Low-Poly Paper Tree Creation & GI Baking in Cinema 4D

Low-Poly Paper Tree Creation & GI Baking in Cinema 4D

on Mar 7th 2013 with 17 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Software: Maxon Cinema 4D
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

In this tutorial Aleksey Vozeneski will walk you through how to model a low poly tree in Cinema 4D and how to achieve that paper look that is becoming quite popular these days. He’ll then move on and show you how to bake Global Illumination, so that render times can be significantly reduced and your scene will be production ready.

Introduction

Tutorial

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By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Aleksey Voznesenski is a 3D specialist experienced in many areas of the 3D world. Mainly focused on animation, he has experience in motion graphics, modeling, rigging, render setup, lighting, camera work and art direction. Working as a contractor for many companies, Aleksey provides his expertise to get projects done on time and to spec. His main package of choice is Cinema4D, but Aleksey has experience in all of the industry standard packages like 3ds Max, Maya and XSI. His contact details can be found at ace5studios.com. Also be sure to visit ace5education.com for even more tutorials from Aleksey!  

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  • http://www.facebook.com/floricultor Thiago Correia Carneiro

    ‘Low-poly’ with quads? Hum… Not cool. I feel that the principle of the low poly aesthetic is missing here. That would be 100% cooler if you used TRIs instead.

    • Aleksey Voznessenski

      trolling? :)

      if not: select all and right click, and select triangulate :)

    • cslowik

      technically its low poly. but i do agree low poly work looks just better with tris.

      and no, triangulating doesn’t achieve the same thing as modeling with tris.

  • john

    Nice tut ! what about artifacts we can see around the plane ?
    when you dupplicate tree.. we duplicate artifacts

    Could you help ?

    • Aleksey Voznessenski

      you can either increase accuracy in the Gi settings or you can increase the texture size while baking. Not sure exactly which artifacts you are having a problem with.

  • tepunqt

    pretty cool tip with baking gi into the object! this should work pretty well for architectural flythroughs as I assume?

    • tepunqt

      …but propably a problem with transparent and reflective materials?

    • Aleksey Voznessenski

      yeah there will be problems if you just blindly bake all materials. you got to keep the reflections and transparencies as chanells and just bake the stuff that isnt transparent or reflective. for example the background. and keep the hero buildings with proper materials. You can exclude the baked stuff from Gi calculations by using a “compositing tag”

  • http://twitter.com/fabulous_mauro Mauro Di Ianni

    Pretty cool tutorial, thanks. Kind of a lame question: I see you’re using a windwos 7 dark theme, can you tell me how is it called? Thanks again! Cheers

  • Nik Ska

    А ты на русском туториалы читаешь?

    • Aleksey Voznessenski

      net ne chitayu :( No mozhet nado bi nachatj =)

  • http://www.G2Bproductions.com Greg2B

    Nice tut simple and straight forward. But the tips you mentioned in about modeling where really useful. You should just do a quick tip on improving your modeling speed.

  • Elfago

    Thanks, very effective effect !

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000113175463 Sebastian Paszkiewicz

    Thanks for the great tutorial.

  • Andres GB

    Fantastic Tutorial! Thank you for sharing q:)

  • http://twitter.com/eight_io eight_io

    Any tips on how to bake GI for a camera animation? Thanks!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000264066477 Matthew Austin

    If anyone is having a problem wherein each plane on your hexahedron is spit into two visible tris when rendering (instead of remaining a flat quad), you can re-add phong tags and just turn the angle limit down to 30 degrees or so.