C4D: Fire Room BTS

12/15/2017

Tags: cinema 4d r15 volume effector modeling

My fall semester of senior year has come to an end! To celebrate, I fired up Cinema 4D to try and complete a video contest in a day or two. I gave up on the video contest, but at least I made this adorable Wes Anderson-esque interior. Let’s talk about some of the interesting bits.

Good Rooms

When designing interior scenes, the more detail, the better. I don’t know much about 3D modeling, so all the shapes in this scene are pretty simple, but subtle additions can make a big difference between good and bad-looking rooms. Molding along the ceiling and floor helped make the room look a lot more believable, and little objects like the soccer ball, tissue box, and even the pencil case on the desk convince the audience that the room is actually inhabited by someone. The bedsheets were my personal favorite adjustment. Just by moving a few points around, we get a much more natural disturbance along the bedsheet’s surface. Just as the real world is filled with errors and imperfections, so too should 3D designs have texture and complexity that imitates these issues.

Soccer Ball Modeling

A soccer ball is surprisingly easy to model. There’s a bucky ball primitive in Cinema 4D that has precisely the desired hexagon/pentagon pattern desired. Just extrude each face several times, subsurface divide it, and your soccer ball is done.

Lighting

Probably for the first time in my 3D design hobby, I thought about lighting in a semi-serious way. The bedside lamp’s light uses a volumetric light to get rays to shine out of the luminous lampshade, and a blue spotlight imitates moonlight outside the window. It’s simple to set up a well-lit scene in 3D, and it really brings an otherwise unimpressive piece to the next level. Definitely think about how light works in interior scenes, as these factors play a major role in believing the scene.

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