Cinema 4D practical tutorial: 3D modeling and lighting of a space station

How does a room work? Whether it's a train station, an Art Nouveau room or a space station - rooms should be thought of from the inside out. So we don't start with the walls, but with a part of a room segment. The segment is first built up from several such parts, from which the room is then gradually instantiated.

Spatial logic should be a high priority right from the start. In this video, we use a spline and the extrusion object to build the border for the two cubes. The important thing is that the border has a shadow gap so that it can be recognized as a functional element. By inserting the so-called SSAO (new in R18), the joint is already clearly recognizable in the viewport.

Rooms do not necessarily have to be angular or even rectangular. For this reason, an inclined surface into which an opening is drilled is used as a connection between the previously created element and the subsequent ceiling. In this way, we come close to the goal of combining several functional elements into one room and making it appear technically sophisticated.

To create the most complex shapes possible, the room unit already created is duplicated and connected to a window. Important: Windows in vehicles or airplanes usually have rounded corners so that loads do not occur at points but are distributed over a curved surface. We build the window element from two splines, which are connected and subordinated to an extrusion object.

The complexity of the window is still very low. So we create a kind of seal whose directional spline we derive directly from the edges of the window. This technique is one of the most frequently used to adapt newly created objects to existing ones.

Creating the base strip is not particularly demanding, although you can also come up with your own shape when creating the spline. More interesting is the use of the new knife tool. It has been assigned a number of new functions, most of which can be learned by playing. Nevertheless, the classic cutting techniques will probably remain the most important.

The function divider is a trick that makes it possible to instantiate the subsequent segment without making it look boring. It consists of a simple spline that is extruded and rounded. You can either use the prefabricated spline or your own design.

The lighting concept involves combining some rather sober ceiling lights with the spectacular space lighting. A frozen selection and the truly legendary bevel deformer are used to create the interior lighting, which allows non-destructively rounded edges to be added to untreated objects.

As we have only built one side of the room so far, we can use the symmetry object to build a complete room segment. You can follow my suggestion or let your imagination run wild and design a completely different architecture. Your room can be larger or smaller, you can arrange the segment radially or diagonally. The important thing here is the camera and its focal length, which we create and change in this video.

The connecting element is a detail that is embedded in the ceiling. It therefore only exists once and should be axially symmetrical. Therefore, the individual points of the underlying spline are aligned via the structure manager before you place them in an extrude tool to build the element.

To make the ceiling element appear more technically sophisticated, we install a set of spotlights. This requires a little thought, because only then is it possible to distribute the three discs correctly by snapping and connecting them polygonally with a cube element. Up to version R15, this can be done with the bridge tool, from version R16 onwards with the polygon pin.

The floor of our scene consists of a plane, not the classic floor object. The layer allows us to select and extrude a part. In case you plan to use the physical renderer, we should scale the entire project, because only then will you get the expected depth of field with the appropriate Blender. Watch this video to find out how.

The fuller and more complex a scene becomes, the more difficult it is to move in the viewport. However, as you are usually working on details anyway and do not need the entire scene, you should assign the individual elements to corresponding layers. This way, only the part of the geometry that is currently needed can be displayed and edited - the "unnecessary" parts of the geometry are hidden and do not need to be moved.

There are an infinite number of different ways to set light. To give you an idea of which type and direction of light might suit our scene, I show you different lighting situations in this video. You don't necessarily have to choose one, because you can also simply combine different types of light. The important thing is that the light should create the desired mood and match the logic of the image.

Illuminating polygons that have a luminous material requires the use of global illumination. However, the default settings usually do not provide a sufficiently bright scene. In this video, you will find out what options you have to brighten up the scene and how amazingly different these options can be.

To make the outer area, i.e. outer space, perceptible, we need another light source. Similar to a sun, this should be precisely controllable by means of a decrease, so I opt for a circular surface light. The highlight: you can click on the shadow cast in the viewport, so the light source can be positioned and fine-tuned quickly and easily.

There are many ways to create shaders. A classic option is to create them in Photoshop. The task of this shader is to provide the walls with a barely perceptible, textured surface, which nevertheless gives the eye a grip, so to speak. The setup in Photoshop is simple, the resulting PSD file is loaded into the color and relief channels.

The tex folder contains a range of materials that you can play with. This video is about the standard procedure. You will learn how to load materials, assign them and, if necessary, mirror or tile them. The layers of the material can also be opened and edited in Photoshop by double-clicking on them.

The vertex color tag can be used to paint colors and alpha channels directly onto the geometry. All you have to do is place the tag behind the desired object in the object manager, tell the tag whether you want to paint on colors, an alpha channel or both, and you're ready to go.

Although the vertex color tag enables color application, the color remains invisible during rendering. To make it visible, you must place the original material in a layer shader, assign a vertex map effect to it and drag the vertex map into the corresponding window. This connects the shader and the map and makes the material and the color application visible.

You don't always just want to paint on a color. If you would rather have a different material instead of a color, set the "alpha channel" in the vertex color tag. This is assigned via a layer shader in exactly the same way as before. If you now paint on the geometry, you can make the new material visible (white) or remove it (black).

Although the material application via the alpha channel works quite well, the edges between the materials look very artificial. You can change this by following the video exactly and adding the "Levr" calculation mode to the alpha material, as this is able to make the edges appear much harder and more organic.

Since version R18, Cinema 4D has had a direct connection to the Substance program. The great thing about this is that you don't need to own Substance yourself, but you still get access to several hundred shaders provided by other users in the Substance forum. Cinema 4D "translates" the shaders into native C4D materials, whereby the Substance setting options are largely retained.

Global illumination, ambient occlusion and glow effects are the most important render effects we need. I will also give you a number of tips, such as creating different render presets, using already created GI settings or reducing the contrast to avoid washed-out lights via color mapping.

After rendering, the image is fine-tuned in Photoshop: We add an overexposure of the light sources to make the atmosphere more tangible, and we also use LensFlare Studio to add a visible light source and corresponding lens flares. At the very end, we center the subject optically using a vignette and carefully add a little more color dynamics.