How to model a room in Cinema 4D

Filed under: Design, Tutorials & How To's | Taged:3D, cinema

4d, modeling, room, slider, tutorial |
The only thing that annoys me about cinema 4D is that there are limited free
tutorials and “how to’s” on the internet and that if you really want to get into the
programs more advanced features you have to either spend hours searching the
net or go out and buy an expensive book. Like most people I don’t have the
money to be spent on expensive books, nor the free time to spend searching the
net for hard to find how-to’s which have been relegated to page 550 of googles
search results because the pay for sites are much better at SEO.
So without much further ado I bring you the first in my series of Cinema 4D
tutorials, you might find the titles or subjects quite odd but then again they are
subjects which I have searched google for and come up with nothing so I thought I
would share how I went about doing what I had hoped to be shown how to do.

First things first, open up Cinema 4D and press F5. This brings up the following
four viewpoints in the main screen (in Clockwise order) Perspective, Top, Right
and Front. This is most useful for getting things aligned right and knowing how
they will look along all three axis. If you then press the middle mouse button on
any of these views then it will enlarge to take up the entire view upon which
pressing the middle mouse button again returns to the four view, view.

Next select a new cube and select its attributes, as you can see (above) I have
made it 100m tall and a width and breadth of 250m. I also changed its vertical
position to 50m so that it is flush to where the X and Y planes meet. This cube will
be the outside walls of our room therefore rename it to “outside” by double clicking
on its name within the objects browser. The next step is to produce the shell of the
room and the inside wall, we shall be using a Boole element for this.

Duplicate the outside wall and then create a Boole element. You can duplicate an
object simply by selecting it and then pressing Ctrl + C followed by Ctrl + V, well
it’s the only way I know of. Rename this duplicate outside cube, inside. Then
change its size so that you have a 10m thick wall and that its height is 10m taller
(that is X=240, Y=110 & Z=240 if your too lazy to think). Next place both cubes
within the Boole using the objects browser the outside wall being on top of the
inside wall as shown above, when quickly rendered you should result in
something looking like the image below.

Now you have the basic walls of your model, you need to give it a floor. For this
you could simply raise up the inside cube by 10 meters and then later on paint a
texture on the floor face for the carpet, wood veneer, etc. Or if your lazy just
produce another cube resize it to the dimensions of the inside wall and have it so
its height is 10m and place it on the floor. I choose the first option for this tutorial
as it allows me to fit in showing how to do selective texturing as well as being the
most efficient so far as render times go.
Now the room has a floor and four walls, it needs a door and some windows to
finish it off before we texture it. These can be done much in the same way as the
room was created. Therefore rename the Boole element “Walls” and place it
within another Boole element, then create another cube and resize it to the
dimensions you want your window to be at and place it on top of the walls Boole
in this new Boole. Sounds complex but it really isn’t the above image shows you
what mine looks like and the below image is the rendered result.

Now I’m sure you are able to make some more windows and a door without my
guidance, so I shall leave you to that and continue with the tutorial. To texture our
room we need to first make it editable, so the first thing to do is select the inside
and outside objects and press C to make them editable (as shown in the below
image).
Next select the button marked number 2 in the above image so you can begin to
select the faces of your model to be textured. You might have to spin the
perspective view to underside the room to be able to select the boxes floor rather
than its top – or at least I had to. Now you should have the bottom face of the
inside cube selected the perimeter of which will be shown as red. Now from the
Selection drop down choose set selection (see #1 in image below).

Now you have the floor selected within your object browser double click upon it
and rename it to floor. Now create or load a texture and drag it onto the inside
object within the object browser and double click on its icon once it appears there.
Then within the selection text space enter “floor” or what ever you named the face
selection. Now when rendered you should get something similar to what you see
in the below image, just the floor texture being rendered.

You can use the above technique to texture the rest of the room, having different
textures for different walls, etc. A rug can also be placed in a similar fashion, but I
shall cover that in a separate tutorial i’m going to write tomorrow.

As a bonus I shall now continue with some radiosity rendering to make the scene
look ultra cool. First off you need a floor and sky element in the3D world. Now as
this is a mock up you don’t need to use any form of detailed sky texture for the
sky, as they take ages to render and when your just mocking up anything longer
than 60 seconds is an age so save all the detailed texturing until you have
finished the room and filled it with what ever you think of filling it with. Create a
new material and give it the same settings as shown in the image above, the
brightness is set to 170% because it provides the final image with a lot more
dynamic range, for more information see this tutorial here. Next go to render
settings and select Radiosity, the following settings are best chosen to give the
highest quality render with the largest dynamic range and least amount of
incorrect visible artefacts.

Just incase you cant make out the settings shown in the above image they are as
follows: Strength:100%, Accuracy: 90%, Prepass Size: 1/1, Diffuse Depth: 1,
Stochastic Samples: 300, Min. Resolution: 20 and Max. Resolution: 150. You will
also need to go into the Options within the render settings (four down from the
Radiosity in the above image) and turn off Auto Light. Now your ready to render,
this will take a while and Radiosity has to make a lot of calculations but the end
result it worth it. My version took 4 minutes to render, that is with just one texture
and at 640×480 but the quality of the render is ultra high and well worth the wait.
The time to render will increase the more object you include into the scene and
the more complex the textures you use, but overall the wait is really worth it in the
end. Below you can see my final render and the end of this tutorial.
I hope this has helped someone, if you have followed this tutorial then please
leave a comment. Also if you have any questions or ideas for tutorials that you
cant find anywhere then please leave them below in the comments section and I
shall have a go