Make a tire in Cinema 4d xl | ||||||
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This is roughly what you should have by now. Here I've dropped the
Segment in a Symmetry Object just to see how it works. Now it's
time to start slicing using the Knife.
Select the Knife (Structure>Knife) or hit
the letter K on your keyboard. Make sure that the option
Restrict to Selection is unchecked in the
Active Tools Manager -- we want our cuts to slice throgh the
whole mesh. From the Top or Right viewport add
4 cuts like in the image: 2 cuts to form a thin band of polygons and 2 cuts to
form a slightly wider band. If you hold down Shift while
cutting you will restrict the knife to 45Ú angles and will make it easier to
keep the cuts straight.
Now switch to Polygon mode, select the polygons shown
above and delete them.
This
is how it should look.
OK, this can be a bit tricky but the principle is quite easy: select
some points, clone and move them, and use the Bridge tool to
create new polygons. Here's how you do it:
Select the points on the image marked with purple dots (•) and copy their Y-value from the
Coordinates Manager.
Now select the blue dots (•) and
clone them once, just as we did before.
Paste the values you copied earlier in the cloned dot's Y-channel and
hit Enter -- the points should move down to the position marked
with orange (•).
Now Bridge the points to build the polygons
nescessary for the pattern of the tire. The image above shows what it should
look like.
Continue cloning points and then bridging them as this image shows. As
you can see I've let 2 triangles slip through but I think we can get away with
it :)
Now it's time for some more slicing. Select the Top
view and lay down 6 cuts along the X-axis as shown in the image. The cuts are
made close to the edges and the reason for these cuts is to
provide sharp definition when we eventually drop the finished wheel in a
HyperNURBS. When you're done cutting swith to
Front view for some extra slices.
The black lines on the image indicates where the cuts
should go. Once again, we want sharp definition on our tire pattern and this
will get us there.
This close-up is just to illustrate that I decided to go with
triangles for the ending of the thinner polygon band as well. You can also see
some of the cuts we made in the previous steps.
If you drop the Segment in a Symmetry Object and hit render you should have something like the image on the right. It has some resemblance with a tire but we're not there yet. Switch to Points mode and Top viewport.
Select the Live Selection tool and make sure that
Only Select Visible Elements is unchecked.
Then select a any group of 4 points and start moving the on the X- and
Z-axes. If you have some reference material of real tire patterns, use
them, otherwise just move and rotate the points (around Y-axis
only!) until you get something that could pass as a believable
pattern.
Frequently check with the Symmetry Object active and
dropped in a HyperNURB to see how you're doing. When you're
satisfied it's time to Duplicate and then
Bend.
Deactivate the HyperNURBS and select the
Symmetry Object. Then select Function>Duplicate.
The number of Copies determines the size of your tire -- 5
copies will make it pretty small and 200 will make it pretty huge (although
rather thin...). Anyway, enter 50 to start with and work from there. Alse check
Generate Instances so you wont bog down your system with too
much geometry. Also, if you change the geometry of your Segment, all instances
will update immeadiately.Now, the tricky part here is to know how much every
instance should move. Select Top view and start experimenting
with different values for the Z-channel. You might wanna zoom
in real close in order to get the instances to line up properly. I found that
something around 2500 was an appropriate number. Click OK.
Add a Bend deformer
(Objects>Deformations>Bend). Group the
Symmetry Object (containing your Segment), the
Instances and the Bend deformer under a
Null Object (Objects>Null Object). Name the null
Wheel. Select Right viewport and rotate the
Bend deformer -90° around the X-axis/Pitch.
Now double-click the Bend object to bring up its dialog box.
Change the Y size so that it encompasses the whole group of instances and is
placed reasonably in the middle of the group. Check Keep Y Axis
Length and set the Mode to
Limited.
Your hierarchy should be as the image above illustrates. Now we will
bend all those instances into a circle and forming the actual tire.
Grab hold of the yellow handle on the
Bend deformer and start dragging it in the
Z-direction. You will see the instances starting to bend. You
will probably have to drag the handle as well as zoom out quite a bit before the
circle will be almost closed. Now zoom in and double-click the
Bend deformer once again. You'll see that the
Angle will be very high and this is the value you should play
with now -- add 10-20 degrees, click OK and see what happens.
Zoom in extremely close on the gap between the two ends and
make sure that they meet as neatly as you can. For my wheel the angle of 412Ú
proved to be OK.
Now drop the Wheel-group in a
HyperNURBS and render -- Congratulations, you have a
tire! Just add a hubcap and you're ready to roll!
Here I've added some additional cuts (the line along the
center of the tire) to break up the pattern a bit plus a rim modeled by
following this tutorial by Holger Schömann at Digital Worlds.
Note: the tire can get very heavy on the polycountside when
you drop it in a HyperNURBS so if you're not planning any close-up shots of it,
deactivate the HN. Usually you can get away with simple polygons. Or set the
HyperNURBS Subdivision Renderer to 1 to keep
some smoothness.
Talk about this tutorial at the Forum >>
3DM models creation
Copyright © Anders 'Cartesius' Kjellberg
Edit by Stryker
Source: http://www.cartesiuscreations.com