Intro to primitive objects - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- Whenever you want to create a graphic element, inside of Cinema 4D, you'll probably want to start with primitive objects. There are several different methods of modeling inside of Cinema 4D. But primitive objects are three dimensional objects that you can use as a base point to create primitive shapes. Let me show you what I mean. If we look here in the view port, I'm going to hover of the right-hand side, and just make that a little bit larger so we can more clearly see this shelf up here within the interface. And in this section of the shelves we have the different create tools, and I'll start with the left-most tool here that looks like a cube. Anytime you see a box that has a black triangle, in the lower right corner, you can click and hold on that shape and you can see all of the different things that you can create within these primitive objects. So, let's look at a couple different things here. Let's start by adding a cube. Now, since I went ahead and held down my mouse, I can choose the cube here. If I let go of the mouse and just click once, since that cube was up, that's what's going to be added in the scene. Notice once I've actually added something in the scene here, in the attributes panel, I have my object channel that's showing me the size of this object. So, if I wanted this to be 800 centimeters on the X, I can highlight that area and type 800. And if I press tab, it's going to move down to the next field here. So, if I want its height on the Y to be 150, I could type 150 and then press tab. And if I want its depth to be much more narrow, something like 10 centimeters, I can go ahead and type 10, and that's going to make this much more narrow. Now, in order to view this shape I'll go up to the upper right corner of the view port, and I'll click on my rotation arrows here, and I can orbit around what I just created. Now, you might notice I've got some other things here on this shape that I could potentially click on. For example, these orange boxes. If I click on this top-most box here, and I drag, notice I'm changing the the size of the Y. And as I drag in here, notice I can actually create things that are smaller that one centimeter. I can do the same thing here on the X, and I can do the same thing on the Z. Although depending on my rotation settings, or my orbiting settings, I may or may not be able to see clearly what it is I'm creating. So, I can go to the upper right corner of the interface, and I can click this little icon here to change the views that I'm looking at, or the number of view ports that I'm looking at. So, now if I look in the upper left-hand corner here, you can see I've got perspective, top view, front view, and right view. So, now as I hover over this little cube here, you can see I am now making this larger on the Z, and as I change that in my right view, and my top view I'm getting a very clear look at how I'm actually changing that shape. Each different primitive object will give you different options. If I go back up here and I click and hold I could choose a completely different shape. Let's go ahead and choose the tube object. Now, notice once I've added the tube in here, I've got these objects overlapping and intersecting. When you're working in 3D space it's generally a good idea not to have object intersect. So, what I'll do is hover over this arrow here in the top section. See how I have this blue arrow? If I click on that and drag, I can move this object in Z space. So, I'm going to move it forward here. And if I want to rotate my object, I can come up here to my different orientaion tools, and I'll grab my rotate tool. Notice when I grab my rotate tool, instead of having little arrow handles, now I actually have axis handles. So, I can click on this X axis, and I can rotate this on the axis. And if I hold shift as I rotate, it's going to snap in full increments around until I get to 90 degrees. So, here I'll click once on my tube in the objects manager, and that'll bring it's attributes here. So, much like I was able to input different attributes within my cube primitive, I could do the same thing here the tube primitive. Notice the edges of this tube look kind of angular. So, I may want to increase the rotational segments. Instead of typing it in, this time I'll click and drag on the up and down arrows to increase or decrease the number of segments. Now, just like in my cube object within my tube object I also have visual anchor points that I can click on to change the different parameters of this individual object if I want to make changes accordingly. So, the next time you want to create something that is a three dimensional object without having to create it totally from scratch, you'll definitely want to make sure to make use of primitive objects.