. Some click on the Dome light that we just created and just turn the exposure down. It might be nice is actually to give this a color. We could actually test this sky color. I don't know about this dome light. This is like if you've ever heard of HDR arrays, the HDR images, CG people talk about them quite large. This is where you would put an HDR image. We could try putting an HDR in this, just quickly see. May be the blue is just a bit too blue. It's not looking too bad. If you go to Window content browser, you can type in search and go HDL. We could put this sunny, cloudy HDR in here. We're getting actually another sunlight there because there's a sun inside the HDR. I wonder if we turn off our Sun there and just increase, maybe the way to do it because we've got a bend on the water, we're getting a bit of a weird shadow. If you rotate the dome light, it will actually rotate. You can't actually see it in the viewport. There's probably a way of seeing it in the viewport. HDR, which you maybe you've already figured out now is just an image. HDR means high dynamic range. Someone has gone out to a real sky, presumably here, can't see this big, so I'm guessing it's a real sky and taken lots of images with their camera using either 180 or 360 degree lens , something like that. They've taken a picture of the whole sky at different exposures. You get all the detail that it looks like when it's very dark and you get all the detail that it looks like when it's very high and something like the Sun, because it's so bright, will be visible through all of those spectrums. The image knows that, that thing is incredibly bright. That's a very bright light source. When you save all of that in Photoshop, you can actually merge, like multiple exposure images quite easily into an HDR. If you wanted to make your own, it's quite fun thing to do. You can merge it into a very high dynamic range image, which just contains loads and loads of color information of how bright the scene is. You can then use that in a 3D package as a sky or light source or to make nice realistic looking reflections. If you're working on a feature film or visual effects shot, if you're adding CG elements into a real film background, you could take a picture of the scene a 360 degree or 180 degree image of the environment which you're filmed stuff is in, and then when you add a CG thing element into that scene that you want to add into the film element and you want it to match and make it look like it's in the same lighting environment, then use that HDR that you've made from that scene and it should match more accurately. I'm going to say exactly because it probably requires a little bit of work to get that working. But then at least you've got pretty much the exact same lighting that you will need to get it looking realistic. That's looking all right. right it still tinting. Maybe it's still tinting. Fatten the tint up and down. It was still tinting it. Yes. It's bit too blue. I'm just going to light the guy, but let's try it. I just want to try adding a fill light. Yeah, I just want to see a little bit more detail in a character cuisine. We spent so much time on it, I don't want to speak in a shadow. Pointless. It will give it a bit more of a studio feel, but that would make more sense. Maybe from it's face. Would it make any sense? Nice. There we go. I think I'm going to leave it there. We might as well just do a render of that now. Let's save that where we are. Go to Render Settings, go to Output, and instead of current frame, set it to all frames and I'm going to output a MP4. In your Save tab, go to format MP4, set this. Yeah, if you dropped down the format here and go to preset high quantity. I normally rendered image sequences of 3D because I'm normally always going into after-effects and doing some extra post-production on it. But seeing this is just a modeling tutorial to get something, get a nice result out of the model you've just made. Let's just do this. The three dots on file and find where you want to save it and then there we go. Just hit Render, and then depending on how fast your computer is, it will be completely broken. Why is that broken. Well, this was an interesting result. This always happens in CG. There's some technical issue. Something has obviously happened there. That has messed up our boat position. I think the way I'm going to fix that, hopefully this will fix it. I'm thinking it's something to do with the delay and the way we've attached it to the surface. If you click on your Cloner, go to Tags and go to MoGraph and MoGraph Cache. This tag will let you bake the position. If you then try using other effectors to move the positions around, you have to unbake it before you can make any changes. This will just bake the boat animation for the entire scene, hopefully locking it in place. When we go to Render, this way now you will get 100 percent repeatable animation. For me, I can't override MP4s, I get some issue with it. I'm just going to add _1 at the end of the file. Let's try that again. This is always the case. You go, I finished my scene this is working on nice. I've finished my scene, I'm all done, hit Render. Then you hit Render and you realize, oh, hang on, it's broken when you go to Render because something weird is happening. I'm afraid that's just like the nature of working in CG. There's just a lot of technical fluffing around, but we're getting a nice render out of that now. I let it go. Maybe we'll do a time-lapse of this section and then we'll have a look at the final result. It's going to stuff it because I'm bored. Hopefully that as an issue, stop an MP4 and ring off my serious outbreaks it but I guess we'll find out now. Nice. Yeah, I guess we didn't really change anything, so it's a bit grainy. Rather than immediately pointing out all the negatives, let me start with the positives. It's looking very nice, feeling very nice about this. The model looks good. Rocking backwards and forwards is quite nice. Yeah, I was just going to say, I'm just feeling like in terms of animation, you can see the noise changing a little bit here. It would be nice to maybe add a couple of layers of the noise to smooth that out. It looks bit digital in the background, and maybe the Render settings could be a bit higher to get rid of this noise. But yeah, it's looking very nice. Let's just recap how we made that render. We started by making a plane Redshift material and reducing the reflection weight down to zero just so that we have completely matte, like diffuse material when their reflections. I think the default is like middle gray, so I just made it a bit brighter. We then applied that material to everything in the scene, and all you have to do, you don't have to like apply to every single object, just the top nulls is fine and then the material will just apply to all the children as well. After that, we just set up some simple lighting so that at least we have some nice shading when we do our render. We also went into the Render Settings and made sure the render was set to Redshift, and then we went into Redshift and switched on GI, which is Global Illumination, just to make sure that we get some really nice light, like lush, realistic lighting bouncing around inside the scene. We then added an HDR image to a Redshift dome light. It's really handy to just get a really quick lighting setup. I used one from this Cinema 4D content libraries. Make sure you've downloaded the Content Library, which is an option when you install Cinema 4D. It's also quite fun to make your own HDR. Experiment with that. If you have a camera with manual exposure setting, which a lot phones do now and you've got Photoshop, then all you need is tripod, and then you can just take multiple exposures and load them into Photoshop and make sure in HDR. I then added a fill light into the scene so that you can actually see the character because with the backlit Sun, the character was in shadow and we've spent so long building that character, you want to see him. Yeah. I feel like it was quite important. Then when we came to hit Render, there was an issue with the cloner method. I think it was because the way that delay effect of works. It just puts the objects somewhere and then when it's loading up the delay effect, it actually causes a delay for the object moving to its original position where it's supposed to be. Not entirely sure why that happens. I think it feels a little bit like a bug, but maybe it's not a bug, but using the MoGraph cache tag, fix that. Yeah. If there's any weird stuff going on with cloners or anything like that, a MoGraph cache tag can fix it off, like render time issue. If he's looking around the viewport and then hit Render, it's wrong. Try and MoGraph cache tag, it might fix it. But after that final hiccup, we managed to output a lovely render to show off our finished seen. A massive well done to everybody who's made it this far. In the next video, we're just going to have a bit of a debrief, go through the major steps that we went through to achieve our model. I'll also quickly explain the changes that I made to the final render that I showed at the start. 15. Class Debrief: Congratulations. Well done for completing this in-depth look at modeling in Cinema 4D. A huge thank you to everybody who made it to this video. I hope you found it useful and I hope you learned a thing or two. I just wanted to recap our main steps in our modeling journey. We started with a humble cube and used box modeling to form a posable T-pose character shape. We then built our boat using different techniques, using splines and surface generators. We then posed our character into the boat. After that, we made some water using material displacement for our boat and character to sail on. We then wrapped it all up by adding a bit of movement and outputting a simple render. As I mentioned before, I actually did carry on working on the scene a little bit just so that I could get a nice looking render at the end, basically for a nice thumbnail and a nice video to lure you guys in. I hope it worked. But not to leave you totally high and dry, I'll quickly point out the changes that I made. I'm not going to go into the full technical details of what I did. I'm sure I'll touch on these topics in later classes. But for now, I'll just explain the changes I made. If you look in the class materials, I've included the scene file, which you can go ahead and pick apart if you wish. One of the main differences is clearly the colors. I spent a little time making various materials. I used some image texture for the stripes on the sail, some subsurface scattering on the character to make it a bit flashier, and then some nice reflections, obviously for the water. The other major thing I worked on was the water to push it in a bit more of a realistic direction, the simple water wasn't really floating my boat. Full disclosure, I actually got really close. I had something that pretty much was this and then I found a seawater preset in the content browser Cinema 4D. It literally uses the same technique that we already set up but it used a couple of different types of noise types. This is the kind of thing where if you don't know the exact type of noise that you want, then you can sit there for a while clicking on every single one, fiddling with them until it looks right. It's a lot of fiddling around to get a particular look. This preset just was exactly what I needed. The only difference is it uses couple of different noise types and there's two on top of each other and then it's got a particular animation speed, that kind of thing. If you search for waves in the content browser, you should find it. There's also loads of tutorials out there to make seawater, and there's some great plugins, I think there's one called HOT4D or something like that. There's some really simple, easy-to-use water things like this. Another thing I did, as I mentioned before, is I didn't use the boat attachment, the cloner method or any other attachment to water in the end. I was getting some random results that I didn't really like in terms of the boat movements so I just animated it by hand with some keyframes and it just worked better all around. I do that quite a lot. I do that on projects where you think it's going to be really easy, there's an automatic method of doing it and I don't have to do anything and then you do it, and the randomness is a little bit ugly actually, to be honest. I ended up just taking everything apart and just animating it by hand. It really didn't take very long and it's just like a loop. The other reason I did that is because inside the cloner you can't rig the character's head to bob backwards and forwards. That was another thing I wanted to add. As you can see here, when the boat rocks, he keeps his head a bit more steady. I did that using an aim constraint. He's just looking at it now, which is positioned roughly around where the sails are. It's very subtle, but I think it's effective, it brings the character to life a little bit. The last thing I did was just add a few more details, I added a little ball to the top of the mast which I thought needed a little bit more detail on it. Also I decided in the end that sails do need to be attached. I don't know why I thought it was going to look all right with them completely detached. In your head, I'm going to go, it's going to be really graphics, so we don't want any fiddly little details. But actually when I looked at it, it looked so much better with little ropes attaching the sails. Yeah, it literally ties it all together. Amazing. I hope you found that all useful and you go away with some extra modeling knowledge, ready to tackle any weird and wonderful shape that your project requires with confidence. Please post your scenes. It would be amazing to see what you guys create using the knowledge that I'm hopefully imparting to you, whether that be your own character and boat that you've created, or anything really. If you've gone on to make a different project with the skills that you've learned here I'd really love to see it. Once again, I'm Russ Etheridge. You can follow me on social media, @russ_ether. I'm normally on Twitter and Instagram. Give me a shout if you have any questions, and I'll see you next time.