3D with c4d and unity

Game Content with CINEMA 4D and UNITY
By Thomas Pasieka

I hear a lot of people complaining about not being able to create game content with CINEMA 4D! Well this is not really true. There is a way and it is called “UNITY”! Now, what is UNITY, you might ask? Unity is a game engine just like “Torque” you may have heard of “Torque” before. However, UNITY is currently only available to OS X (Yes,all the apple computer users out there are the happy folks right now). I do not have information on when UNITY will be released for Windows PC’s, but the future will tell. Now, the topic of this is tutorial is “game content”. I will show you how easy it can be to create a simple environment with CINEMA 4D and use UNITY to actually make a playable level by creating a FPS camera, adding physics andsuch. Believe me when I say that this is really EASY. We are going to create a neat little piece of landscape with CINEMA 4D. Doesn’t need to be fancy in this case, but it will look decent enough in the end. The purpose of this tutorial is not how one will create great looking models. I will show how to create simple objects and textures. Alright, time to get started. Open CINEMA 4D and create aplane object. Make it big enough (I did mine around 6000x6000 - See Picture001) and extruded the top. You can also use a cube in this case and it doesn’t need to be a plane. That is up to you. Right after select the “live selection tool” -

make sure to activate “soft selection” (Picture002). I changed the radius of the tool to 500m in order to get a “soft selection” on the selected polygons.This method is great to create a landscape with some ups and downs (hills) and such (See result in Picture003). Try to archive something similar looking. I also created another plane to shape the “river” out as you can see in the pic-

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tures above. Once satisfied, I selected the edge of the object and used “Set point value” to straighten out the bottom (Picture004 and Picture005).I selected the top polygons and side polygons of the object and created two selection tags in order
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Game Content with CINEMA 4D and UNITY
By Thomas Pasieka

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to create separate textures for each. Keep in mind that your textures have to be in the power of 2 in order for UNITY to work with it (512x512 or 1024x1024 pixel will do - See Picture006 and Picture007).

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Tocreate these textures I simply used Photoshop. In our next step we are going to create a fence on one side of the landscape. As you can see from the screenshot it is fairly simple. It’s been created

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out of a cube and extruded in several ways to get it where I wanted it to be. I duplicated the fence on one side of the landscape (Picture008 and Picture009). So far, so good! Now let’screate some

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Game Content with CINEMA 4D and UNITY
By Thomas Pasieka

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cubes that have been extruded and duplicated a few times. Once again I created a texture for this wooden bridge with Photoshop and applied it within CINEMA 4D. I placed the bridge just above the river so later on you will be able to walk over this little bridge and enjoy the view (Picture011 and Picture012). Nowlet’s have a look at the scene by adding a sky and shadows (I simply used the SKY module for this purpose just to get a feel for the lighting - See Picture013).

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trees for our scene. Create a simple cube and make sure it’s subdivided a few times. Now here is one nice thing: You can use any “deformer” within CINEMA 4D and UNITY will convert it for you! Nifty isn’t it? (Picture010). As youcan see in the screenshot I used a “Bulge” deformer to get a bit of thickness on the bottom and upper part of the tree trunk. Easy enough! The top of the tree is

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a simple sphere with a texture applied to it that I also created with Photoshop. That will do for our little game level. I copied and arranged some trees within the scene. Alright, on to the next thing! The wooden bridge. This...