3DKiwi

Great. The last couple of versions have introduced procedural modelling which I'm really digging.

As mentioned I'm no longer the owner of C4D cafe. I moved to the dark side (Modo) a couple of years ago. Yeah I miss the challenges as well. My suggestion with restarting the challenges is to start off simple, nothing too complex. Something like an abstract Chess piece would be ideal to start with. I recall we did a chess set challenge and had some superb entries.

No. I live 2 hours drive away so a comfortable drive. It would mean staying the night. Not really a problem. Only issue is I'm a Modo user now and can't see any real reason to come back to using Cinema 4D. I doubt you would want me rabbiting on how much better Modo is. Hope it goes well for those attending.

I started of with a text spline as a child object of an Extrude Object. The Extrude object had zero depth. This was just to generate the polygons. I then use the knife tool. No other tools. Then select some vertices and moved them to create some depth. Bit rushed as I needed to get off to work. The letter C would take a little bit of work but nothing too major so that you could successfully run a loop knife cut on it. Here's a similar progression showing how I made it. I started with a text spline as a child of a Extrude object and made the Extrude object editable. LetterC.zip

This is one of these ones that sounds easy but isn't. I would do it manually if a nice sharp result is what you're after. Here's what I mean where I've very quickly done the letter H. You can see my modelling steps by unhiding objects. Text.zip

Excellent news.

This pattern is pretty easy to recreate within C4D. Here's what I mean. I just traced one section of your spline with the Polygon pen tool then cloned it. Grid.zip

Perhaps a different approach will work better? As I understand it all you're trying to do is add some thickness to the plastic. If so then why not actually add some thickness to the model. That can be done with the extrude tool with the caps option enabled. Here's what I mean where I applied an extrude to an elongated sphere. Lastly I applied the Boolean. Pity C4D doesn't have a thickness deformer. This would be much better as it's non destructive. Other apps like Blender do plus their Booleans work a lot quicker than C4D's. Hope this helps.

The 3D Coat mesh looks soft to me. I wonder how the new VDM in R20 would go? Anyway just to give you an idea of what a Modo Mesh Fusion model would look like I've replicated part of the original model and imported it into C4D. Quads generally until you get to the cut out parts. Renders cleanly. What's very slick is the source meshes for the Mesh Fusion object can be if you want, procedural meshes i.e. you can edit the construction of them. The Mesh Fusion object then updates. Mesh Fusion then allows you to adjust the size of the edge bevels where the Boolean intersection is. When you're done you generate a final mesh. Anyway, back to the car I'm modelling in Blender :) MeshFusion.zip

I'll see what I can do later today. Both Modo and Moi will generate a lot of geometry but it will render clean plus pretty easy to create.

Of course this kind of modelling is a piece of cake in a Nurbs modeller like Moi (Moment of inspiration) or using Mesh Fusion in Modo. In both of these you would be making the holes with Booleans. No need to fart around with edge loops and triangles etc.

There's a subdivision modelling technique where you use a shrinkwrap deformer to deformer one surface on to another surface. In this case you would be deforming once cylinder on to the surface of a more highly subdivided cylinder. The highly subdivided one is referred to as the "Guide Mesh". This gets hidden. Now on the other cylinder you perform you knife cuts, extrudes etc. You then use the deformer to project this on to the guide mesh, excluding any holes or extrusions. The knife cuts etc get smoothed out. Blender does this technique really well. Cinema 4D can do it but it's a bit trial and error to get it to work right.

Holy toledo!! Yup, you have a lot of edges. Far too many plus the top is one giant N-Gon. You could fix that by doing an inner extrude once or twice. This is going to be challenging to model using Sub-D. I would delete the Sub-D object as you have edges for the model to look round. You then apply the Bevel deformer (using the angle option) to round out the edges. (You would need to do a bit of clean up first however).

Alteratively you can simulate a Shear using the FFD deformer. The screen grab shows this being done.

C4D doesn't have a Shear tool. Best you can do is select 1 vertex then with the Move tool selected enable "Soft selection" in the tool settings. Play around with the radius then drag the vertex upwards. Vertices nearer to the selected vertex will move more than those further away. Here's the Shear tool in Modo in action. In fact all it is, is the Move tool with a linear falloff.

C4DZone is online for me.

Blender's navigation can be configured to replicate that of other 3D apps e.g. Maya navigation. The upcoming 2.8 addresses a lot of the issues with non standard hotkeys etc. In Modo extruding a curve is not as easy as C4D but it's certainly doable whilst retaining the ability to edit the curve and the extrusion. It's procedural modelling system takes a bit of learning but once you know your way around is very powerful. The main impediment is it slows down with anything modestly complex.

The C4D documentation says the normal scale tool only works in polygon mode. Pitiful that something so easy to do or you would expect so can't be done in C4D. Modo does this easily. Even Blender can scale locally and in edge mode. Here's me doing it in Blender. I changed to edge mode just to show it works in edge mode. It would have worked the same in polygon mode.

C4DS - excellent. Suggest you upload this file to the Cafe's download section. The points to circle script is one of the most downloaded files from the Cafe. Having a radius adjust option would be super cool. Modo has a points (edges and polygons) function that works the same but with options to change the radius and spin the selection. I use it regularly.

You're over thinking this Fastbee. Unless you're thinking of applying I wouldn't stress over it.

Pretty good news from the sound of things. To go global I would hope that MAXON does away with the restrictions they place on 3rd party resellers. e.g. From New Zealand I can't buy C4D from a US reseller as I've done with other 3D apps like Modo and ZBrush.

Working for me. Just paste the url in.

I like the dark skin. I like have the unread content button at the top rather than having to scroll to the bottom. I still reckon it's too hard to find the cafe's free tutorials. They should have a link of their own along side "Gallery".

Hopefully after 2 years they found something to use :)

Maybe Igor can pass this on to MAXON as a bug as something isn't right. That said if it was me I would have my objects better organized in the Object Manager with Parent null objects and then child objects. You then move entire groups by moving the parent null. Should I want to mass select objects I would select in the Object Manager rather than the viewport. Generally for me I select objects in the Object Manager then only select in the viewport in component mode (point, edge & polygon). BTW a tip for selecting obscured objects in the viewport is to hold down the Ctrl key and right click over an object. You then get a popup menu of objects behind the mouse cursor that you can select from. Release the Ctrl key then select the object from the menu.