The Extrude, Sweep, and Lathe are very useful objects in any 3D program. Cinema 4D lends itself very well to traditional designers, mainly due to the fact that it effortlessly imports Bezier splines from Illustrator. So, we can use splines drawn in Cinema 4D or in another program to Extrude or Sweep; but what happens when we need more control over the details of the generated object?
Cinema 4D has a few objects* that support a rail spline to control the banking or target direction. The video above will explain how to leverage the rail spline option for a swept object representing a racetrack with banked corners.
* The objects supporting a rail spline are:
- Sweep/SweepNURBS object
- Align to Spline tag
- The Arrange function (legacy)
- The Duplicate function (legacy)
- The Cloner object
- The Spline Wrap deformer
- The Spline effector
- The MoSpline object
- The Motion Camera
shimetina
February 20, 2015 — 9:08 am
Excellent tip, thanks a lot!
Berhanu Tesfaye
February 10, 2015 — 8:21 am
thank you so much!
dangerlatte
January 29, 2015 — 9:50 am
thanx jamie. great tip, you’re really good at explaining things in cinema, one of the better tutorials i’ve seen in a while. look forward to more!
Xander M
November 5, 2014 — 5:21 am
thanks, very helpful
gumzster
October 10, 2014 — 10:28 am
I never paid attention to the rail option. Your tips are teaching me a
bunch. Thank you!
siesam20
September 11, 2014 — 1:56 pm
Hey Jamie, great video its just i have the old cinema 4D from 2012 i
couldn’t find the create outline option. Is there another way other then
scaling?
Final☆EVO
July 7, 2014 — 11:00 pm
your voice. i LOVE IT
DroehnIng
June 3, 2014 — 12:17 am
Nobody was able to tell me how to prevent my roads from twisting and now
after abandoning the project i find this … sigh
Bruce Brachman
April 23, 2014 — 4:06 pm
Jamie!!!
This solved my problem. Perfectly.
I am creating straps for bags and could not figure out how to make them
behave correctly. Adding the rail spline is the answer.
I have to try it with an open spline. I wonder if the create outline works
with an open spline. I will check.
Thank you.
ArgoBeats
April 18, 2014 — 5:20 pm
this is VERY cool! Thanks Jamie
ModelBOT
April 17, 2014 — 11:12 pm
OMG IM GOING TO USE THIS RAIL SPLINE METHOD TO CREATE FANCY SCHMANCY
FUTURISTIC ROADS!! THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!
ErikW
January 20, 2014 — 12:05 pm
Thanks Jamie! This is really useful info and I love the quick tips. Keep them coming!
Jamie Hamel-Smith
January 20, 2014 — 12:06 pm
Thanks! I’m glad you’re finding them useful.
EliaForce1984ita
January 7, 2014 — 7:36 am
Can you make a tutorial on how to “twist polygons” ?
If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, I can explain you better,
it’s a thing that I still haven’t figured out very properly and also a
feature that I really need to know for my modeling needings.
simon nunes
January 3, 2014 — 2:16 pm
fantastic tutorial as usual
MySonyVegas
December 13, 2013 — 1:40 pm
Believe it or not, exactly what I needed right now, thanks :)
Kai Sinzinger
December 10, 2013 — 9:46 pm
Nice one!! Thanks a lot!
Top Quark
December 10, 2013 — 4:25 pm
Good one, create outline was something I’ve been desperately needing for
various reasons
NightHawk Italo
December 10, 2013 — 10:54 am
Thank you very much Jamie,really useful tutorial.
I did’nt know some parameters of SweepNURBS,really great .
I have a question about Subdivision modeling method,do you have an idea how
to create like this “single” object?
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/1016/subdsample2.png
http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/8031/subdsample1.png
Thanks again for everything,bye.
Izzy Long
December 10, 2013 — 9:19 am
Perfect tip Jamie!! Thanks again!
BRODZELi Lasha
December 10, 2013 — 6:37 am
thanks
Jamie Hamel-Smith
December 10, 2013 — 6:15 am
My latest tip is a really quick one that focuses on rail splines. They can
be super useful for sweeps, and other object types too.