Today we’ll be making a simple robot from a reference image, using primitives. Often times it is hard to figure out what the scale/sizes of our shapes should be when creating a model, even when we have a reference image to work off of. To make sure we avoid this difficulty with our robot, we will be learning a cool technique to help us ensure we get all our proportions correct.
Step 1: Create a new material, and add our front-view redbot source image as a texture in the ‘color’ tab.
Step 2: Drop a plane primitive on to your scene; we will be using this to place our redbot image on the scene.
Step 3: Select the plane, then go to your Attributes Manager (lower right hand section), and look in the ‘Object’ tab. Here we will reduce the number of segments our plane has to make sure we avoid having unnecessarily heavy objects on our scene (maintaining a low polygon count is crucial to optimal game performance). For both the ‘Height Segments’ and ‘Width Segments’ properties, set their value to 1.
Step 1: Create a new material, and add our front-view redbot source image as a texture in the ‘color’ tab.
Step 2: Drop a plane primitive on to your scene; we will be using this to place our redbot image on the scene.
Step 3: Select the plane, then go to your Attributes Manager (lower right hand section), and look in the ‘Object’ tab. Here we will reduce the number of segments our plane has to make sure we avoid having unnecessarily heavy objects on our scene (maintaining a low polygon count is crucial to optimal game performance). For both the ‘Height Segments’ and ‘Width Segments’ properties, set their value to 1.
Step 4: Place your redbot texture on the plane, and rotate it so that it is vertical and facing the right direction.
Step 5: At this point, the redbot texture you placed on the plane is probably looking a little stretched out, so resize your plane until the image looks as it should.
Step 6: Copy and Paste the redbot plane, and rotate the new one horizontally by 90 degrees.
Step 7: Create another material, this time with the side-view of the redbot as the texture, and put it on the newly rotated plane (also make sure it’s facing the right direction). Now you should be able to get a basic idea of the scale your robot model will be.
Step 8: Now you can start placing primitives, and aligning+resizing them to fit the outlines of your redbot planes.
Step 5: At this point, the redbot texture you placed on the plane is probably looking a little stretched out, so resize your plane until the image looks as it should.
Step 6: Copy and Paste the redbot plane, and rotate the new one horizontally by 90 degrees.
Step 7: Create another material, this time with the side-view of the redbot as the texture, and put it on the newly rotated plane (also make sure it’s facing the right direction). Now you should be able to get a basic idea of the scale your robot model will be.
Step 8: Now you can start placing primitives, and aligning+resizing them to fit the outlines of your redbot planes.
Taking Advantage Of Alternate Views:
Alternate views would really make the task of resizing our primitives to the right scale rather easy, if only they showed our redbot textures… Oh wait, they can!
Alternate views would really make the task of resizing our primitives to the right scale rather easy, if only they showed our redbot textures… Oh wait, they can!
From any of your alternate views, select the planes containing your reference redbot images, then go to your view-window menu-bar, and select Display > Constant Shading. You should now be able to see your redbot textures from inside your alternate views.
Now to make it even easier to accurately size your primitives, whenever you drop a primitive onto the scene, select it, and make sure to have the “Display > X-Ray” option on, from the same menu you enabled the Constant Shading earlier. ‘X-Ray’ makes whichever object you’re actively working on become translucent, making it incredibly easy to then trace out a shape with it from a reference image.
Fillet:
Although the robot is fairly blocky, most of its shapes still have rounded edges. Luckily, Cinema 4D provides us with a simple way to round the edges of primitives using the ‘Fillet’ property. To enable it, select the primitive you wish to round, and go to your Attributes Manager, then under the ‘Object’ tab, check the box labeled ‘Fillet’. This will automatically give your shape rounded edges; you can adjust the roundness of the edges by messing with the values in the ‘Fillet Radius’ and ‘Fillet Subdivisions’ properties.
Although the robot is fairly blocky, most of its shapes still have rounded edges. Luckily, Cinema 4D provides us with a simple way to round the edges of primitives using the ‘Fillet’ property. To enable it, select the primitive you wish to round, and go to your Attributes Manager, then under the ‘Object’ tab, check the box labeled ‘Fillet’. This will automatically give your shape rounded edges; you can adjust the roundness of the edges by messing with the values in the ‘Fillet Radius’ and ‘Fillet Subdivisions’ properties.
Parenting:
For some structures that contain several parts, such as the arms of our robot, it would makes sense if we could group all the parts/objects pertaining to that structure together, or better yet, organize them in a hierarchical fashion (i.e. where the fingers belong to the hand, and the hand belongs to the forearm, etc.).
Well, again Cinema 4D makes our lives as easy as possible, and allows us to ‘parent’ objects together, by simply dragging and droping objects to the parts they belong to in the object manager (section in the upper-right). Therefore, you can just drag each one of your finger objects to a flattened cylinder representing the palm, and have yourself a nicely structured robot hand. The benefit to structuring your models this way, is that it provides you with an quick way to make easily adjustable joints. A hand parented to a forearm for example, may still be rotated independently of the forearm, yet if you rotate the forearm, the hand goes with it.
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