Greetings!

Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.

Pipes / Tubes in Cinema 4D

[Deleted User][Deleted User]11 Posts: 4,002Member
Ok. So this is my first ever tutorial and its on something that i JUST learned a few months ago. So forgive me if there is a better way to do this.

What we are gonna learn today is how to make pipes or tubes for your greebling endeavors.

Although this will be done using Cinema 4D, I'm sure that it can be of some help within other applications.

Here we go.

First thing you're gonna want to do is make a spline object. This can be almost any type of spline that you want, akima, linear, freehand, B-spline, take your pick.

splinechooser.jpg

Ok. I'm gonna use a linear spline that way we can teach you about the "Round" tool which I have come to find out is VERY use full if you use splines a lot.

So, lets go ahead and draw our spline. I'm gonna press the "F4" shortcut key to go into "Front View" mode in the viewport. Dont know why i do this, i just like to make splines in that view.

So just draw out a basic spline with about 5 or 6 points in it.

splinedraw.jpg

Ok, this is where we are gonna use the "Rounding" tool. It's not important to this tutorial, i just thinks its useful.

What you need to do is select at least 2 points in your spline.

I'm gonna select my middle three.

pointselect.jpg

Now you need to got to the "Structure" menu, and use the pop out menu "Edit Spline" and then choose the "Round" option which is located towards the bottom of the list.

round.jpg

Ok, so after you click on the "Round" option, your "Attributes Manager" is gonna update and show you a few values that you can change.

The "Points" option is for how many new points you want added to the spline. The more points the rounder it is. And the next option in the "Spline Type". This is the type of spline you want it to use when making the specified section round.

I'm gonna set my point value to 10 and leave the type set on B-Spline.

round002.jpg

Press ok and your spline will be rounded.

round003.jpg

Alright, so now that we have that sorted out we are gonna turn this into a pipe.

Lets go ahead and press the "F1" shortcut key to return us to the "Perspective" view in the viewport.

Go back to your spline drop down menu and choose the "Circle" spline.

In the "Attributes Manager" go ahead and change the radius of the circle to 25 and the plane to "XY."

circle.jpg

Alright, this is where it starts to get fun. There are a few options that you can choose from in the "Intermediate Points" field.

circle002.jpg

I'm not gonna describe what each of these are because quite frankly, im not sure. Lol.

But for this tutorial we are going to choose the "Uniform" option.

This is basically going to make all of the points the same distance away from each other.

When you do this you're gonna be allowed to place a value into the "Number" field. Let's go ahead and make this value 2.

circle003.jpg

Ok. Now that we have the size of the pipe and the path we want it to follow, we need to add some polygons to it.

To do this we are going to employ the help of our NURB friends.

Bring up your NURBS pull down menu and select "SweepNURBS."

NURBS.jpg

Now we need to make both the splines "Children" of the SweepNURBS.

To do this select both of the splines and then click and hold them. Now move your mouse over the SweepNURBS object in the "Object Manager" until your mouse has a down arrow next to it, then release.

children.jpg

Ok. There you go. Once you make both splines children you should have a pretty decent pipe.


final.jpg


The best part about it though is that you can still change the all the values of the splines for tweaking as you need it.

Hope this helped and good luck ! :thumb:
Sign In or Register to comment.