Egg modeling tutorial

I had to do this tutorial for the sake of history. After a very funny thread on c4dCafé I noticed there is a whole subculture of Egg modeling strategies :D
These two web pages will teach you how to do the Egg modeling.
Egg Primitive Plugin
Splendid Egg video tutorial
Point by point on blueprint method
And here is the subject on C4dCafé

OK Lets get started on this one...
egg

Follow up:

To get started properly you will need an empty document open in Cinema4D (ctrl-N on windows and cmd-N on mac)
This will look like this:

new document

The first step is to add a "Cube" to the scene:

cube

Next step is to drag this "Cube" into a HyperNurb, you will notice that the cursor changes into a square with an arrow while dragging in the Cube, this means it is all OK.
You will notice at this point the cube has become round in your view port. This is normal.

cube-in-HN

Hang in there we are half way.
Now we have to make the Cube "Editable", there are several methods to do that, foremost you could hit the "make editable" icon shown in image below, or you could go to the "Functions" menu and release your mouse on "Make Editable" or if you can remember this you could hit the "C" key on your keyboard (this is for advanced users)
You will notice the icon just left of the cube in the object manager has changes to a triangle (this is not a bug)

hit-C

Now comes the part usually referred to as "Box Modeling" or "Low Polygon modeling" This is a way of working with the minimum number of polygons as possible. The HyperNurb will take care of smoothing things for us.

In the next step we have a choice of at least two methods.
1. Use Polygon tool
2. Use Point tool

point-or-poly

As seen above I made a selection of the top polygon or the top 4 points using the selection tool.

Here comes the WOW part of this tutorial (if you are not sleeping already)
Using the "Scale Tool" (shortcut T) and by dragging gently in the viewport from right to left you will try to make the selected points or polygon approximately twice as small as it was. You can do this numerically in the Coordinate manager in the middle column in the X and Z boxes.

rescale

Yeah this looks quite like it.
You will see that the egg is a little bit edgy in the viewport but it renders much more smoothly in the final render. This is one of the nice things of the HyperNurb, it has by default a different resolution in the viewport than in the final render. You can override this if really necessary.

subdivs

And here is the final render, the texture is made by Gaazmaster of France (yes, they know how to make egg shaders by nature)

egg-render

And... as you may have seen in the Video tutorial, don't forget to name the cube "Egg". You will have to learn to have a clear naming protocol to help you manage larger projects in the future.

Same tutorial but shorter:

Take a cube
Drop it in a HyperNurb
Make it editable
Select top polygon
Rescale it

Please send me a comment if I forgot to specify one or the other phase of the egg making thing.

There are many ways to model things...
The egg could also be done with deformers on a sphere or simply with a spline in a LatheNurbs object
more-egg-methods


14 comments

Comment from: Michael [Visitor] : 2009-03-13 @ 04:20
*****
Wow I really didn't know that Cinema 4D had such powerful capabilities. This is truly amazing. This opens up a whole new world.

Totally Awesome!
Comment from: base80 [Member] Email : 2009-03-13 @ 04:25
This is only a chicken egg. There is a whole world of eggs waiting to be discovered.
Comment from: Fred Camino [Visitor] : 2009-03-21 @ 02:10
*****
This was incredible. A+++ would read again. Primo best!!!
Comment from: avision [Visitor] : 2009-05-26 @ 16:49
*****
This is by far your best tutorial.
I would like a "how to model a cup" tutorial.
Comment from: Isabel Ramírez [Visitor] : 2009-09-30 @ 16:22
Thank you very much. I'm starting in Cinema4D and your post has been so much useful
Comment from: Bastenhof [Visitor] Email : 2009-10-16 @ 12:53
Thank you for this tutorial... but I can't make the egg at the moment.
I can't understand why : as soon as I've made the cube editable, I can't select neither the top polygon of the cube, nor the 4 points : the box disappears, and the polygons and the points are on the sphere.
(I'm on the v11.5 demo)
Any idea ?
Comment from: base80 [Member] Email : 2009-10-16 @ 14:02
ALT-A
Comment from: Bastenhof [Visitor] : 2009-10-17 @ 16:20
GREAT !!! It works !! :-) Thanks !!
Comment from: 3drhody [Visitor] : 2010-01-08 @ 18:00
Yes, but how would you make 2 eggs?
Comment from: base80 [Member] Email : 2010-01-11 @ 04:31
:-) There are many ways to make a second egg. You could do the tutorial twice. Or use an instance or just copy it or better use a cloner.
Comment from: fahmawee [Visitor] : 2010-01-18 @ 20:34
*****
Thank you for this tutorial... but I can't make the egg at the moment.
I can't understand why : as soon as I've made the cube editable, I can't select neither the top polygon of the cube, nor the 4 points : the box disappears, and the polygons and the points are on the sphere
Comment from: Jeff [Visitor] · http://riglerdigital.com/wordpress : 2010-02-03 @ 23:45
Very nice. I am a fan of C4Dcafe and thought your post was funny. Nice screen shots BTW. I just subbed to your blog.

Jeff
Comment from: Ed [Visitor] · http://edwards.heliohots,org : 2010-02-13 @ 18:05
*****
Wow, this was a very intense tutorial and I thought I'll never finish. Great tutorial by the way, it was great practice for a beginner like me with this software.
Comment from: Michelle [Visitor] Email : 2010-04-25 @ 04:19
****-
I'm having the same problem as fahmawee...after I make the object editable, the sides of the box disappear and I cannot select anything. :(

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