Hi all! Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes look at some of the art from my game.

For making organic shapes in 3D, subdivision surfaces are your friend: the idea is that you have a low-polygon base mesh which gets smoothed—subdivided—by your modeling software, interactively, so you can make adjustments to the base mesh and quickly switch back and forth between that and the subdivided version to see what you’re getting. Here’s what the base mesh and the subdivided one look like, side-by-side:

The key thing to know about subdivision-surface modeling is how to use the density of the base mesh to control the contours of the subdivided one. You can see a couple of places on the base mesh where there’re narrow strips of polygons—around the base of the beak and around the upper edge of the body—and you can see on the subdivided mesh that that’s where the sharper edges ended up. If your polygons are all roughly the same size, you’ll have a uniformly smooth mesh, and it’ll end up looking blobby and uninteresting; figuring out where you want sharper transitions and adding more polygons there is essential to making shapes that behave appealingly. In Cinema 4D, the most useful tool for adding density is the Knife (in loop mode, usually—any extra rings of edges need to go all the way around the mesh or you’ll get weird discontinuities), but Inner Extrude and a few others can be helpful as well.

If you’d like to learn more about subdivision-surface modeling in C4D, there’s a good tutorial over here and about a million more around YouTube.

Thanks for reading—I hope you’ve found this interesting. If you’d like to see the duck in action, I highly recommend checking out the game I made it for: Duck Guardian!