cinema 4d: build a car using points

I have taken the plunge into advanced cinema 4d territory by creating a using the points based method so I thought I would write a series of blogs about my experiences. This won't be a step by step look at building the entire car but I will provide enough information to get you past the initial stages. In this first blog I will focus on setting up the blueprints.

1) If you're new to car modelling it would be best to choose something that you would be relatively easy to create rather than a car that has too many awkward features. You can find a decent range of car blueprints at the following web address;

http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/cars/

Typing car blueprints in to Google will bring back plenty of blueprint web sites.

2) Once I've found my blueprint I'll copy and past it into photo editing software such as paint or Photoshop. Your blueprint should have three perspectives; top, side and front. Select the top perspective by using the selection tool, right click on it and then choose crop. Save as a j peg file to your Cinema 4d folder and then do the same with the other perspectives. Make sure that the front end of the car is facing right for the side perspective.

3) Open up Cinema 4d and choose the four way perspective. Go to edit - configure - in the top view. In the attributes manager go to back and click on the image button. Locate your top perspective image and open it up to load it to the screen. Do the same for the right and front perspectives. Make sure that the images are facing the correct way. In the top view the front end of the car should be facing down and in the side view the font end should be facing right.

4) Now comes the tricky part. Add a null object and in the top view place it at the front of the car in the middle. Now it's just a case of aligning the other images so that the null object is situated at the front of the car in all viewpoints.

It's important to take time setting up the blueprints otherwise problems will occur down the line. Well, we've come to the end of the first part of the tutorial. Hope it went OK. Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks. That's all for now folks.

Overcoming the symmetry tool in C4D

A few days ago I followed a tutorial that showed me how to create a humanoid head in C4D which didn't go too well at the time. This was partly down to how some of the tutorial was written and also because of the difficulty of using the symmetry tool. The symmetry tool can be of great help when modelling a character as it quite literally does half the job for you but there is a lot that can go wrong when using this tool. One of my previous efforts started to show signs of a bump which ran down the middle of the model. No matter what I did I couldn't rectify this problem however not all was lost as I managed to disguise the defects. I then found the tutorial mentioned above in the hope that I could learn how to avoid the common mistakes often associated when using the symmetry tool. I found the tutorial frustrating at first but on the whole it did teach me some valuable information that I would have not known otherwise.

For my first try at using the symmetry tool I used a primitive cube object which I placed in a HyperNurbs object. I then placed the cube object under symmetry and then placed both of them under HyperNurbs. Now it was this mistake that made the modelling process difficult. Instead I should have cut the primitive object in half and then placed it in a symmetry object. This made so much sense and I don't know why I didn't think of this in the first place. There is still the risk of a split down the middle of the model if a selected polygon is pulled outwards.

I have just begun a new model and I am pleased to say that this one is going smoothly thanks to the symmetry tool.

Below is my effort from the tutorial. The model on the left demonstrates what happens when I connected all of the objects together. For some reason the pixels seem blocky compared with the model on the left.

For anyone who is interested in checking out the symmetry tutorial just click on the link below;

http://dogparry.deviantart.com/art/Head-modeling-C4d-part-1-77337338