Today's Adventure

lemonzed asked: How did you make "day 1- LowRes Hill"?

Hey lemonzed!

I took a look at your Tumblr, and saw that you’re struggling with recreating this style, so I hope this helps! I’m using a program called Cinema4D (C4D for short). And the process itself is pretty simple, to be honest. There’s a couple different ways to get that “low poly” look, and a lot of it consists of fooling around with whichever process you think looks best in each occasion.

For that scene specifically, I made a Landscape object and used a Displacer  (to slightly randomize the landscape) as well as a Polygon Reduction. The polygon reducer was the key here. It took a normal object and reduced it down to a lower polygon count (hence why the “low poly” term is quite self-descriptive). Normally it’s used to easily optimize performance of 3D models, but here, we can take advantage of it to produce this specific style.

For the rest of the scene…. I made a Cylinder for the tree trunk, and a Sphere with a Connect Array Object, and used the Connect to deform the sphere (adjusting the tolerance).

Then it’s “as simple as” adding materials, lighting the scene, adjusting your shapes to deform how you want, and rendering it to your pleasing! (All of these can be difficult if you’re new to C4D, but once you’ve spent some time in the program, they become much easier)

Doing a couple “low poly cd4 tutorial’ searches on google will provide you with a lot of material to absorb, and I’m sure you’ll find things far more helpful than what I offered! But I hope I at least helped you with some of the roadblocks you’ve been having on your own Tumblr  :)

(also, here’s a screenshot of my scene in c4d, in case everything I just said was overwhelming)