Cinema 4D Tutorial – How to Create 3D Grass

Cinema 4D Tutorial – How to Create 3D Grass




Ok! This is a Cinema 4D Tutorial I’ve created
which will introduce you to object manipulation, textures, fur and also
general familiarity with the program itself. I’m using Cinema 4D 10 and
you can download the demo directly from Maxon.



Tutorial by Adam Woodhouse: www.adamwoodhouse.co.uk



Cinema 4D Tutorial – How to Create 3D Grass


Step 1 – Creating a base

First of all open the Cinema 4D application, which will automatically
create a new scene for you to start working with. You then need to
create a base for your grass to be attached to, I’m going to add a cube
and modify it – ” Objects > Primitive > Cube”.Your canvas should
look exactly like this now :



Step 2 – Modifying out base

Now we have out cube, we can edit to to be more of a interesting
shape by firstly clicking it, and in the Attributes pane, increasing
Segments X, Y & Z to a higher number ( I am going to select 50 and
this will enable me to edit the shape more smoothly )



I’m going to manually edit my cube, by selecting the orange square on
the cube and dragging them to a desired position in the X, Y and Z
plains. You can alternatively change the size of the image in the
attributes panel by typing X, Y Z variables, but let’s keep this simple
and quick.



Then I am going to hit the “C” key on my keyboard ( Make Editable
from the menu ” Functions > Make Editable ” ) This allows me to then
use the Magnet tool to manipulate my plain further. Select the magnet
tool ( Structure > Magnet ) And click and drag the cursor on the
plane to create any desired effect.

I used the tool to add a hilly effect to the plane:



Step 3 – Adding texture to the base

We now need to make out base look relatively organic, so we are going
to add a soil type texture. In the materials pane, ( bottom of the
screen ) click “File > New Material”, underneath where you just
clicked a new texture will appear in the shape of a circle named “Mat” –
Double click on the word “Mat” and rename it “Soil”.Double click on the
Soil Sphere texture, and a new dialog box will pop up looking like this
:



Click the arrow where the option for ” Texture” Appears on the right
area of the dialog box. A list will display below, click on “Gradient”.
You will notice the circle with the texture displayed in the dialog box
will change. What we are going to do now is change the gradient itself,
so double click where the flat gradient is displayed ( underneath the
texture arrow ) and change the values in the shader properties to
something like this:



We want to now click the close button on this panel, and apply the
texture to our plane. You need to click and drag the texture onto out
plane, this is illustrated below :



Step 4 – Selecting the placement of the grass

Ok if you have got this far you are doing pretty well. We now need to
click the window icon, which will allow us to see multiple views of our
scene.



Clicking this will change our view to this:



Ok, we only now care about the top right view, click the Use polygon
tool – so select “Tools > Polygons ” from the menu. Now we need to
select the rectangle selection tool and select all polygons in the top
right window labeled “Top”. (Basically this will be the area the grass
will be placed on) – So select ” Selection – Rectangle selection” From
the menu. Move the cursor to the top right view and in a click drag
motion, select all the polygons until they all turn orange.

Now your view will look like this:



Now come out of this view by pressing the same window icon as you did
before, however, click the one in the top left ( Perspective view ).
You will now be able to see your object with only the top polygons
selected.



Step 5 – Adding the grass

Now we have our top layer of the plane selected, we need to add
grass, ok ok, so I lied to you, it’s not grass. It’s Cinema 4d’s Fur
Tool, but does a sweet job or replicating grass. All you need to do now
is click from the menu “Hair > Fur” and some spikes will appear on
the plane in the perspective view.We are now going to increase the
amount of fur, so in the objects panel, select “Fur” which will update
the Attributes view. Where you can change the ” Count ” Aka, amount of
fur. It’s initially at 10000, but I’m going to change mine to 30000, but
you will have to experiment to ensure you will have the full area
covered in grass depending on how large you made your plane. Also we
will change the Randomness of the grass, by adding a variable randomize
setting of 6 degrees.

This might sound like gibberish but experiment with the attributes, and who knows, you might create some really cool stuff.



Step 6 – Add texture to the grass

That’s basically it to be honest, but we will need to add a new
texture to the grass to make it green. When you added the grass, a new
texture was made in the textures panel. It should be called “Fur Mat” –
double click it to open the texture dialogAll I am going to do here is
change the gradient of the grass to two shades of green. You can change
the thickness etc via the left hand menu if you want to experiment!



Step 7 – Rendering

That’s it! You have made some grass on a plane, if you got this far…
congratulations! Now we need to just render the image to see the final
result, so click “Render > Render View” From the menu which will show
you exactly what you have created! I just added a background ( Objects
> Scene > Background ) and changed the attributes to ” Use color
> Always”. Here’s my final result!

Cheers,

Adam Woodhouse ( www.adamwoodhouse.co.uk )


http://www.youthedesigner.com/2008/08/13/cinema-4d-tutorial-how-to-create-3d-grass/