3.1 How to Edit a Sphere

Hi everyone and welcome back to create a low polymoon with Cinema 4D. In this chapter we'll look at how we can start to model our moon. So in the last chapter, we took a look at how to create basic shapes such as the sphere here. And also, we took a look at the ways that we could adjust certain parameters of our sphere and other shapes to our liking, using the adjustments window here. So, for our moon, we're going to want to choose the right type of sphere to act as our base model. And to do this we want to make sure that the sphere is selected. So either clicking in our list of objects here or clicking on the sphere in our view port. And then just move over to the adjustments window, and taking a look at the drop down box here under Type. So you can see here that currently, our sphere is set at standard. Now, this is where we can see that those polygons become quite tight at the top and at the bottom here, and get larger Towards the middle of this fit. Now we can change that the way the polygons appear on this sphere by selecting another type, such as the tetrahedron here. You can see suddenly that the polygons take on a different form, a different shape to make up the sphere. And you can sort of go through each of the different types of spheres here, just seeing how the polygons look. I'm just going through all of them. Just having a look at what the different shapes are that make up this sphere, and we can even have a hemisphere here as well. But the one that we'll be looking at and working on for the moon, will be this one, the Icosahedron. So, this gives us a nice even spread of polygons around the whole sphere, that we can use to mold the craters and other details of our moon. So just moving around, this sphere here like, so you can see that all the polygons are sort of nicely, evenly spread out. Unlike some of the other shapes here, some of the other spheres, you can see it gets really tight here, and really stretched in the middle here. Or even the standard one, where you can see it gets really tight in the top and the bottom here. So lets go ahead and click on Icosahedron. And we'll also leave the segments at around 24. Which is a good balance between the amount of polygons, whilst still keeping on the low side to retain that sort of low poly look. So taking a look at each of these parameters and making sure that you're happy with each and every one of them. Such as the radius, making sure that you're happy with how big or small the size of your moon is. So I'm just going to go ahead and make it 140, just so that it's easier to look at in our view port. Making sure that you're happy with the segments, which is set at 24. This is the last chance that you'll have to change them. So just playing around here until you're happy with the way that it looks. And also the type of sphere, which we know whether we want to keep it icosahedron. And then from there, once we're happy with the way that our sphere looks, we need to make our object editable. Now, to edit your 3D object further, we'll need to click on this button here. So again, make sure that the object that you want to edit is selected, by clicking on it here or in the view port. And then just click on the Make Editable button, or simply hit the C button on your keyboard, which is the short cut for this button here. So let's go ahead and click that. Now as I stated previously, once that button has been clicked, some of the adjustment settings will no longer be available. So you can see here at the bottom here, all of our adjustment settings are gone, and have now been replaced by these options here. Okay, so now that it's editable, we can use the adjustments tools here on the left side of the screen. And this will allow us to select and modify the sphere in different ways. Now, these are the main tools that we'll be using, and those are the Points tool, the Edges tool, and the Polygons tool. Now, before we continue, the last thing that we need to adjust from our sphere is just deleting this font tag here. Now, this font tag is what creates the illusion of a smooth surface for our sphere. So if we go back to this mode here, you can see even though our sphere is relatively lowpoly, it still appears quite smooth. But if we delete this font tag like so, suddenly you can see the polygons on the surface of our sphere. We can go ahead and delete this as well.