🎉 Spring Registration is OPEN! 🎉
00
DAYS
00
HOURS
00
MINUTES
00
SECONDS
REGISTER NOW
Back to Blog Index

Tutorial: Making Giants Part 4 | The Building

No items found.

Creating a building in Cinema 4D.

In Part 3 we built out a desert scene that can serve at the environment for our little film. With some lighting, some nice textures, and a little compositing magic it looks pretty good! Now, let's create that big ol' building that's going to serve as the Goliath in our story.

We're going to plan out the building in Illustrator, model it up in Cinema 4D, and then give it a nice texture.

You'll learn a lot of modeling tricks in this video, plus get a good look at the workflow that Joey used to go from Illustrator to Cinema 4D. Creating this building took some time, so you'll also see a lot of sped-up sections where he tweaks texture settings forever to try and get the look he’s after. Tons of stuff to learn in this one!

{{lead-magnet}}

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Music (00:00:02):

[intro music]

Joey Korenman (00:00:12):

Our scene. Sure. Looks party. So now we can move on to this building. I've got some reference images that I'm kind of digging, so I'm going to try and mash them up to make something cool looking and imposing. So I start by going into illustrator and just blocking out the basic shape of the building. Now, before I go crazy, uh, you know, doing stuff in illustrator, um, I want to make sure that what I create is actually gonna work in the context of the frames that have already set up. Um, so real quick, you can see here I've brought in all of those reference images that I liked. This was kind of the main one that, that really jumped out at me, but there was aspects of these other images that I liked. So I just wanted to be looking at them while I'm designing this.

Joey Korenman (00:00:58):

Um, and one thing that occurred to me was, you know, this building here is very tall and skinny. And if I hop back into Cinema 4D for a second, you can see that the way this frame is blocked out, this building, isn't really that skinny, you know, it's a little bit fatter and bigger, and I want to make sure that the building I designed in illustrator, uh, still has the same proportions so that, you know, when I pop it back in and get rid of this placeholder building, it all makes sense. What I'm going to do is actually select this building here, and I'm going to select one of these polygons, right? So I'm in polygon mode. I just select that one. And Cinema 4D down here tells me the exact size of that polygon. Okay. So it's a 73 by 2 48. So why don't we just round up, we'll say 75 by two 50.

Joey Korenman (00:01:46):

All right. So just remember those numbers, 75 by two 50, and I'm going to grab my rectangle tool and I'm going to, double-click in illustrator, right? If you do that, this pops up and the width can be 75 and the height can be two 50. And now what this gives me is a rectangle with the exact same proportions are pretty darn close to what we were using in Cinema 4D. So what I'm going to do is, uh, actually invert the stroke in the fill here. So I've got this nice little guide. Okay. Um, I'm going to make a new layer here. I'm going to actually call this guide and I'm going to cut it off of the building, cut that shape off the building layer and paste it into the guide layer. And the next thing I want to do is I want to be able to design on a grid.

Joey Korenman (00:02:32):

It's going to make life a lot easier in terms of, um, making sure that there's symmetry and things like that with the building. So what I'm going to do is, uh, go to my view menu and I'm going to turn on show grid. And then I'm also going to turn on snap to grid. And what I want to do is move this guide, right? So that the one of these corners is right on a grid point. Okay. And then I want to come down here and I basically just want to cheat this cheat, these points over. So I'm hitting the, a key to go to this direct selection tool, which lets me select individual points. And then I can grab those points and just pull them. And they will snap to the grid because I have snap to grid turned on. If they're not snapping, make sure you have snap to grid turned on, and then I can do the same thing on these points on the side.

Joey Korenman (00:03:20):

So I'm gonna select this point, come up here, select this point. And then I'm just going to move them just a little bit. And this one, didn't move somebody to move that one individually. And so now I've got a shape that's pretty much the right size. Um, it's, it's very, very, very close to the size of the polygon that we measured in Cinema 4D, but everything's on a grid now. Okay. And so this is going to make it a little bit easier to do symmetry and this would, this would actually be a lot easier if, uh, I've made this a little bit bigger. I'm gonna hold shift so I can make it the right size. And you see what I'm doing. I'm looking for these thicker grid lines. And I basically want to make this so that I want to make it big enough so that it takes up, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4 of these big kind of areas.

Joey Korenman (00:04:09):

So let me just pop back in here real quick and snap these points over. All right. And now we are going to be set up to pretty easily. There we go. Make symmetrical stuff because we know the middle of the building is going to be right here, right. This, this line right here. And so it's going to be easy to be, you know, to be symmetrical and all that good stuff. All right. So this is my guide. I'm going to bring this down here. Um, and I want to, uh, I want to make it a little bit lighter in color. So I'm just going to go here to my color and pick a lighter color so I can still see it and then I'm going to lock it. Okay. So now I can see the contour of that building like that, the right size. But now I can go to my building layer and actually start building out this building.

Joey Korenman (00:04:56):

So, you know what I like about one of the things I like about this building is that there's kind of different levels to it, right? Um, if we zoom in closely, you can see that you've got this bottom level and then it juts in a little bit, then it goes up and it juts in. And I kind of like, it gives it this cool kind of pointy staggered effect. So I want to do that on this building. So what I'm going to do is grab my rectangle tool and it's going to snap to this grid, which is going to make it really easy to start building this up. All right. And then I'm just going to copy and paste this shape and move it up like this and these shapes, I can actually make them darker. It doesn't matter what color I'm making any of this.

Joey Korenman (00:05:38):

And then once I've got this one moved up a little bit, um, I can move it inwards while holding the option key. Right. So it moves in from the center. Cool. And then I'll do the same thing again. And maybe this section, you know, looking here, maybe this set, this, this second section should be a little bit longer. So let me just move this up, like this, move this one down a little bit like, so, and then I'll copy it again, scooted in. And I'm just sort of, I'm just kinda playing around here. I just want to see what we're getting.

Joey Korenman (00:06:13):

There we go. Cool. And then maybe like at the top we can have a couple of extra little, little sections like this. Cool. All right. So you've got this interesting shape. I can select all these shapes now and I want to make sure that my Pathfinders open. So if it's not, you go to window Pathfinder, the Pathfinder tool lets you combine multiple shapes. All right. So I've got all these shapes and I hit this first one, unite basically merges all those shapes together. And now I have this outline of my building. All right. Um, and it's still very chunky looking and it's kinda cool. Um, and I think that's going to work and because, uh, you know, I, one thing I should probably do is actually extend it. So it goes all the way to the top. So let me hit undo for a minute.

Joey Korenman (00:07:00):

Um, and I'm just going to knock this one up to the top, like that, knock this one up a little bit and then select them all again and Pathfinder. Okay. So now I've got a, you know, something that is the right, uh, proportion. Um, so that when I, you know, bring this into Cinema 4D and extrude it, it's going to line up very nicely with this shape that's already in there. Cool. All right. So the next thing I want to do is make a copy of this shape. All right. Um, I'm just going to make a copy. I'm going to move it over here to the side. Here we go. Um, and I'm just going to leave that copy there. Okay. Cause now on this copy, what I want to do is add some detail like windows and interesting stuff like that. Okay. Um, so I do like these windows, I think they're neat.

Joey Korenman (00:07:52):

Um, but I think that, you know, one of the things that kind of fooled me the first time I looked at this image, you know, these are all individual windows, but the, you know, in the center of this building here, the windows kind of mushed together and they look like these really long, tall strips of glass, which I thought were kind of creepy looking and interesting. So I wanted to try and make something like that. So what I'm going to do, uh, let me just come down here and I'm just going to pull up a really long strip like this. All right. And I'll have it go. I don't know. Maybe, maybe that's a little too high, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop in here and I'm just gonna pull this shape down a little bit. Maybe it comes right up to where this level kind of ends right there.

Joey Korenman (00:08:38):

Okay. And I thought it would also be interesting if this was kind of pointy. Right. Um, now you can see here, there we go. Want to make sure it's snap to the grid. It'll make it a lot easier to make symmetry and stuff. I want the top of this window to be a little pointy. I think it'll make it a little kind of cooler looking. Um, so I'm gonna grab my pen tool. I need to turn off snap to grid temporarily. Right. And because I've got my, uh, my smart guides turned on as I move my pen right over here. It'll tell me where the center is. And then I can add a point there. Pardon me? I need to make sure that I'm getting that little plus symbol right next to the pen and then click. Okay. And then I can select that point and move it up and have a little pointy kind of window like that up at the top.

Joey Korenman (00:09:25):

Cool. All right. So I've got one of those and then I want to, I want to copy it. So I'm just going to hold option and shift and hit the left arrow key. And it's just going to knock that thing over right. And make a copy of it. And then I can just turn my Snapchat grid back on and it'll snap it to a grid. All right. And, uh, and I moved it down a little bit by accident, so let's knock it back up and there we go. All right. So now we've got two of these things and you know, it may look like, let me turn off, uh, let me actually hide the grid for a minute. So, you know, these, these look really thin kind of out of context here. Um, but one of the things that's, that's actually kind of tricky when you're building stuff in 3d is to make sure that things look big if they're supposed to be big and a good way of doing that is by loading stuff up with detail.

Joey Korenman (00:10:17):

Because when things are big, uh, you know, big features like windows tend to look small because if it's big and you know, and you're seeing the whole thing on your screen, that means you're far away and you should see tons and tons of detail. So I want to make, I don't know, maybe another, another copy of these. Um, and then, uh, maybe what I can then do is just grab these three. Let me turn my grid back on the hot key is a command apostrophe. Okay. And, uh, and then I can just come over here and set up symmetry on the other side. Okay. Um, to make it easier to see these, what I might do is actually flip the stroke and the fill. This will make it a little bit easier as we're working to kind of gauge. Um, so the next thing I want to do is start adding some windows and I want some variation in them.

Joey Korenman (00:11:08):

So what I think I'll do is I'll have the windows at this at the bottom, be a little bit bigger, right? So maybe, uh, what we'll do is we'll have these windows be, uh, four squares, right? Four grid squares. Um, and let me put one down here at the bottom, let me move this thing, illustrators giving me trouble. So I'm just gonna use my arrow keys. Let me select it, move it down here. There we go. Okay. So I want one at the bottom and then I'm gonna hold option and shift and move another one. Uh, let's say there, and actually they shouldn't be at the bottom. They should be up a little bit. Okay. So I'm going to then copy this one again. And once I copy one, you can command D right. And command D what it does, is it, um, it does the transform again, command.

Joey Korenman (00:11:59):

So whatever the last transform you did was it. We'll just do it again. Okay. Um, and then I can copy this and move it over here and then maybe copy this and move it over here. Cool. All right. And then I can grab these windows here and I can copy them over to this side. And then I can, uh, control, click and say transform reflect, and I want to reflect them on the vertical access access, the vertical axis. There we go. All right. And it'll just flip them for me. All right. So now we're keeping that simple symmetry and it's really easy. So now moving up a little further on the building, we can make those windows a little smaller. So then what we could do is make little groups of like one grid, square windows like this. All right. And because we have snap to grid turned on, it's actually really easy to make these cool. All right. So now we've got these groups of three.

Joey Korenman (00:13:07):

Okay. And I'm going to copy this group and move it up here. And it's given me trouble, uh, because what it's trying to do is it's trying to snap the center point of this, to the grid. Um, so maybe if I select a whole group of these and move them up, it'll be better. There we go. And then I can hit that command D key. Right. And, uh, and then up here, I got to get rid of this one. All right. You can see how quickly we're starting to build up a very detailed kind of thing here. Let me select another group of these. Copy them up here. Let me try copying a group of four. Yeah. That's not going to work. So I'm going to have to kind of manually copy groups of these and snap them back into place. So they, they show up in the right place.

Joey Korenman (00:13:56):

And this is basically, this is basically the process I'm going to use to, you know, just build up a whole bunch of detail in this building. All right. So, um, so I won't make you sit through the rest of this process, but I do want to talk about how this is going to be used. So, you know, I'm thinking that this is the front of the building and, you know, it's, so I've got basically like all these windows and these crazy shapes, and then I've also got the outline of the building. And so what I can do in Cinema 4D is extrude. Both of those, put them together and kind of have some cool variation and definition, um, you know, in the front of the building. But we're also going to see the side of the building and I want the side to look a little different.

Joey Korenman (00:14:37):

So I'm actually going to make a complete copy of this setup. That's going to be used for the side of the building. All right. Um, awesome. So this is step one in the process of making the building. So I just kept more windows and visual detail kinda messing around and changing the shapes of some of these things, trying to make it more visually interesting. And just thinking about the fact that when this comes into Cinema 4D, it's going to be really big. So I need a lot of detail on it. Once I had the front of the building kind of figured out I did the side of the building and I made it look pretty close to the front of the building, but a little bit different so that we could kind of combine the front and the sides and get a little bit of variation when we modeled the building.

Joey Korenman (00:15:22):

And then it was time to export it. I need to make sure that, uh, these shapes come into Cinema 4D the way I want them to. So the way that I'm gonna be using this is I basically want to extrude this shape and that's going to be the bulk of the building. Then I want to extrude this shape and I want all of these windows to be knocked out. And then I can basically just, you know, put this, this piece on top of this piece. And it'll look like there's this building with this really intricate, complicated front to it. Um, so in order for that to work, I need to make sure that Cinema 4D understands that this shape needs to have all of these little shapes knocked out. Okay. So an easy way to do that is to take all your shapes and just fill them with black.

Joey Korenman (00:16:04):

And before I do that, I'm going to select this entire setup here, and then I'm going to go in and hold shift and just de-select the outside, which sometimes can be difficult to do. Um, so another way I could do it is, um, oh, I think I may have it grouped. So I'm gonna shift command G to ungroup them first. There we go. Um, and then I can go in and select this whole group shift and get rid of the outline and then just group all these windows together. Okay. Then what I'm going to do is select all of this and I'm going to make the fill black, and then I'm going to use my Pathfinder, but I'm use the second option subtract. Okay. So I need to, uh, oops. I had a little window open here. Let's try that. There we go. And so now I've basically taken that outer shape and knocked out all these inner shapes.

Joey Korenman (00:16:56):

Okay. So now I know this is going to work properly inside of Cinema 4D. All right. So we'll do the same thing with the side, and then we'll hop into Cinema 4D and start building this out. All right. So here are the outlines that I brought in from a illustrator, and you can see that, um, you know, unfortunately Cinema 4D loses any naming that you did. Um, so you got to quickly rename these. So this is the front outline, and this is the side outline side of the building, not outlive knee, but outline. And then this group here, uh, this is the side detail, and this is the front detail. Okay. And so just to double check that everything's working the way we want, uh, what I'm gonna do is take, um, take an extruded nerves. And I'm just going to put the front detail in there and say hierarchical.

Joey Korenman (00:17:54):

Okay. And you can see that it's not a, it's not doing exactly what we want yet. So what I need to do, let me turn that extrude off for a minute is come in here, um, right. Click on front detail, Knoll, and say select children. So it's Lex every path in here and say connect objects. Okay. So then I can take this out and hide it and then turn the extrude back on. And now we should have a perfect little perfect little shape set up. Okay. And basically all that did was it took all of those splines and it connected them to make them one spline. And when you have one spline and Cinema 4D that has multiple parts, it's smart enough to figure out that, oh, this parts inside of this bigger part, that means it's a hole. All right. And I want to check and make sure that it's working on decided detail as well.

Joey Korenman (00:18:41):

Um, because that's another really complicated one. So let me do the same thing. Uh, and let me, let me, uh, make sure this is name correctly. So side detail, and I'm going to say select children connect objects. Okay. And then I'm going to copy this extrude and, uh, I'm going to delete front detail and put this copy of the side detail in there. And that works too. All right. Good to go. So now we've got, um, we've got our side detail and our front details, so those are already set up. So let me just say front detail and side detail. All right. So we're already starting to build this thing out now. Uh, right now, one problem we have is we are building this building, but we have absolutely no sense of scale, right. In relation to the scene that we've already kind of laid out.

Joey Korenman (00:19:33):

I want to make sure that when I build this building and I'm happy with it, I can copy and paste it back into the scene and not have to do a whole lot of work to like put it back in place and stuff like that. So I'm going to go back to this scene here and just copy my building placeholder cube and paste it in here. Okay. And you, so you can see that the scale of these doesn't match this yet. So let me go ahead. Uh, I'm going to group all of this building stuff under knowledge, we'll just call it building. Okay. Uh, and what I want to do is use that same access center command to bring the access all the way down to the bottom here, which would make it easy to line it up with this one. So I need to, uh, first say, include children and use all objects because this Knoll has a bunch of objects underneath it.

Joey Korenman (00:20:18):

And I'm going to say, Y negative 100 execute, and it's going to move that axis right. To the middle there, just like that. Okay. So then I can zero out the Y I can actually just parent it under this building and zero everything out. And so that way I can hit my T key and just scale it until it's the same scale as that building. All right. And I could pop into like my, um, my front view here and get really precise. Cool. Okay. And, uh, and then what I can do is, you know, I can build out the pieces and then just line them all up on the center of this thing. All right. So a really quickly, what I want to do also is go into this building placeholder object, go to the basic tab and say, x-ray, that's gonna let me see through it.

Joey Korenman (00:21:08):

So I can kind of use it as a guide just to make sure the volume of the building stays about the same. It's not gonna be exact, but it should be close. So we've got front detail, side detail. Um, so let's turn this off temporarily. And with front detail, let's also do the front outline. So I can just copy this. I'm gonna hold command and copy this extrude right there. And I'll call this front outline and I will just replace just like that. And what I need to make sure is I need to make sure that these two splines are in the same place on X. Um, so why don't I just zero that out, let's see here. And then these, uh, these extrudes are in the same place. Right? Cool. And now these splines are in about same place. And so now what I need to do is take that front detail and push it out this way.

Joey Korenman (00:22:06):

All right. And basically what I'm doing is I'm creating just a little bit of a knockout here. Okay. And what's cool about doing it this way is that now it's going to be very easy for me to have a different texture on the inside of these windows than on the outside. Um, and you know, to actually model this properly would be kind of a pain. Um, and the good thing is the way we're going to be texturing this, we don't have to worry so much about topology. You know, if I look at, um, let me just turn on lines for a minute, right? So this, this works pretty good. Um, but if I was going to do more modeling to this, it would be a kind of a pain I'd have to add a lot of polygons. And, and so, um, it, you know, it would be kind of a pain to add more details and bevels and stuff like that to this building.

Joey Korenman (00:22:53):

And so I'm deliberately building it this way, because I know that texturing wise the way we're going to do it, uh, mapping the texture onto it. It's not going to matter, you know, how, how precise the topology is. All right. So we've got the, uh, the front detail and the front outline, and those are locked together. And then we've got the, uh, the side detail. Let me turn this off. We don't need that. We hide these for a minute and make sure that we've got a, here we go. Um, and then I'm going to take my, uh, my front outline and I'm going to extrude it a lot more. And what I want to do is try and line up this front building with this kind of placeholder that we have. Okay. So I'm gonna take the front detail in the front outline and let me move these up here. All right. Let me, let me, let me start organizing this a little bit better. So this is building setup, let's say, and we can turn it off. We don't need it right now. This is going to be the actual final building. And so then I'm going to use that same access center tool, um, execute. And I think what's going on, let's see here.

Joey Korenman (00:24:03):

I want to make sure that we're actually getting this in the right place. Uh, let's look like we are. So let me, let me just do this, the old fashioned way. I'm just gonna move this so that it's centered right on that building, just like this, move the access to the middle. Okay. And then I can parent it under that placeholder again and just zero, everything out. Right. And it'll be right in the middle now. I actually want it, let me move that. And also it's kind of in the, the front of the building there, and then I'm going to scoot the building forward, get out of access mode.

Joey Korenman (00:24:42):

I want to scoot it. So it lines up with the front of that building. And then I can go into my front, uh, outline and I can extrude that until it's as big as the original building. Okay. Uh, cool. So now we've, we've started to actually get that final building and you can see that there's a ton of detail to it, and we're going to do the side as well. Um, and you know, it's because we, we shifted things around a little bit and illustrator, it's not exactly the same size. It's not the same width. So if we wanted to, uh, we could just, uh, scale it a little bit, um, you know, just to try and match it. I mean, it's going to make these, it's going to make the windows not quite as, uh, square, but that's okay. That's not a big deal.

Joey Korenman (00:25:29):

And we could even make it a little bit taller to kind of counteract that. Um, okay. But I'm not going to do that until the very end. Um, but just so you know, that we're going to be able to tweak this. It's not going to be an issue. All right. So we've got the final building. Um, all right. Let me hide the placeholder and now we need to do the side of the building as well. All right. So what I want to do is, um, let me copy final building, um, and just take these two pieces out of it. And we'll rename them side detail and side outline. I keep hitting the B and then I'm going to use, um, I'm going to use the side detail spline here. So let me get rid of front detail and put in side detail and, uh, let me hide, let's see here.

Joey Korenman (00:26:14):

I need to make sure that, you know, all of my coordinates are making sense. So front detail, um, is, you know, X is zero Z zero. So I need to make sure it's the same thing for side detail. Zero zero. There we go. Um, and then for side outline, so let me grab this. Here's the side outline. Um, and I needed an easy thing to do is just parent it to the front outline and then zero out the X and the Z, and then just front outline. Okay. And so now we've got the, uh, the side details. So this is actually the side of the building, and I can turn all this stuff off again, building setup is off. So that's good. Um, and let me turn off this front for a minute. So here's the side of the building. Okay. And what I want to do is, uh, in my final building, let me group these, and this is the front, and this is the side. And for the side, I want to use my access center tool again. Uh, and I want to say, um, point center.

Joey Korenman (00:27:22):

All right. So it's gonna, it's going to put that access pretty much right. In the center. It's actually not directly in the center, but that's okay. We'll fix it. It's actually not in the right spot at all. I want that right in the middle of this. Right. And, um, I'm kind of eyeballing it. We can try to use the access center tool, but I think it's given us trouble. Um, because, because we've got splines that are extruding, it's just not calculating it. Right. So that's okay. But basically what I want to do is take that side and rotate it 90 degrees. Okay. So you get something like this. All right, cool. So what I want to do, and I want to make sure that this is still kind of staying in that same footprint. Okay. And it's not, so I need to take the side and I need to move it back like this.

Joey Korenman (00:28:10):

And then I need to go into the side outline and I need to extrude it less. There we go. So now it's inside that, that same footprint. Okay. And you can see the reason that I modeled it this way, and I had the side spline be a little different than the front is because now you get this cool kind of like contour to the building. Right. It gives it a little bit more. Let me just make it a little more interesting, frankly. Right. Um, and so now you've got something with a lot more kind of there's little nooks and crannies to it. Um, you know, I loaded in, into my picture viewer here. I loaded in the reference images. And this was one of the references that, that I liked, even though it doesn't really look much like this building, I liked how there were just little like corners and pieces kind of jutting out kind of randomly.

Joey Korenman (00:28:57):

So I designed it that way and illustrator, so that wouldn't line up perfectly and you'd get kind of an irregular shape to it. All right. And then the rest of this stuff, we're going to be using as texture reference in a minute. All right, cool. So here is, um, here's basically our building. Now this side in the back don't have any detail. That's okay. You know, we did an animatic and one of the beautiful things about doing an animatic is I already know, we never see anything except the front and this side of the building. So who cares about the back? Who cares about this side? We don't have to do it, and that's why doing an animatic. Sometimes it can save you a ton of work because now I don't have to worry about that stuff. All right. So here we go. And then looking at that building placeholder.

Joey Korenman (00:29:38):

Okay. Um, you know, I talked about potentially stretching this out a little bit, um, and we can try that. We can see what that's gonna look like if I took the front and I used my scale tool. Um, and actually I can just, I can just do it this way. I'm just going to scale it on X a little bit. We could see what that looks like. Let me turn that building placeholder off. Right. If I made it a little bit more stretched out, I'm not sure it made that big of a difference to me. Um, you know, and I kinda like having a little bit more separation here. Um, and then maybe I'll do the same thing on the side. Maybe I'll just stretch that a little bit too. Not too much. Okay, cool. It just makes it a little bit, blockier a little bit chunkier, which kind of makes it fit better into that, um, into the placeholder cube that we already had.

Joey Korenman (00:30:26):

So here's our final building. I'm going to save this. Uh, so it doesn't end up building C 4d just in case, you know, better, safe than sorry. Um, cool. And, uh, there we go. So there's our building. Um, now I want to add a little bit more detail to it because, you know, I mentioned this before, but when things are supposed to look big, one thing that tells us they're big is we see tons and tons and tons of tiny little details. Okay. So what I want to do is add a little bit more detail around these windows. So let's do this, let's go into the, uh, into the front and we've got this front detail spline here. Okay. Um, and what I want to do, let me think about this. Let's try this. Let's take, um, let's make a copy of this front detail spline.

Joey Korenman (00:31:15):

I don't need the extrude and let's do this. Let's take, um, let's take a rectangle spline. We need it to be very small two by two. And let's put this down here. What I want to do is try sweeping this rectangle through that front detail. All right. And this needs to be really, really small and what it's doing. It needs to be even smaller. So like point to 0.2, here we go. You see what it did? It just added these little kind of just a little bit of trim to everything. Okay. And that could be easily. So this would be like the front trim. And if that's easily, just another thing we could add, like a slightly different texture to it. Um, and it just gives it a little bit more visual detail. Um, and because we already had those splines set up, it was really easy to do that too.

Joey Korenman (00:32:09):

All right. And we can do the same thing on the other side. Um, so we'll take the side detail and copy that spline. And I can just copy and do the same thing here. We'll uh, just swap outside detail in front detail. It's now we get the side trim. Cool. All right. And this is all, this is like super easy to do. This is all. This is working. Great. All right. Um, cool. So then let's see what else we can do now. There is going to be a shot, basically. The way we see this building is we see it, you know, from this really low angle like this. And then sometimes we see it from up top here. Okay. Now, when we see it from up top here, this is going to look really flat, which might be, it might be okay, but it'd be cool if there was a little bit more detailed to it.

Joey Korenman (00:32:59):

All right. So what I want to do for this is I want to have kind of like an extra piece up at the top here, I think. Um, so what I'm gonna do, I'm just going to manually build this. I'm going to take a cube and I'm going to shrink it down. So it's not so gigantic and I'm going to move it up to the top of the building. All right. And put it pretty much right. In the center. And, uh, and I'm going to scale it down like this. All right. And basically what I want to do, I want to center this as best I can, and I'm just kind of eyeballing this. Cause again, um, you know, th the way we're going to texture this and the way we're going to be using it, um, we're going to be able to get away with a lot.

Joey Korenman (00:33:46):

Cool. Okay. So I'm adding this extra piece, I'm going to make this editable. Um, and then I am going to use my knife tool. Um, let me go into polygon mode here, and I'm gonna hit M K to bring up my knife, and I'm going to set this to plane, and I want the X, Z. Now what the, why is going with the YZ plane basically want to add some cuts, right? And so I'm going to just tell it to make three cuts and slice it. Um, and so what this is going to do, let's see here, ah, this isn't working the way I want three cuts slice. It don't restrict a selection. There we go. All right. And so here, uh, what this is going to let me do is just add cuts to this really easily. And so let me add four cuts.

Joey Korenman (00:34:40):

And what I'm trying to do is I want to cut out the middle of this thing. Um, so I need to try and get sort of an, even an even kind of alignment of these cuts. Let's try six. I don't know, work. Okay, cool. So now I have all these cuts and what I can then do. Um, I need to take this cube and just scoot it over. It's not centered. It's not really all that centered for me. Cube. There we go. That's better. Okay. And then I'm going to take these polygons and these polygons, and I'm going to extrude those out like that. Okay. And then I'm going to take all of these top polygons. I'm going to do an inner extrude MW, inner extrude, make sure preserve, uh, preserve groups is on. Alright. So it, it, it, it like this, right. And I want like a little bit of a lip to it, and then I'm going to do another extruded.

Joey Korenman (00:35:41):

Empty is extruded, and I'm gonna extrude this down. Cool. Okay. And so now I've got this extra little piece of geometry, and I'm going to try and center this a little bit better on that building. You can see, it's not really centered right down here, so I'm just going to grab it and just gently nudge it over on X. There we go. Cool. All right. So now I've got this little top piece. Um, and what I could then do is, is just put like some little, uh, you know, maybe like some little gribbles in there. Um, Gribble has a term. I'm not sure exactly where it came from it. I heard it used when talking about star wars, it's basically just little like meaningless details that you add to something to make it look bigger. So what I want to do is I'm just going to take a, I'm going to make a cube, um, and I'm gonna make that I'm going to make it really small.

Joey Korenman (00:36:33):

Um, it's probably gonna need to be smarter than let's try one by one by one. And I'm going to put that inside of a cloner. And first thing I need to do, I need to take this cube that I, uh, that I made up here, and I need to save these polygons as a selection. So I'm going to go to select and say, set selection. And I'm going to call this a roof floor. And what I want to do is I want to clone this little tiny cube in object mode. I want to clone it onto this and let me rename this roof. This is my roof object. I want to clone it onto the roof, uh, distribution on the surface and for the selection. I want this selection tag. All right. And then I can just crank this up and, and, you know, you can make it even more if you want to.

Joey Korenman (00:37:19):

And I just want a bunch of them. And then I'm just going to call these gribbles gribbles and then add a random effector to that that is affecting the scale. All right. And so they can all be like slightly different shapes and stuff like that. And, and, um, you know, and it's just gonna, it's just going to add, like, you know, and they're all going to be the same texture, so they're not going to stick out as much like that. It's just going to give it a little bit, uh, extra, you know? And so you can see here, there's one sticking out of there, um, which I don't want. So I'm going to just go into the, um, the seed and just change it until that doesn't happen. There we go. And all, I don't care what it looks like on this side or in the back or anything like that.

Joey Korenman (00:38:05):

All I care about is what does it look like for this shot when we're looking down at the plant? Cool. All right. So here's our building. Um, and you know, you could keep going and adding more detail, but I think that for our purposes, this is going to work pretty good. All right. So here's the front, here's the side. Um, and then we've got all this stuff on top. Beautiful. So we've got this building and now we need to texture it. So I, uh, I just copied the, uh, the building that we just made and I'm just going to paste it right in here. And, oh my God. Look at that because of the way we modeled it, we made sure to use our placeholder building as a reference, it, pastes it right in place. And I can just turn my placeholder building off. And here we go.

Joey Korenman (00:38:51):

Here's the building we just made with all the detail, all those windows, all that beautiful stuff ready to go. Um, and so I'm just going to save this, uh, as a new, as a new scene. So this is gonna be seen, oh one, uh, and we'll call this building working. All right. So, uh, let's just do a quick render here. Um, so I've got my, uh, basic crappy settings here, and I'm going to use, I'm actually gonna switch this to the physical renderer. Um, I'm going to leave global lumination on. Um, and what I found is that sometimes the, uh, the physical renderer actually renders faster than the standard renderer for certain situations. Like if you have blurry reflections, um, which that happens when you have something, uh, when you have a reflectance channel with a roughness setting that makes the reflections a little bit blurry, and the physical render actually handles that faster.

Joey Korenman (00:39:45):

Um, and I just wanted to do a quick preview of this before we really get cranking on the textures, just to see overall how this is fitting into the scene. Okay. And just get like a rough idea. Now, here's the thing about doing texturing texturing relies on so many different things. It obviously relies on the texture. Um, but it's also gonna rely on things like the lighting and the modeling, um, and things being reflected in the texture. So the environment it's in plays into it. And so it's, it's not a fast process because you can make a texture that looks great on your little preview down here, but then in the scene it looks terrible. And so what I want to show you is just some strategies that I kind of use, um, when I approached texturing. Okay. So what I want to do is copy, I'm going to copy, uh, the fill, the fill light, this light skylight.

Joey Korenman (00:40:42):

Um, and then I'm going to copy the ground in the mountains. I'm a copy those, put them in a brand new scene like this, and scoot, scoot kind of far back like this. All right, here we go. All right. So here's what I'm doing. I want a new scene where I'm kind of a, and I don't even really need those mountains. I'm just going to delete the mountains. Okay. I just want the ground and the sky. All right. And basically what I'm going to use this scene for this scene is going to render a lot faster because there's a lot less in it. Okay. And, um, I, you know, I don't even have global illumination turned on, but what I want to do, um, and let me actually turn off this. Displacer let me make this a lot simpler. Um, what I want to do is basically have an object.

Joey Korenman (00:41:27):

That's very simple, like a cube or something like this, right. I'm actually an object that I really like to use. I, it gives you a good idea. Um, for, for textures is you take a cube, you make it editable, you select every single face and you do an inner extrude and then an extrude, okay. This simple shape for whatever reason. Um, and let me make sure my fill light is somewhere where it's going to be actually useful. Let me turn this back to, uh, let's see here, lions, here we go. Um, so that fill lights, let me move that back just to make sure that it's actually going to be doing something to this shape. Okay. So what's cool about this shape is it's got a few contours to it, um, and it can cast shadows on itself and stuff like that. And it'll just give you a decent idea of what a texture is going to do in a scene, but it's going to render super fast.

Joey Korenman (00:42:25):

So I need to turn global illumination on because that is definitely going to affect, uh, the way a texture is going to look. And I also want to make sure before I start doing this a million times that I have, uh, autoload turned on. Okay. Um, and I can say skip PrePass if present, and this is going to let me, um, crank out renders a lot faster over time. I could also tweak the global illumination settings to make them a little bit lower. Um, but you can see that the global illumination, it really does affect the look. So I want to make sure that's on when I'm looking at my textures here. Okay. And just for comparison, let's do a standard render and see if that's faster in this case, in some cases it is faster. Um, and because I don't have a texture on this thing, it actually probably is going to be faster in this case.

Joey Korenman (00:43:14):

Um, and what's taking the most time is just the GI. PrePass cool. All right. So let's talk about textures for a minute. What kind of texture do we want on this building? So these are some of the reference images that I pulled from Pinterest. Now. I really like this. Okay. It's, it's rough and gritty, but it's also kind of shiny. And I like how there's kind of like a, uh, a regularity to it. You know, it looks manmade. Um, I like this too. Um, I mean, it's kind of a completely different shape for a building, but I just liked how much detail there was to it. Okay. Uh, this was the original building that I sort of modeled ours after, and you can't really see much texture there. Um, here's another one again, it's like, it's got this lattice around it. That just really makes it feel dense visually.

Joey Korenman (00:44:02):

And I like this because the, the surface, it's almost like a brushed metal kind of, you know, uh, blurry, reflections, but a little bit shiny and glossy. And so I kind of wanted to capture some of that, um, you know, a little bit of this. So for this type of a texture where it looks like, you know, slate or something like that, um, you can try to mimic that using shaders inside of Cinema 4D, like the noise shader, for example. But a lot of times you're going to just have to, you're going to be fighting that, right. You don't really want to be doing that. Um, and trying to mimic something when you could just go to CG textures.com or any other site that you'd like to find textures, um, and, and just find a good texture. Right. So let's just take a look. Uh, let's go to, um, let's see.

Joey Korenman (00:44:50):

I mean, I can just type in slate and see what pops up and you see, okay, you've got all these great textures and a lot of them are already tiled for you. Like, look at this one. Right. That's pretty interesting. I like it, but I feel like it's a little bit too, old-school looking, um, and you know, it looks like a roof. It doesn't look like the side of a building. Um, so that's not exactly what I want. All right. So let's just try, um, not granted, but let's try. Well, I don't know. Let's try granted. So what happens if I type granted in, into the search box? Yeah. There's some really nice ones. There's like some smooth ones. Like, you'd find on like, you know, your, your countertop, um, there's stuff like this, which is kind of cool. I kinda liked that, that brick texture.

Joey Korenman (00:45:35):

Um, and then you've got something like this. The only problem with this is it's not tiled and I could tile it. Um, I really liked the texture of it though. It's beautiful. All right. So I'm going to leave that one open, um, but let's keep looking. Let's see what else we got. There's another page here. All right. And you know, what I'm looking for ideally is one that says set tiled. Cause if it's tiled like this one set tiled huge. Um, and let me just take a look at that. What this means is that this is already a seamless texture that I can use. Okay. Um, and if I clicked 3d tiling preview, this is pretty cool too. This will show you when this texture is tiled, what it looks like. And that looks pretty good. I like the roughness of it. It's got a ton of detail, um, and I can use this texture kind of as a base to do some cool stuff.

Joey Korenman (00:46:27):

All right. So let's go back to this texture and let's say, that's it, that's the one I want. Uh, and I am going to hop in here and download this and you can get a free membership, which lets you download, um, you know, basically like small versions of textures. Um, and then you can pay like a tiny amount of money and get much more high resolution. Okay. I highly recommend CG textures. It's an amazing, amazing resource. So what I can then do is come in here and we can say, you know, building and I can, uh, I can start just by putting that texture in the color channel. All right. So that's gonna probably have ended up on my desktop. So let's copy that in. Um, and I'm just going to say no for now. And I'm going to put this not on the ground, sorry, on the, uh, on this object.

Joey Korenman (00:47:18):

Okay. Now first thing you're going to notice is the texture is not going to map properly at first. Okay. It's going to look incorrect. So what we're going to need to do is fix that, but I want to show what it looks like. Uh, so if this ever happens to, you you'll know how to fix it, see how it's stretching the texture right here. Um, that's because by default Cinema 4D tries to use UVS to apply a texture. And if you don't know what you are, there's actually another tutorial, an old one on school of motion.com. That explains what you, these are. You could find that, um, but I'm gonna change the projection to cubic and that is the projection we're going to use for our building as well. And what that's going to do is it's going to let us, um, you know, not have to worry about the shape of the building.

Joey Korenman (00:48:03):

It's just going to apply it in a way where, um, you know, it's going to look perfect on every single side, cubic mapping looks good for things that are sort of cubic. Right. There we go. So now you've got this nice texture, but there's not a lot of variation to it. It's really, um, you know, it's just flat looking. I mean, it looks like, uh, basically you took a sticker of something that looks like granite and put it on there. So the next thing I want to do is get into some of the more, uh, elaborate details here. All right. So I have color and I also have reflectants. Okay. Now reflectants in Cinema 4D 16 actually includes both your specular and your reflections. So, uh, you've got the default specular, um, and I'm going to change that to a Beckman layer. Okay. Um, so what I want to do is basically have some specularity and some reflection on here, and I want to use this texture that I've already started using, um, to, to make the reflections and the specularity look a little more realistic.

Joey Korenman (00:49:03):

Okay. So what I could do for example is, um, I could go to, uh, my reflection, strength. I don't want to key frame that I do not want to do that. Let me remove animation there. Um, what I want to do is I want to put a, um, I want to put a texture underneath reflections strength. Okay. So I'm going to just load in that same bitmap and I'm going to turn a reflection, strength up to 50%. Let me just turn up to a hundred percent so you can see what it does. And, um, before I do that, I want to go into this texture and I want to turn the black point up a little bit and the white point down to get more contrast, right? Just to show you what this is going to do. It's basically going to take the brightness of this texture and, you know, parts that are bright are going to be very reflective and parts that are dark are not going to be very reflective.

Joey Korenman (00:49:56):

And it's going to give a, it's going to break up this texture a lot and make it a lot more realistic because in real life, things are not generally uniformly realist, uh, reflective, or, you know, are uniformly shiny there's variation to it. And so now you can see that the dark parts of that texture are not as shiny as the rest. Okay. And it's going to give this a lot more of a realistic look. So I basically want to go through and use features like that to dial this. Okay. Um, I could also, um, let me come in here. So we've got reflection, strength. You've also got specular strength and you could do the exact same thing. I'm going to copy that channel and I'm going to paste it into my specular string and turn my specular strength up now, reflection, strength. Let me turn that down to 50.

Joey Korenman (00:50:50):

And I've got roughness at 50 right now, too, which means that it's not a perfect reflection. It's kind of blurring it a little bit. Um, and I can also use a bump in the reflectance channel to break up the reflection without actually creating a bump map. Now, in this case, what I actually want to do is create a bump map. So I'm going to go turn on bump and I'm going to paste that same texture in there, and let's leave the strength at 20. And let's just do a quick render and see what that looks like. And hopefully you're starting to see the process here. Uh, you, you know, you start with like a photographic texture and then you can, um, you know, kind of get that looking the way you want. And then once you're happy with it, copy that same texture into other channels, into your reflectance channel, to control, reflection, strength, and specular, strength, and bump and all that kind of stuff.

Joey Korenman (00:51:43):

And you know what this is going to end up doing is giving you a texture that has a lot more richness and variation to it. Okay. Um, I don't have ambient occlusion turned on but once I turn that on, that's going to really accent, you know, these intersecting parts here, but this is already feeling pretty cool. And I'm good. I know that this is going to feel good as a base texture for me. Um, but you know, I also want a little bit of that tiling to it. I want it to feel, um, you know, I want it to, to, to have a little bit of this kind of quality to it. Let me pull up my picture viewer. I want to have some of this in there too. So how could we do that? So what I, what I could do, um, is I could go into my bump channel, for example.

Joey Korenman (00:52:27):

Okay. So the bump channel just has this texture in it. I could set this to layer. Now what that's going to do is it's going to basically give me a little mini Photoshop inside of Cinema 4D and part. So the first layer in my mini Photoshop is that bitmap, but I can then add another shader on top of it. So for example, I could go to, um, I could go to surfaces and I could say, add tiles, and then I can go into my tiles options and let's turn the tile colors to, um, let's actually do them as black and we'll do the grout is white like this. And actually, you know what, let me try it backwards first. So I want tiles to be white, right. And the grout to be black. Um, and so then I'm going to multiply that on top of this bitmap that's already there.

Joey Korenman (00:53:19):

All right. And so this is just for the bump and you can see already kind of a preview of what's happening. Um, and let me set my output to a nine 60 by five 40 here. And let me turn on that physical renderer, because I think it's going to start to give us a little bit of a, a little bit of a speed advantage. And I'm just going to do a quick render here, um, to see what that bump, you know, now with that title kind of on there, what that's doing. Wow. Look at that. You see how like, you know, stacking the layers has given us this very interesting looking texture. Now those tiles, they feel, I like the grooves a little bit too thick and also where there's a groove. I want things to be a little darker. So I'm going to do two things.

Joey Korenman (00:54:04):

All right. One, I'm going to come into the tiles and I'm going to take the grout with down to about, I don't know, let's, let's, let's do half of that. And the bevel with, I don't want as much of a bevel either. Right. So I'm just making those a little bit thinner, those lines. Um, cool. And that looks a little bit better to me. All right. You can see just like, I just made those a little bit thinner. Cool. Then what I want to do is, uh, let me just go ahead and copy this channel and I'm going to activate the diffusion channel and diffusion lets you break up. Uh, it basically lets you make things, um, overall a little bit dollar based on a texture. So I am going to paste that channel. Um, and you can see that that's going to make those grooves a lot darker and um, you know, maybe what I could do to let me go into layer, let me just turn off bitmap for a minute and turn this to normal.

Joey Korenman (00:55:02):

Right? So that it's not affecting the texture at all. It's just effecting the grooves. And if I change this mix strength, you can see what it's doing. I just want it to darken those grooves just a little bit. There we go. So you've got this pretty elaborate looking texture here and um, you know, I'm just curious what that's gonna look like on the building. Um, so let me just go ahead, uh, and just do a quick test. I'm going to take, I'm going to go back to the scene. I'm going to copy my final building.

Joey Korenman (00:55:38):

I'm going to paste it here and uh, let's find that building. Where is that building here? Turn this cube off. All right. So there's the final building. Um, and I'm going to take this texture and just put it on there. And a, and I'm going to do quick render. Now the scale of the texture is probably going to need to be adjusted now because that building was so much smaller than that little cube that I was playing around with. Um, so you can see that the tiles are way too big. So I need to come in here and say at tiles instead of one, let's try 10 and 10 by 10. So I'm basically scaling that texture down by a factor of 10 and that's starting to look okay. Um, I probably need to make sure that I'm mapping this correctly. I need this needs to be cubic mapping. Um, and let's try that. So you can see that this process, there we go. That's looking kind of cool. Yeah. I'm kind of digging that. Let's see here.

Joey Korenman (00:56:37):

Let's see when we get in close here. And so, all right, now all of the parts of the building have the same texture. Um, and again, I'm going to make the inside of these windows have a different texture. Um, and uh, actually let me show you how I'm going to do that by the way. So if we just made, um, you know, a new texture here and we said windows, all right. And so for the windows, uh, you know, maybe we want like a dark kind of a cool colored window and we want that to, um, to have Beckman reflection. Um, we are going to want for now on that. And since those are glass, we're going to use a dielectric. Um, and uh, and then for reflection strength, we can, we can turn that up quite a bit. Roughness can go down to zero, um, cause they're windows, they're going to be very reflective.

Joey Korenman (00:57:23):

Maybe we can make them 10, just so they're a little or no, you know what? Zero, let's leave it at zero, um, 75 reflections strength. So what I want to do is take this window texture now and just put it on the front outline and let me hide these other pieces for a minute. Um, and I want to tell it to only apply that texture to the C one face now, uh, it's not showing up, uh, correctly right now. And the reason is, um, the way textures are kind of, uh, you know, evaluated in Cinema 4D. It depends on the order that the tags are coming. So if I want to get really specific, what I need to do is have this texture tag on the front outline and then have this texture come after it. Um, let me turn off the side as well.

Joey Korenman (00:58:08):

And if I hit render, now, you'll be able to see right. That I've got a totally different texture on the front of this thing that I do on the side. Okay. I've got this shiny kind of reflecty one. Um, and, uh, and then on the side and you can see it's, it's, it's acting like a window. It's a very dark window, actually, probably a little bit too dark. Um, so let me actually dock this picture, viewer a feeling we'll be using it quite a bit. Okay, cool. Uh, let me take the, um, let me take the color, brighten it up a little bit and we'll just do another, another little render here. Cool. That's better.

Joey Korenman (00:58:49):

All right. Okay, cool. So, uh, we've got our beautiful, um, our beautiful glassy texture. And then when we turn the front detail back on, copy this texture over it. Um, and let me turn the front trim back on, copy that same texture on it temporarily, even though it is going to change and now you can see I'm in, I'll have to probably zoom in. So you can see this a little closer, but you know, for like looking at a shot like this or something. Right. And we, and we render that, um, you're going to be able to see reflections here, whereas you're seeing the tile everywhere else.

Joey Korenman (00:59:29):

Cool. So we've got two different textures working, working here. Okay. So now here's another thing. This, this trim is feeling a little small to me, especially when we're close to the building. So I'm gonna take the trim. Um, let's knock that up. Let's try like 0.5 and 0.5 and I want a different texture on it too. Um, and I dunno, I'm thinking just kind of a, maybe a matte texture that's maybe a little bit brighter than, than this. So let's, um, so we'll just make a new texture, we'll call this trim. Um, and maybe we'll, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll make that texture a little bit cool. Just like a tiny, tiny bit. Cool. Um, and kind of in this like mid-tone range, uh, I'm going to go to reflectance and I'm gonna change this to Beckman and I'm gonna leave the roughness up and I, I want a little bit of specularity, but I want it to be, um, I don't know, let's say 20% reflective, but I want it to be pretty rough.

Joey Korenman (01:00:25):

I want it to feel mat. Cool. And then let's see. Oh, and then of course I need to put that texture on the front trim and render that. Um, and this is going to give us a little bit more contrast on the trim and break things up for us a little bit. Um, and that's starting to feel pretty interesting. There's a lot of detail going on and I may actually want to make these tiles a little bit smaller. I'm going to be doing a lot of these little test renders, um, to try and see, you know, trans see how this building looks from from different angles and from the top and from the bottom and all that kind of stuff. Um, then it looks like something got a little bit screwy, uh, here, this looks like it. Um, oh, I know what's going on. I have my side turned off.

Joey Korenman (01:01:13):

There we go. So I'm gonna have to do the same thing with the side to get those textures on and all that kind of stuff, but you could see, we're already starting to get a lot of visual interest here. Um, and let me try to, let me try to frame up something remotely, resembling that first shot. Um, I'm going to take a, uh, I'm gonna take a camera and we are going to make this a 15 mil lens. Cause that's what it is in the beginning. And we're kind of looking up at the building like this, right. Uh, and I'm going to turn on ambient occlusion now, so we can see kind of what the effect of that is going to be. And let's just do a quick test render or it might not be that quick and let's see what we're getting here.

Joey Korenman (01:01:54):

Cool. Um, and you can see the render times are starting to creep a little bit because now we've got all the bells and whistles turned on. Ambient occlusion is a definitely a little bit of a render hog, but it adds so much nice detail, um, to this stuff. And we've got, you know, a lot of really nice kind of visual density happening here. It's going to be kind of a really interesting thing for your eye to look the trim. I feel like there's a little bit too much contrast there. Um, so I'm going to play with that, but this is basically the process that I am going to follow to nail the texture of this building. Um, and now you're going to watch me work really fast for a long time. Uh, while you hear me do voiceover, this part of the process takes a while because I'm constantly rendering and re rendering and re rendering to try and find that look, that feels the way I want it to this process is sometimes called look development.

Joey Korenman (01:02:52):

And there are some newer tools out there, like the octane renderer or theater render that can speed this up, uh, using your GPU to render faster. But I didn't want to bite off too many new things for this series. So I just kept it simple and just use the built-in Cinema 4D renderer, which is great after tweaking and rendering and tweaking and rendering. I ended up with this. I like it. There's a lot of contrast. There's plenty of detail in the texture to help sell the size of the building. And once the camera moves and we see light reflecting off the building, I think it's going to look very interesting visually. Now next up we have the plant, the plant has to be designed a lot more deliberately because it's going to move the building. We'll just sit there, looking cool and ominous, but the plant is alive. So it should be able to sway with the breeze open or close its pedals, bend forwards or backwards. And at the end of the piece, it actually has to grow on right in front of us. So it needs to be modeled and rig to do that. So how do we do that?

EXPLORE ALL COURSES

Dive into real-time 3D with our Unreal Engine beginner's course by Jonathan Winbush. Master importing assets, world-building, animation, and cinematic sequences to create stunning 3D renders in no time! Perfect for motion designers ready to level up.

Explore this Course

Unlock the secrets of character design in this dynamic course! Explore shape language, anatomy rules, and motifs to craft animation-ready characters. Gain drawing tips, hacks, and Procreate mastery (or any drawing app). Ideal for artists seeking to elevate their craft.

Explore this Course

Elevate your freelance motion design career with our guide to client success. Master a repeatable method for finding, contacting, and landing clients. Learn to identify prospects, nurture leads, and develop a thriving freelance philosophy amidst chaos.

Explore this Course

Rev up your editing skills with After Effects! Learn to use it for everyday needs and craft dynamic templates (Mogrts) for smarter teamwork. You'll master creating animated graphics, removing unwanted elements, tracking graphics, and making customizable templates.

Explore this Course

Stand out with Demo Reel Dash! Learn to spotlight your best work and market your unique brand of magic. By the end, you'll have a brand new demo reel and a custom campaign to showcase yourself to an audience aligned with your career goals.

Explore this Course

Illuminate your 3D skills with Lights, Camera, Render! Dive deep into advanced Cinema 4D techniques with David Ariew. Master core cinematography skills, gain valuable assets, and learn tools and best practices to create stunning work that wows clients.

Explore this Course

Master After Effects at your own pace with Jake Bartlett's beginner course. Perfect for video editors, you'll learn to create stylish animated graphics, remove unwanted elements, and track graphics into shots. By the end, you'll be equipped for everyday AE needs and more.

Explore this Course

Revolutionize your Premiere workflow with customizable AE templates! Master creating dynamic Motion Graphics Templates (Mogrts) in After Effects to speed up your team's work. By the end, you'll craft easily-customizable templates for seamless use in Premiere Pro.

Explore this Course
Your download is in your inbox!!!
Check your email (spam, too) for the download link!
Please check the spam folder if you don't see the message within a minute or two. Google likes to hide your downloads, sometimes.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Not sure where to start?

If you’re a beginner, here are some great courses to help you get started:

After Effects Kickstart

Dive into the fundamentals of motion design with our most popular (and recently updated) After Effects course.

LEARN MORE

Photoshop + Illustrator Unleashed

Master the basics of Photoshop and Illustrator and gain invaluable insights in this introductory level course.

LEARN MORE

Design Kickstart

An introduction to the design principles behind all great work.

LEARN MORE

More Advanced?

If you’re a more advanced student looking to up your game, here are some great options:

Animation Bootcamp

Learn the art and principles of creating beautiful movements in Adobe After Effects.

LEARN MORE

Design Bootcamp

Learn to design for motion in this intermediate-level, project-based course.

LEARN MORE

Cinema 4D Basecamp

Learn Cinema 4D from the ground up in this exciting introductory C4D course.

LEARN MORE

Now is the time to learn the skills you need to advance in your motion design career: