This week I tried experimenting in Cinema 4D on my own, but first, I went through another tutorial. It came out very useful. For my project and the crystal form, a low poly style seems to be the right direction, so I found a video about creating a low poly animal. In this case, I didn’t follow along, but just made notes for the future reference.

First new thing that I’ve learned was importing a reference image. Even though it’s not a realistic shape, it needs some sort of guidelines. Keys F1-F4 help to switch between different camera views. Going to Attributes and View Settings lets us import an image from our documents. We can import different images for different camera views, so it’s an easy way to make profile and front references.

The second feature introduced in the video was using Loft and parenting it with a shape outline, which then can be duplicated. The duplicate instantly connects with the original, even if we rotate, scale or move it, making a consistent, progressive shape.

After tweaking the shapes in between camera views and connecting them, we can apply Polygon Reduction, which makes it a bit more of a primitive object, perfect for the low poly purposes. There are also a few other techniques like switching off the Phong Tags, switching on Linear Interpolation in Loft settings and applying Displacer (noise height variation).

Bezier (which is similar to a pen tool in Illustrator or Photoshop, making a path) with Sweep (which fills the path) are perfect for the antlers modeling. The end of the video was just about creating a floor object and a material + lighting.

As I said, I went through the video and made notes to then apply some of the techniques in my own model. I tried to re-create (at least to certain extent) the model of Travis Scott from the article. I tried it with the Loft strategy first, but then decided to create a capsule and edit it, which came out much better. Although, Loft and Symmetry tools were perfect for the hair. I used a Boole (which is adequate to Path Finder in Adobe Illustrator) to make the mouth intersected into the capsule.

I’m yet to apply the materials and edit it in Substance Painter. Even though it’s not perfect, I’m happy with the outcome as for my first ever model without a tutorial.