The Room

The Room

In this article I will shape a room by the measurements of my kitchen. There are many different ways of modeling a room but since there are some tricky corners I will start off with a cube. The coordinate system of the object and the coordinate system of the world(which the object is in) will be important, so hopefully you will understand their special relationship and how to rearrange them.

Just the walls

At fist you should take the measurements of your room and mind accuracy. I posted my scratch-paper below so you may get an idea of my approach on how I modeled the kitchen.

draft sketch of measurements

Start Cinema4D and choose a cube. As you will see the point of origin of your coordinate system is in the center of your object. This will become interesting later on but for now just notice, that the world and your object you create have their own coordinate system.

At first it is helpful to chance the scale of your object to cm, unless you live in a villa. The Screen-shot below shows the clicks. First go to edit, then program default/presetting [guessing since I got a German version] and a window pops up. If you now click “units” you are able to adjust the units of measurement. Your coordinate display will switch to cm.

follow the red line

After you set your scale to cm you make you object editable. Go to the coordinate manager and change the size to the your measurement. Click “apply” and your object will grow. My room has a small corner on one side but that’s for later…

Now the interesting part begins. You will have to move your scale to one corner of your room! [Since you converted the object by editing it, it gets its own scale.] This is important because you need a reference point for other objects you want to create or place in the room. Having them organized from one point, preferably on the floor since your objects are on the floor too, makes it really easy to rearrange things without calculating the coordinates.

Enable Object Axis Tool, you can now only move your axis around, your objects will stay at there current location. [left tool-bar] I propose switching to top and front view, so you can see exactly what your doing. Zoom in and correct it again until the arrows point directly alongside. See what I mean?

select size-->resize, select object axis-->drag to corner

Your object and its coordinate system should look like this.

Object's point of origin

Notice that our object is still beneath the floor. We can now select the object-axis-tool [left tool bar] and set the coordinates to zero. Both our coordinate systems are now combined, or more correctly placed on top of each other.

Combine the systems

Now I want to create that corner and her fore I divide one side by creating another polygon. I can create two new points by selecting the point tool and then the structure menu on the file menu.  I then press “add point” and add two points randomly on both sides. Then I select the point tool [go live selection] and mark my two points. [You have to select both points at the same time! Do this by holding Shift] Finally connect the points.

split one side

I did this twice and selected the lines, then moved them to where I want them by changing the x-axis position. [See lower right corner in screen-shot above] By having these two lines it is easy to move them inside later on.

2 new lines

Once you got those lines arranged, it’s all about working with the coordinates of the lines. Select the Edge Tool [left tool-bar] and then the two edges on the right. All you have to do now is change the z-axis to 27 cm, since my corner is 27 cm This is what it looks like.

Just move the lines back on the z-axis

Actually we are finished. All you have to do is select the top polygon [the roof ] and delete it. Now we can see inside the box. In the next sessions we will start filling that box, starting with my fridge

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