My last tip on the knife tool caused one of my viewers to bring about an interesting question.
How would you cut a line that is perfectly parallel to a group of selected polygons?
The answer to this actually lies in one of my previous tips on workplanes. Using workplanes and the knife tool, we can indeed create a perfectly parallel cut. See the video below for an explanation on how this is done.
The Knife tool in Cinema 4D does not leave much to be desired. It’s got a few different modes, and a lot of options to slice your geometry or add points. one such feature is not immediately intuitive (but is well documented), and might be useful to you. There is an ability to lock the knife tool’s position and numerically enter a value in the Attribute Manager. Check out the accompanying video to see how this works.
This tip focuses on three different techniques to move one object to another when using Cinema 4D.
See the short screencast for a demo of everything I mentioned above.
Cinema 4D has a slice option on the cylinder primitive. In this video we will see how to use that with a Bool object to create a cutaway effect.
The effect is achieved by animating the slice’s From and To properties. By animating one or both of these, you can create a slice that grows out of nothing and rotates around a central point. The video below will show you how to leverage this in order to create a cutaway effect on a turbo-charger model.
Sometimes you need to make modifications to every identical side of a radial object. The Array object is great for repeating things in a simple circle, and this video shows how you can use it to get greater control over modeling radial things.
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This video is a really simple tip showing how to use the Current State to Object command in Cinema 4D when dealing with interpolated splines. Enjoy! Read More
In the below video, we take a look at creating some battery cables using a few modeling techniques. The actual connector is created using some simple polygonal modeling, and the cable is created using a SweepNURBS object and a few deformers.
Head on past the break to see the video, and do let me know what you think of it.
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This installment looks at the batteries and the battery terminals (to be more specific). We went for a very tough and heavy look, and I think it’s going to work well. Read More
In this installment of the Razorback series, I’m adding additional detail to the already stylized K.E.R.S. housing for the machine.
Initially we create some arbitrary indentations and realign the cabling to fit. While creating the indentations, we ensure that the edges are realistically beveled. Once we’re happy with the indentations, we actually set them up to look like removable panels. Read More
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? Read More
This video covers quite a lot. It doesn’t really belong in the Five Minute Tips section due to the length, but there are always exceptions to the rule. Read More
Cinema 4D has a lot of options if you want to rig your objects to obey simple constraints. In the latest versions, you can use Expresso, character animation tools, and some other miscellaneous rigging tools. The tip in this post relies on one of the oldest expressions in the Cinema 4D tool box; the Target Tag. Read More