I’m making a note here, huge success

Well, nearly…

Monday night (May 27th) was FE Suffolk night and I’d volunteered to give a talk about my use of Cinema 4d and how I have used it to make content for websites, games, videos and other such tomfoolery. To try and make it interesting to the web people in the audience who have probably never been near a NURBS or a metaball in their lives, I thought it would be more fun to demo both Cinema 4d and Unity to give an idea about how a 3d app can be slotted into a workflow. That was the theory anyway but as the saying goes, the best laid plans…

I thought a good way to grab the audiences attention would be to build an iconic object from a well know game so picked the weighted companion cube simply as it’s a cube shape so works well with going from a primitive shape up to something more complex. I built the cube on a Sunday afternoon the week before the talk and spent about a few hours over the next couple of nights putting the texture together while having some fun with the model.
Cinema 4d Cube
This shows my step by step process starting with a primitive cube. The second one is a demo to show a default cube with its standard UV and how simple it is to drop a texture on to get a basic object textured. The third cube is me using a boolean to build some of the shape up, yeah yeah yeah… booleans are not the best way to work but sometimes they can be used to get good results. The fourth cube is the final thing cleaned up and then five is the final textured cube with the UV’s cleaned up as the process of modeling the cube creates some horrible overlapping on the UV. I would go into depth on what some of the terms are but I doubt I could explain them well enough without a load of pictures.

The final result isn’t bad for a few hours work and it’s free to download from the freebies section of the site.

companion cube

A quick video was rendered up to show an example of dynamics.

I then edited an existing Unity sandbox I’ve made to include the cube, along with a script to interact with it (pick it up and chuck it) but I left that as a backup as I really wanted to demo how to import objects from C4D into Unity and then work with them. The landscape was built using a selection of the default items and scripts within Unity but some of the assets are mine such as the crate, the rather crude toilet (crude model rather than crude as in rude) and the picture of famed Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov is something I don’t really think I can explain. Finally I installed the unity player onto my laptop, tested it, copied all the files over and then set off for the talk.

My talk was right after one called ‘Javascript without jQuery’ by the main man of FE Anders Fisher, I got up, plugged the projector cable in the laptop and was greeted by what had to be the smallest screen in the world. My laptop, in an attempt to display the small resolution of the projector, crushed all of the C4D screen into a mess of jumbled screens. So for those that haven’t seen C4D before, this is what it should have looked like:
c4d-largescreen

Not like this:
c4d-icklescreen

YOWZER!

So not one to be daunted too much, I shuffled on and managed to go through a few of the steps I took in creating the cube and explaining a bit about UV mapping. I should add that while UV mapping is a pretty important step when trying to make a good model, its also one of the most mind numbing processes ever developed by man, and it often takes me the longest out of any stage of making something as I tend to lose the will to live while UVing.

The biggest hurdle came when trying to work with unity as I couldn’t find any of the stuff I wanted to talk through properly and then to rub it in further, the object imported fine into Unity but refused to be imported into the scene. I ended up going straight to the finished version and back-peddling through the steps to show how I added a box collider and a rigid body then applied the script to the scene.

The test scene worked fine in Unity but fell over when I exported it and ran it as it turns out theres an export to offline mode. Well I didn’t know did I? It seems you need a whole load of js nonsense to make it work and without an internet connection it just fails so theres a little tickbox for export to offline mode that pumps out the needed files. You live and learn.

In the end I think I got there, just about, but I think GLaDOS had a hand in a few of the things that threw me off.

A big thanks to Kerry Buckley for taking a photo of me mid ramble.
dr cube and the unity 3d cinema 4d nightmare from hell

If anyone has any questions, feel free to chip in below but finally… here’s the link to the scene: FE Suffolk Unity Demo

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