City tutorial in Cinema4D

[pingyao]

This is a thread purely for those members who have Cinema4D. A few members have asked for a tutorial on city building, so here it is - well the first part, more tutorials will follow. Apologises if this tutorial is a little basic, but it is aimed toward the amateur newbie rather than the seasoned pro! I use version 9.012, but it should be relevant for versions before and after mine. This thread will concentrate purely on how to build, texture and render a model of a city (not too complicated mind).

There are probably various ways to build a 3D city in Cinema4D, but I’ll explain the way I did it as I have found this way to be the most user friendly. It also allows for highly complex models with limited PC lag - always a pain in the arse for us modellers! So I’ll waste no more time - good luck and do post city models as you progress.

STARTING OUT
Creating a base for your city

Firstly for the city I made, I used satellite images for the base. This gives it a certain authentic appearance and I would highly recommend doing it, otherwise your model appears to be in a featureless plain!

Go into Google Earth/Virtual Earth, whatever and save an image of somewhere you find interesting.



This is a pic of the coast of Yemen. The image is roughly 1 mile wide - 1.62kms. You can copy it if you want or use your own, but the main thing is try and make it to scale I.E. 1 mile wide (For Chrisheem I tiled together over 40 separate images from Google earth, I won’t go into doing that here as it was in Photoshop and is a whole tutorial in itself).

Go into Cinema4D and go to file/save as, create a new folder first and then save within this folder the file as ‘tutorial city’ (or somein). This folder will now contain all your cities textures once you start creating those. Your screen should look like this


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Go to ‘Cube Object’ on top toolbar, depress button and dropdown menu will appear, release button on ‘Add plane object’.


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You should now have a screen like this.


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You can change the view of the object by hitting the ‘F’ buttons on your keyboard. By default you should be in perspective view, which is F1. F2 is plan and F3 & F4 are elevations. You can also change the view by going into the ‘cameras’ menu.


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If you hit the little square in the top right of the view window it changes to a 4-way view as well. The other 3 little icons on the left I’ll let you work out what they do!


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As a rule I usually work in plan and perspective for everything, very rarely do I use elevations, so I just swap back and forward between F1 and F2 - perspective and plan.

Right go to plan view ‘F2’. Make sure the ‘use object tool’ button on left tool bar is depressed, otherwise you won’t be able to change the dimensions properly (If your object is not doing what it should be doing, always make sure this button is depressed.)


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In the coordinates manager (position - size - rotation box at the bottom) enter the following (firstly make sure the coordinates are set to metric, to do this go to edit/preferences/units and set to meter in basic units window) X 1620m, Z 1050m. This is now the same scale approximately as my original satelitte image, about 1 mile in width or 1.62kms. You might have to drag the scale button to see the whole thing in the view window. You should have something like this.


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Now go back to perspective view, remember F1. The plane will probably have lots of subdivisions. Lets make it a little simpler, at this stage we just want the plane as a single polygon object. Go to the ‘object properties window’, bottom right and enter 1 for both height and width segments.


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Now texturing the plane. The blank window at the bottom is the material manager, where all your textures will be stored. In its ‘file’ menu go to ‘new material’.


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Double click the material ball, the ‘material editor’ window will pop up. Go to the ‘colour’ tab, then click the little arrow by the texture button and press load texture from the drop down menu.


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Now navigate to where you saved the satellite image earlier. Click open and it should load it onto the ‘material ball’ like so.


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If you get a message saying something like ‘do you want cinema4d to make a copy of this texture’ when you load it, just press ‘yes’.

Now all you need to do is close the ‘material editor’ window, grab the little icon of the material in the material manager and holding the mouse button down drop it on your plane object in the view window. Voila!


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If the orientation of the texture is the wrong way I.E. sea on short side, just swap the dimensions around in the coordinates manager.

Finally a little bit on rendering. If you want to get an instant hint of what it looks like, just press the ‘render active view’ button on the top.


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Incedently if you press the ‘Display’ menu button on the view window you have a heap of different options for how to display the model when your working on it. I think its default setting is gouraud shading. This is fine for a simple plane, but not so great when you’ve got a massive city model. I usually have it set on ’lines’ . Anyway it makes no difference to the render, this is purely an option for when your working on the model itself.


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That’s the end of the first tutorial. More will follow.

[ska.pre]

oo this is so cool.good idea that you made this.i will try do something like you did,my city :P

[Ni3lS]

JIHAAAA! Tnx so much Pingyao!

[Evrasia 99911]

And where it is possible to load This editor?

[Edwin_kok86]

Pingyao, thanx for helping the beginners like me with getting started. I have a small question: Do you know if you can import files into Cinema 4D like .dwf or .3ds. Because i made a 3D model in ADT 2007 and want to render it properly.

Thanx in advance.

[pingyao]

Originally Posted by Evrasia 99911

And where it is possible to load This editor?

Not sure I understand the question. Do you mean the software?

Originally Posted by Edwin_kok86

Pingyao, thanx for helping the beginners like me with getting started. I have a small question: Do you know if you can import files into Cinema 4D like .dwf or .3ds. Because i made a 3D model in ADT 2007 and want to render it properly.

Thanx in advance.

You should be able to open 3Ds files, I have done so in the past. DWF files, not so sure, although their are loads of freeware conversion tools you can download if that helps.

[pingyao]

STAGE TWO slicing and extruding

Right now comes the fun part, the actual building of your city. The way I build 99% of all the buildings is by slicing and extruding the plane that we made in the first part. By extruding your buildings from a plane you are in effect using a single polygon object to model your entire city, rather than separate polygon objects for individual buildings. The advantage with doing it like this to avoid PC lag and memory problems when rendering. If each building was a separate object you’d have literally hundreds and the model would quickly grind to a halt.

To make your plane available for slicing and extruding you must first make it editable. Go to ‘Make object editable’ button on top left


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Then go to ‘Use Polygon Tool’


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Whenever you want to cut, slice, extrude, bridge, basically do anything with the fundamental polygons of an object the ‘Use Polygon tool’ must be selected. You will notice the plane has gone blue. So when an object is blue you can edit its polygons. If you want to move, scale, rotate the entire object you have to click the ‘Use object tool’.


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By swapping between these two, you can construct an entire city full of stuff. There is another important button called ‘Use point tool’ which I’ll come to later.

Right make sure your in plan view ‘F2’. If you hover your mouse over the plane it will go yellow.


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If you click on it, it will go red.


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This means you have highlighted the polygon. You can edit it without clicking on it, but by doing this you restrict what you edit to the highlighted area, particularly useful when its quite a complex object with loads of polygons - just highlight what part you want to change and happily edit it without affecting everything else. I’ll explain this is little more later in the tutorials.

If you want you can go to the ’display’ menu in the view window and click gouraud shading if you wish, to see your texture on the plane.


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Now go to structure/knife .


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You’ll notice your cursor now has changed to a little cross, showing you can now cut and slice your object. In order to cut an object you need to either click just outside the object and then click again the other side. Or click and hold down the mouse outside the object and release the other side of the object. Like this.


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How it looks on the screen as you do it


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Hey presto, you’ve sliced an object.


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Okay, forgive the simplistic nature of my explanation, I’m sure you can all now happily slice your plane to oblivion, but what I’m trying to explain here is the fundamentals of how I built that city. This is really important and you might just want to play about with slicing the plane up first to get used to how it works.

Next up is making a building. All the buildings are initially built on plan and then extruded up. So let do a simple block first of all. Undo your sliced up plane, so its nice an clean. Slice across it first and then do two vertical paralell slice upwards and another horizontal slice above the first. You should end up with something like this.


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If you want to get dead straight lines hold the shift key down as you slice with your knife. Now lets select the rectangular polygon you’ve created. If you want to select a single polygon hit the ‘move tool’ and then click the polygon you want to select. If you want to select more than one polygon, you can still use this tool, but just hold down shift as you select other polygons, give it a go.


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Alternatively if you want to select additional polygons you can use the ‘live selection’ tool.


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The ‘arrow’ selection highlights any polygon it touches when you click the mouse. The ‘area’ selection highlights all polygons within the box you create over the object. I tend to just use the ‘move tool’ for single polygon selection or the ‘arrow’ selection in the ‘live selection’ tools options for multiple polygon selection.

Now you’ve got your polygon selected change to F1 if you like to see it in perspective and then go to the structure menu again and click ‘extrude’.


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Hold down the mouse and drag, you will notice the polygon extrudes either up or down from the plane. Enter 200m into the coordinates manager or the options, offset window on the right. (N.B. if you release the button as your extruding and then click and hold again you will extrude again from where you stopped, try it out.)

You should end up with a pretty fat mother of a skyscraper 200m high.


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Basically you can slice up smaller portions on the plane if you like to create more blocks and then extrude those, just have a play around. You can also slice the top of the polygon you extruded to create different forms on top. N.B. if you try to slice part of the object that is not highlighted in red nothing will happen. You need to simply go to the 'move object' or 'arrow selection' button click off the model to deactivate everything and then you can slice. Or simply highlight which area you want to slice.

The next part of this tutorial is applying textures to your building.

[hella good]

thanks for this tutorial its really helpful

one question. ive only got the demo version, which wont let you save. is there any way to get the proper version or do you simply have to buy it?

[Edwin_kok86]

Originally Posted by hella good

thanks for this tutorial its really helpful

one question. ive only got the demo version, which wont let you save. is there any way to get the proper version or do you simply have to buy it?

Every program can be illigally downloaded if you want......Not that i recommend it but it's crazy to buy such program's if they are only for fun use. Only companies will and are able to buy such expensive programs.

[pingyao]

Indeed, downloading is very, very iffy. I started with a free version that came with a PC magazine. Then I got this version from a mate who uses it for work.

[Ni3lS]

Tnx for update Pingyao.. but how are you making cranes and stuff in the building when it's rising ? or is that in your next tutorial?

[pingyao]

Haha, you'll just have to wait and see Nielsiej. Incedently, if anyone has been following my tutorials I'd love to see how you're all getting on. Just PM me screenshots if you want.

[Ni3lS]

Ow I'm sorry if i'm pushing you I'm just really motivated.. I will post some screenshots in the future, I'm real busy with school right now

[pingyao]

STAGE THREE Textures

Texturing your model obviously adds detail and realism to it, although even quite a crude texture can be used and you can still achieve good results with lighting and rendering.

Start by bringing back your plane with its applied texture (No slices).


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Go to plan view. Now in order to make a scale building with specific measurements I have to firstly make a box with the correct dimensions. Then I simply slice on the plane the outline of the box. This sounds a little confusing, but its not really, its just you cannot slice the plane with specific measurements.

So go to ‘add cube object’ at the top, depress the button and click on the cube.


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Now go to the coordinates manager and enter the following

X 45
Z 30

Don’t worry about the Y (vertical) coordinates. This box is purely a template, a guide if you will for tracing the base of our building onto the plan.


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Also notice in the top right, in the objects manager window, a cube object has appeared.


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The objects manager window is very important as you use this to keep track of all your different objects. If you double click on the word ‘cube’ in the object manager you can rename it. Call it ‘Template’. Now double click the ‘Plane.1’ under it and name this ’Base’ . It should look like this.


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Now make sure your base is active, just click on it in the object manager. Go to ‘Use polygon tool’ button as before and then the main menu structure/knife. Slice across the base and then make a vertical slice upwards.


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Go to the windows ‘view’ menu and select hidden line, this allows you to see all the slices along objects when their not active. Zoom in and then select the box in the object manager (should be labelled template now). Click the ‘Move tool’ in the top and drag your box so that the bottom left corner aligns with the intersecting lines on the base.


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Now select the base again in the object manager, Go back to structure/knife and draw a diagonal line through the opposite corner of roughly where the box is.


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Make two more slices from the diagonal line back down to the hoizontal line and along the top, to complete the outline of your template/box. Notice when you hover near a point where two slices intersect, like a corner a little box appears, this is a snap point and automatically snaps your slices end point to that intersection. Highly useful.

Now click on the template in the object manager and delete it.

You should now have this.


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Now lets extrude this little building as we did on the last tutorial. Go back to perspective view. Click on the ‘move tool’ and select the polygon that is the base. Go to structure/extrude and then enter 200m into Y box in the coordinates manager of the offset window on the attributes manager on the right.


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Now in order to apply the textures we need to select the polygons onto which the texture is applied, so select the four sides first and then go to the main menu at the top selection/set selection.


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In the object manager a little red triangle has appeared next to the base.


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Double click it, and in the window below name it ‘01’.


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What this has done is define a name to the selected polygons. When you place your tecture on the object you can restrict it so that it only appears on the area with a specific name I.E. ‘01’. So lets create a texture. This is one I made in photoshop, or you can find one from the web. As your building is 200m tall, it needs to have quite a few floors. The most important thing is to align the texture rotated 90 degrees clockwise. For some reason on extruded polygons - the buildings walls - a straight forward façade texture when applied is 90 degrees anticlockwise, so we need to compensate for this.


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So rotate it as shown and save your texture in the same folder as the model and the google earth texture for the base.

Now go to the texture manager at the bottom and file/new material. Double click the new texture sphere and in the colour tab click on the little arrow next to ‘texture’ as we did before and click load to navigate to your texture.

You can re name the textures as well. You should end up with this.


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Now drag the new texture onto the base in the view window.


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You will notice its changed the whole bloody object to the façade texture!! Never fear this is where we need to restrict the texture to only the portions of the base that we set earlier. So in the attributes manager on the right, look in the selection window, its empty. Simply type ‘01’ into it.


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Press ‘enter’ on your keyboard, and there you go.


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Just do a quick render to test it. Go to ‘Render active view’ button at the top.


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You can add as many different textures as you want to the this one object. Just remember when you go to set selection in the selection menu, not to have the current selection triangle in the object manager selected, otherwise your selection will be overwritten.

[ska.pre]

pingyao what don't you doing this any more.maybe would found somebody who will one day made something simmilar
maybe even me

[pingyao]

I'm not planning anymore tutorials, no time really. But hopefully this is enough for someone with Cinema 4D to begin playing around and buildiing a city. It was never my intention to model an entire 3dCity as a tutorial

[AcesHigh]

Pingyao, how many of the highrise building on Chrisheem are actually done that way (simply extruding them from the ground)?

I mean... buildings with more complex shapes but be done another way right? Dont you also ever import complete building models from other programs?

[pingyao]

All the buildings were done in this way in one form or another. Even the more unusual shaped buildings were still extruded up from a plane at first and then modified from that. You could import them as seperate models though. The only ones that were'nt done like this were the sphere for the station (Balon) and the twisting (Dancorp Vita) Tower, which was a rectangular block with a twist deformer applied to it. Otherwise this was the technique used, particularly useful for achieving a dense cityscape fast.

[AcesHigh]

Pingyao, your exemple is for a FLAT surface right?

what about hills and stuff, like in Chrisheen itself?

[pingyao]

Yep, that a flat plane - All the buildings for Chrisheem were extruded from a flat plane. The hills are a plane which has been sliced and then the points where the slices intersect have been extruded up to create the landscape. If you notice most of the city is built on a level flat plane, it gets pretty complex if you extrude buildings from an angled plane i.e hillside as your polygons start warping all over the place.