C4D - Subdivision Surface Weight

In this tutorial I will show you a simple trick how to control Subdivision surface (aka Hyper-Nurbs) with Subdivision Surface Weight tag.

I am not very good at sub-d modelling, also not a great fan of it :) but its a powerfull technique and lot of great 3D artists use this all the time. As you can see in the top render, you can get really nice results from very simple meshes, what are easy to modify (not like highpoly objects).

In the top render is 3x the same object, from left to right: base mesh -> base mesh in subdivision surface -> base mesh in sub-d with edges modified with sub-d weight.

This tag allows you control the impact of subdividing, either on edges or on points.

Sometimes you need razorsharp cuts or corners and cutting the object wont help very much. On this example one side of the pipe is not exactly 90° to world axis, so near cut did terrible mess after subdividing.

If I do the cut more inside, it will look too much beveled. And in this case I want the ends of pipe look like sharp cut.

My solution is to add a Subdivision Surface Weight tag (object manager/tags/cinema 4d tags/sub...) to the base mesh. First put the base mesh under Subdivision Surface, so you can see what you change.

We want to modify the pipe ends, so we need to select the end edges. Switch to edges mode and choose loop selection (prees "v" in perspective view for popup menu - select - loop selection) and select both end outer edges. You can disable sub-d for this step, if you cant find them on subdivided mesh.

Re-enable sub-d, push and hold the "." (dot key) on keyboard and drag the mouse (left-right) anywhere in view. You have to hold the "." key. You can see the changing of Subdivision Surface Weight by changing of blue color to red.

Thats it :) Now click off the tag, to see the result better.

You can change the weight of points too (same action) and also combine point and edges weights. Also the tag allows to change subdivisions amount. Happy experimenting :)

C4D - modelling water splash without plugins

I never thought before that is possible without plugins like Realflow, but it is. Big thanks to

Nikolaus Schatz and his youtube tutorial, what makes cca 90% of knowledge in this tutorial. Also thanks for permission to publish and modify his idea. And its surprisingly not very hard work, so lets go...

1. We start with modelling basic shape of a water splash. If you find some real splash photos online, its something like a simple crown. Best way to get it, is start with simple cylinder without caps and some more hight segments (we will need them)

2. Make it editable and add a Taper deformer to it (select cylinder, shift+click on Taper). Move deformers control outside (or set it to minus strenght, with 100% curvature). Doesnt matter how much you deform it, something between minus 50-150% looks still good.

3. Right-click on the deformed object in manager and select "Current state to object" (or from top menu: mesh/conversion/curr...). Delete original object with deformer. Rename the new object to "4small"

If you google water splashes photos, you can see, that a bottom of the splash is in most cases like a wall of water, then in splits into smaller water drops. Thats why we need later two crown-like objects, on which we will clone water drops (and melt them together with Metaball)

4. 1st we model big crown for small droplets. Select object "4small". Swith to polygon mode. Select some polygons in rough crown shape (dont select much polygons in the lower half of the object), delete selected.

5. Switch to point mode, right click, optimize.

6. Duplicate object, rename it "4big". Select "4big", go to polygon mode, select polygons in upper half, delete them. Go to point mode, optimize.

7. Now create two water drops, just a normal spheres. Name them "big" a "small". Radius depends on the size of the crown, f.e. if the "4small" object is 400cm in Z axis, spheres should be around 10cm and 5cm in radius.

8. Create MoGraph Cloner. Drag "small" sphere inside it, change mode to "Object" and point it to "4small" object. Change distribution to "surface" and amount to cca 250. Play a bit with the seed number until you get nice distribution (its not a problem, if some droplets lap each other). Select Cloner object and add MoGraf effector Random. Turn on only Scale (under it select uniform scale) and play a bit with the value.

9. Duplicate the Cloner. Drag "big" sphere under it, and change pointing object for cloning to "4big" object. Play with seed and count parameter until you get more-or-less even distribution with more overlaping.

10. Select objects "4big" and "4small" and hide them both in editor and renderer.

11. Select both cloners, group them together and put the group in a Metaball object. In Metaball set Hull value to 100%, both subdivisions to 3 cm (depends of scene scale) and turn on Exponential Falloff.

12. Adjust sizes of both cloned spheres, count of clones and seeds, until it looks natural. You can turn off Metaball in manager between changes, this function consumes lot of CPU power.

13. The middle drop you can create easily with few spheres in other metaball and the rings on water are created with formula effector with sperical falloff on a highsegmented plane. You can also add displacement effector to plane to make it look even better.

14. Create a water material (IOR = 1.333) and add it to all water objects.

Have fun with your modeling :)