Transcript:
Welcome back to the print 3d Channel. In the first episode of Cinema 4d for 3d printing on this episode, we’re going to cover the basics, So let’s get started. Thank you for joining me on Cinema 4d for 3d printing. This first episode will cover the basics of setting up your scene, checking your project Scale going over the interface and some of the tools and getting us started with our very first model. So let’s head over to cinema 4d and get started so here we are in cinema 4d the version. I am currently using is R 16 There is a newer version available if you are looking to purchase this application or if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you have access to After Effects, which gives you access to cinema 4d lite built into the host application of After Effects you have limited capabilities, but it’s still a great modelling tool before we begin. There are a few things to consider when building 3d printable objects and models in cinema 4d Firstly, you can’t use any textures created in the materials. If we create a quick default material and add a bump layer, add some noise and crank up the height. You can see it only appears in the render. If we switch to the shaded view, you can clearly see that the bump layer did not affect polygons. The better method would be to use of displacement object and create a similar effect like this. We will go into greater detail on how to do this. In the advanced modeling episode, so when you begin modeling, think in grayscale and only use textures of materials to render out an example, you can use colored materials for different objects as a reference, If you are printing in colors, the next thing to consider is the project scale and project settings. When you open a new file in cinema 4d the first thing you should always set is the project scale down here in the lower right hand corner is your project settings. You can also use the shortcut of command or control. D, depending on your operating system, click on the drop out menu and select millimeters since this is the universal measuring system for 3d printing. You should always set this with every file You create and cinema 4d also to make things easier while modeling you should set your preferences to millimeters to do this go to the. Edit menu, scroll down to preferences or use the shortcut command CTRL E in here. Select the units section and click on the drop down menu and select millimeters. And then you can close this menu. These settings in the Preferences will be set throughout the application’s menus. There are a few more issues to consider such as creating watertight geometry and how to identify geometry issues, but we’ll cover those as we move along and show solutions to these common problems and ways to avoid them as you model. Now, let’s move on to the interface of cinema 4d if this is the first time using cinema 4d don’t let this workspace intimidate you. The application is quite easy to use lets. Start at the top of the application window. You will see the usual menus here. Along the top of the interface in these menus, you’ll find all the different creation tools and more detailed creation and editing tools, but most of these are represented in icon format just below these menus starting from the left. These two icons are your undo and redo button next to those icons for your move scale and rotate tools. If you hover over each tool, it also gives you the shortcut key to activate the tool quickly next up. Are your world movement parameters? These restrict movement of objects to a certain axis when we model, we want to be able to freeform our creations and these will come in handy in certain situations, but for now make sure that X Y and Z are all selected. The next set of icons are mainly for rendering. The only parameter we should set up is a location to render out images. Should we need to use them? By clicking this third button, we can set up our save location in the save menu. Click on the three dots menu and create a render folder in the same folder as your main file you save for your images in model building. These are these other settings are useful for animation and such, but we really won’t need to change anything here. For this episode, The next set of icons will be doing most of our modeling work, starting with the cube icon. If you click and hold, It reveals a full set of default, primitive items you can select and bring to the workspace instantly by just hovering over them and releasing the mouse button. These make modeling easy in the parameter are fully adjustable for each object until we make it editable for sculpting and advanced modeling. The next icon is the spline menus. These are used in conjunction with the icon next to it, which contains the generator objects. We will use these to extrude loft or you can even create your own splines for advanced modeling techniques and animation paths and even much more we will go over how to use these in the next episode, but for now, this is what these icons represent and that’s what’s in the menus. The next icon represents the modeling objects. We will be using these quite often in the advanced modeling episode in this. Venn, you will find our connect and our bool objects. These will use the most, and I will explain how these work in the advanced modeling episode, Also next to the modeling objects is the de former object menu and here we will find some really useful tools or modeling like. Bend Displacer and taper. We will go in a great detail on these two former objects in the advanced modeling episode. The last three icons represent objects usually only used in rendering visual effects for motion graphics. Should we need to use any of these well? Go over them! In it as we go on to navigation to navigate around in your cinema, 4d project window will use these basic icons that represent the way the default camera sees the stage and how to move the default camera around objects on the stage. The first icon is for moving the camera up down left and right if you click and hold with the left mouse button and drag the mouse, your default camera will move around the next icon is your dolly camera tool by clicking and holding and dragging forward and backward. You will Dolly the default camera in and out. Next is the default camera rotation tool the same applies. Click, hold and drag your mouse around to rotate the default camera. Finally is the Orthographic view button by clicking once on this icon, the workspace will expand to show all the views perspective top front and right by clicking the same icon in each of you. You expand this view to full and by clicking again resets to the four view, you can also access this function using your mouse. Should you have a three button or two button with a scroll wheel by clicking the scroll wheel on the background of each window? It does the same operation clicking again returns to the previous view, clicking each window expands the view and clicking again returns to the view to halt these little icons appear in all the orthographic views to make navigation easy moving to the left side of the interface. This row of icons along this side represents different modes for moving and selecting with the most important of the tools right here on top, this icon will change between model and world mode. When you scale an object here, let me show you how that works by adding a simple cube object to the stage if I select our transform tool or hit the T key on the keyboard to switch to that tool and roll over an access handle, it turns white that means this is the axis. I want to scale the Q. So if I click and hold and drag my mouse in model mode, it scales in all direction. If I switch to object mode, it scales only on the axis I have selected. This is a very handy tool and will use this quite often in advanced modeling, the next two icons represent the texture in the workplane mode. We won’t be using these either of these. After that are the different selection modes you can use on an object once it is editable, of course, for instance, to make an object editable, select the object in the object’s menu and hit the C keyed on the keyboard, or you can use this icon here in the top left corner. Once editable, you can select different aspects of this object like points, edges and polygons to reshape your object will use these modes quite often in the advanced modeling, moving to the bottom of the interface. Starting on the left is your material’s menu as I showed you earlier? It is easy to begin creating materials. I usually only create a basic gray material for my models. I may choose to color some objects of a multi-part build just to differentiate the objects, but mostly the default material on objects we are creating will be sufficient Next to the materials area is the coordinates and scale menu for objects on the stage. These are for manipulating the object in the world or on the stage. Some of these attributes are also can be accessed from the attribute’s menu for the object selected. Which is right here. This is the main attributes menu for all items listed above in the object’s menu. These two menus work together like this. If we quickly add a cube object, you can see. It appears in the object’s menu. If we select it, the attributes menu will show you all the information about this object such as size how many segments and if we want to add a fill it edge to it and other basic information about the object selected if you have the default layout in cinema 4d under the object’s menu along the right hand side should be tabs to quickly access the other commonly used menus and, most importantly, the content browser under the object’s menu and underneath the attributes menu. You should see the layer’s menu tab. If it’s not there, you can go up to window and scroll down to layers to have it appear. You can just click on the tabs to bring the menus forward. Well, that covers interface basics, we’ll go into greater detail on the functions and our advanced modeling episode. The next step is to create a template of our printers built space, so we can model accordingly in cinema 4d and not have models that exceed our print area to do this. We are going to create a simple cube object by clicking once on the cube icon, this will drop a 200 millimeter squared cube onto the stage. Let’s rename the cube by double-clicking its name in the object’s menu and call it print area. If we make sure the object is selected in the object’s menu and move down to the attributes menu, we can adjust our size to match our printers build space Since I am using a G Max 1.5 X T plus. My build area is quite large. So for my printer. I will enter 400 for the X Only 500 for the Y and 400 for the Z now. These access may seem different than your printer’s accesses, but this is real-world 3d environment modeling, so these are correct. Every printer is different. So make sure you check your printer’s manufacturer’s documentation for the correct size of your prints build area. Once we have the size setup. We need to put the base of the cube. We created flat on the floor of the stage. The easiest way to do that is by using the position settings down here if we take the Y dimension of our object in this case, the cube and divide it in half and enter that number here in the Y position field and hit enter. It’ll move the object to sit flat on the stage. So in my case, I would under 250 in the Y and hit enter now. The cube is sitting right on the floor of the stage. If we hit the shortcut key of s on your keyboard that will Center up the selected object in the viewport window. Keep this shortcut handy. Because we’ll use this quite often in modeling next. We need to make this somewhat transparent and cinema 4d has a built in function just for that called X-ray to use this mode, select the cube in the object’s menu and move down to the attributes menu and then click on this basic tab here in there at the bottom is the button for the x-ray mode Select that and the cube will become slightly transparent on the stage. Now we need to lock down this cube, so we don’t move the object or change its size the simplest way to do. This is to add the cube to a layer and lock the layer along the right side here next to the attributes menu, you should see the tab for layers if it is not there, you can access it from the windows menu. Once you have the layers menu open and the objects selected in the object’s menu go to the file menu within the layer’s menu and select new layer from object selection, this will create a new layer with the cube object in it. You can rename this layer by double clicking its name and we’ll call it print area Next to the name is a row of icons that represent the different functions of the layer menu. The only one we want to be concerned with now is l4 Lock just under the L row. Click on the lock icon to lock this layer permanently in the document. Now we can save this file as a template file that we open and save every time we want to model in cinema 4d although cinema 4d doesn’t have a template format. If you name it properly, you will know it’s your template. Just remember to save as when you do open this file and remember we already set up the project settings so it should be in the right scale for every time you use it, all right, so let’s move on to creating a simple cube object and show you how to work with objects in cinema 4d to create a basic cube as we did before just click on the cube icon once to drop a base cube object onto the stage. If you go over to the object’s menu, you can see it listed here below. The object’s. Menu is the attribute’s menu and the parameters for this as you can see that default cube is 200 millimeters squared, say we want to make a test cube for printing out new filaments or testing a printer or even calibrating. Let’s make this 140 millimeters. Let’s enter the size we want and all the XY fields for the cube in the attribute’s menu and you can tab through these fields quickly. After you enter your numbers, we won’t be adding any additional segments or creating extra polygons since this is perfectly cubed object and doesn’t require any extra detail since each side is one single polygon. Now let’s move the cube to be flat on the floor of the stage. Remember, we can do that by dividing the Y size in half and entering it in at the Y position like so now we have our test Cube, remember to use the shortcut key S to Center up the cube in the viewport to move the cube object around. We’ll use the first set of tools in the toolbar at the top here, but we will use the shortcut keys to access those functions. First is the move tool by tapping the e key on your keyboard that will bring up the world movement handles on the cube on the stage. These are color-coded to help you define which access you want to move the object. If you mouse over an arrow handle on the object on the stage, the color will turn white when you’re using that access like so, you can then move the object by clicking and holding and then move along that axis and it won’t move in any other direction. As long as you’re moving. Just the selected access handle, you can do world movement by just clicking and holding around the cube and not selecting any handles like this, but I advise against that modeling Next up is the transform or scale tool hitting T on your keyboard will access this function, the same applies. If you mouse over a handle, it will scale in that direction only and in this mode, we scale proportionately along that axis in both directions. If you wish to Freeform scale an object, just click outside the object handles and click and drag your mouse to scale in all directions again. I don’t suggest using this method we’re modeling as you’ll likely want to restrain the movement to an axis. Finally up is the rotation tool you can use the keyboard shortcut R to access this tool. It functions just like the other’s mouse over a handle and it highlights white click and drag to rotate. You can also hold down the shift key and rotate in increments of 10 degrees that covers the basic tools on moving, scaling and rotating an object. Now we can export our file for 3d printing, but before we export this file to STL format, which is native in cinema 4d first, we have to delete our template, simply bring up the layer’s menu. Click the lock icon. You click previously to unlock the layer, then move up to the object’s menu and delete the cube named print area. Now you can go to the file menu at the top here. Scroll down to export and select. STL, from the list of formats, you’ll be prompted to give it a location. And if you wish to rename it. This is where you can do that. The next window will prompt you to set the scale since we work in millimeters make sure that is selected with a scale of 1 now we take the STL file over to slicer and we can see that the cube is 40 millimeter square and solid. Well, there you have it. You’ve created your first model in cinema 4d and exported it to STL format and it’s ready for slicing and printing. Well, that about wraps it up For this episode of Cinema 4d for 3d printing we’re covering the basics in this one on the next episode, we’re gonna go into some advanced modeling techniques and build our first model, So thank you for watching Cinema 4d for 3d printing here in the print 3d channel, please remember to subscribe to the channel comment and like on those videos and join me again on the next installment of Cinema 4d for 3d printing.