Hallo everybody, for long timae have no post here, experimented with sculpting in cinema 4d.
And have one question, I have made this skecth of space-marine, and want to transfer it to nurbs. But have no Idea how to start and what approach to use.
I'm Intrested in hard surface this organic stuf on the stomach will sculpt latter.




For example this shoulder how to model, have no idea how to start e.t.c...)) Any Idea would be greate)

If you have the OBJ file format you can use this little prog!

http://moi3d.com/download/Obj23dmWireframe.zip

But decime your file first ! Millions polygons will be not easy to use!

Thanx good idea, i'll try. But how to model this kind of surfaces like shoulder have no idea)

Hi mir4ea, that's going to be a pretty difficult project - the easiest type of stuff to do in NURBS is when you're able to work more using 2D curves, but for your project there with a lot of swoopy pieces and not many straight shapes you will need to be working with 3D swoopy curves more and that usually requires more experience to get used to.

The basic technique though would be to try and focus on each broad "sheet" of the object, you will end up building a surface (using Sweep, Loft, or Extrude depending on what happens to be easiest for the particular case) for each large sheet, and then trim those with one another to get common edges, then join those surfaces together and do a fillet to round off the sharp connecting edge.

The tricky part is that you often want to build your sheets initially as an extended shape and then the final outline only comes by trimming with other surfaces, rather than trying to model every single shape directly to an irregular outline. If you try to build surfaces directly to irregular outlines it's difficult for the shapes to be smooth and clean. So often times you need to kind of visualize the surface as a larger shape and let intersections produce the final outline.

So for example for this piece here:




You would build a sweep something like this to start with:



Then it will have the excess part cut off by intersecting it with another extended surface for the adjacent part.

- Michael

Hi mir4ea, so here's an example of how that particular piece could be modeled - you have to start by drawing some profile curves, and then use a construction command like Loft, Sweep, Network, or Extrude to form a broad surface like this (here I'm using sweep through 2 profiles):






Then the next piece would be something like this - here I've drawn 2 curves and used loft to build this adjacent piece:






Now since I have a lofted solid I can cut that into pieces using boolean difference with the sweep as the cutting object. If you have all surfaces and not any solids then instead of boolean difference you would use Edit > Trim - the booleans are oriented around working with solids and automatically forming solid results, Trim works on surfaces and lets you manually pick which cut up pieces to discard. Basically when you're working only with surfaces you should use Trim. But here I used boolean difference to slice the loft by the sweep, and then deleted this piece here:



Then you select the edge and do a fillet to round it off:




Then you just basically repeat this process for every area in your model. But it's going to be an advanced project that will take quite a bit of time to complete because you will have to be doing a lot of 3D swoopy surface construction and that's just fundamentally more difficult to do than only drawing 2D curves. Try to use 2D curves when possible for some parts like here how I've used 2 2D curves for doing the Loft. And again the key thing is to not always try to build each piece directly to its ending border right from the start, if you have some irregular outline those will often need to be formed by an initially larger and more simply constructed sheet and the final outline comes from intersections that trim away the outside of it.

Because you will need to work at a pretty advanced level for a project like this, it may take you a while to get up to speed, you may be better off staying with sculpting for this one where you are already familiar with it. But I hope these examples show you how the general process would work in MoI.

It can take some practice to get used to visualizing how to best construct an extended surface. In some cases you do actually want to build it directly to the final outline, if the outline has some simple structure like bounded by 4 distinct sides. But when the outline is not regular like that you then need to instead visualize an extended area and construct that extended piece instead and cut it.

It tends to be easier for people starting out to understand that an interior hole should come from a cut, but it takes more practice to get used to the outer boundary to be built from cutting as well.

- Michael

Thanx a lot for your detail explanation, I'll give a try.
Looks a bit advanced.

Hi mir4ea,

> Looks a bit advanced.

Yup, it's definitely an advanced project - shapes that involve lots of swoopy surfaces and hardly any straight or flat parts are in general more advanced projects to model with NURBS and require using more tools in combination with one another.

The ones that are much easier and super quick to do with NURBS are ones where you are able to define more of the model by 2D curves, your case here doesn't particularly fit into that category though.

Part of that is because it's so much easier to visualize what result that you are going to get in 2D curve generated stuff. Constructing surfaces that swoop and bend around and are not close to being straight in any one direction generally takes more practice just to get a feel for how to shape them.

- Michael

Tried to model this way but it takes a lot of time ant is a bit advanced...
I found way how to polish sculpted material in cinema 4d to make it hard surface..
Just what I get: