Spline modeling tools, such as lathe and loft, help generate geometry from splines. In this video you will engage the skills to further your use of spline modeling tools in Cinema 4D.
- In the previous movie, we saw how the extrude object can be used to generate geometry from splines. In this movie we will work with two other spline generators, namely the lathe and the loft, and we'll begin with the loft object. The loft object generates a mesh from two or more splines. Now, if you come and find it in the menu here, you can see if you take a look at all these objects here, the icons are actually very good at giving you an indication of how the tool functions, and so it's worth also noting that the loft accepts just one spline to generate a surface, just as you can set the movement of an extrude object to 0. So let's create the loft object. And now what we want to do is, we have these two circles here, and you can see I've gone ahead and drawn out these splines in these instances here, and just generated two circular splines. So we've got the basic profile of the coffee cup. We're going to use these two circle splines with the loft object and what we need to do is just put them into the hierarchy so we can do that. Here, this is our top one, and this is the bottom one, and you can see now that the mesh is created. So the order of the splines in the loft object determines the sequence in which they are connected. Let's just have a look; if we just zoom in here you can see our resolution is fairly low, we probably want to increase this, so what we can do is come onto the loft object, and in our mesh sub-division U we'll just up that to 60. We'll get a nice smooth result. Let's turn off the caps as well. We're going to take these to none, and what this is going to be is like the outer part of our coffee cup. So we need kind of a lip, and maybe some coffee as well. So, let's look at the lathe object. The lathe object rotates a spline around the y axis, so it's important to create the profile spline in the xy axis, or the front view, so let's just switch over to the front view and take a look at what we've got. We'll just turn off everything that we're not interested in. So, in point mode, let's just see what we have. We're going to zoom in a bit and just select the cup, and you can see this point here, this is where we started our spline. So it's on the y axis at 1.2 and the important thing is it's on the x axis at 0. So then this means it will rotate around and there won't be like a hole in the middle. So then, just drawn out the rest of this, and I think what we need to do is put this into a lathe just so we can see what happens. So we'll come back out into the perspective view and grab a lathe, hold down alt 'cause I've got coffee cup selected, if we create lathe you can see now immediately rotates around the profile spline that we gave it. And again, we'll come over here and set the sub-division to a higher amount. We'll match what we had before, so 60. So if we turn on the loft as well, you can see this will be an outer material that we can use if we just drop a new material on here. Now what we probably want to do we can see any errors here as well. It just gives us a chance to fix those, and you can just do it just by a slight amount and I think at the bottom as well. Something like so; probably even go less then that? Yes, point 2 seems to work. So by doing this, you can kind of fix any overlapping polygons as well, and I think we'll just do the same thing for our coffee as well. So, you can see in the front view, if we just turn this off, it's a similar kind of deal with the profile spline join-outs in the xy plane, making sure that our start point's at 0, and this end point is at 0 as well, the spline is open, that's very important too, and let's just use a lathe once again on that. Make sure the spline's enabled, and now you can see if we increase our resolution again 60. We'll keep the caps on this. This is actually going to be the drink, the coffee. If we just turn everything back on, you can get a sense of how this can start to look, and just drawing out a few splines is fairly simple. Also if you're using the spline generator objects, which you can find from here, you can just increase the radius as we did afterwards, we made some changes to the model based on new information that came about when we added the lathe. So we can now create models using several spline generators, and even a novice modeler can produce a range of organic and hard surface models using these tools, so it's worth exploring them further.
- New features
- Core 3D and motion graphics concepts
- Creating and adjusting animations
- Working with Illustrator files in C4D
- Spline modeling tools
- Type tools in C4D
- Working with the camera
- Modeling with primitive objects and deformers
- Using Fields
- Building volume