Tutorial written for the123d.com

Time for another tutorial and this time we'll be modeling and texturing a book with a dust cover. I've already scanned all necessary textures for you so all you have to do is model the actual book (which, by the way, will be The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Margaret Drabble (1986), a book I've had for some 15 years by now. Yes, I am that old.).

This will be a three part tutorial. First we'll model the actual book, then we'll model the dust cover and finally we will put on some textures. The tutorial should be easy to follow even if you are a beginner but some basic understanding of Cinema's interface and tool is probably a good start. I've been using Cinema 4D XL 8.5 when writing it but you should basically be fine with earlier versions. The texturing in part three will make use of some procedural shaders (bhodiNUT SLA) but these shaders are not required.

part one: modeling the book

We will start with the book. First of all we need to know the dimensions of the book and my usual approach to this is to scan the front, spine and back of the book. That way I get the textures for it as well as the measurements in pixels. This time we will cheat a bit and just scan the front and spine and then re-use the front scan as a texture for the back of the book. After scanning and some Photoshop cleaning I make a note of the dimensions as you can see in the image above. Now start Cinema and create a Cube object with the same dimensions - X: 591, Y: 241 and Z: 899. This will give us a perfect piece of geometry to start our modeling.

Now make your Cube editable by hitting C on your keyboard or go to Structure>Make Editable. Then switch to Use Polygon Tool and with the Live Selection Tool select the three polygons of the box shown in the image below (the two short ones and the long one).

Time for some modeling. Select the Inner Extrude tool by hitting I on your keyboard or go to Structure > Inner Extrude. Switch to the Active Tool tab and raise the Offset value from default 5 to 10 and hit Apply. The result is not what we want. We want the polygons to stay together so Undo the inner extrusion and then raise the Maximum angle from 89° to 90°. Click Apply and you should get something like the image below.

With the polygons still selected go to Selection > Hide Unselected. Now delete the longer polygon to leave you with the two shorter ones. Select both of these and select the Bridge tool by hitting B on your keyboard (or go to Structure > Bridge). Now click and hold on the upper right corner of the polygon closest to you, then drag the cursor to the corresponding corner of the opposite polygon:

This will bridge the two polygons and you should have the image below:

Now delete the right polygon, the longer one, and then go to Selection > Unhide All. There we have our first rough book cover!

Next up is the shaping of the cover and we will do this by using the Knife quite extensively. If you have Mesh Surgery you can use Katana instead.

OK, let's get cracking! Switch to Front view and frame the cube by hitting O on your keyboard. Select the Knife and make sure that no polygons are selected. Now slice up the geometry like in the image below (by holding down Shift you will constrain the Knife to 45° angles, making it easier to do straight cuts):

Now switch to Use Point Tool and select the Rectangle Selection tool. Make sure that Only Select Visible Elements in the Active Tool tab is unchecked as we want the tool to affect also the hidden points. Select the middle row of points and scale them a bit on the Y-axis. Then move the spine points a bit on the X-axis and you should have this:

Now for our first test. Create a HyperNURBS object and drop your cube in it. The rounding of the spine is good but the curve from the "dent" to the covers could use some attention. Select the Knife, make sure that no points are selected and make an additional cut just to the right of the outer points:

Much better. Switch to Perspective view again and with the HyperNURBS still active you can see that the geometry still need additional knife cuts to look good. First of all we need to define the edges of the cover and we'll do this by placing cuts very close to the edges of the geometry. Switch back to Front view and use the Knife to place two cuts like this (blue line):

And here's a close up shot:

The exact placement of the cuts isn't that important, you can always adjust them as you go along. Now stwith to the Right view and add four more cuts, like this:

Close up:

And here's what it should look like in Perspective view with a close up of one of the corners:

We'll leave the hard covers for a while and instead focus on modeling the pages. We will do this with splines and Extrude NURBS. Switch to Front view and frame the cube. Create a Rectangle Spline, make it editable and scale it so it fits snuggly just inside the cover. Select the two points on the left and subdivide them one time using the default value of 2 (Structure > Subdivide). Select the newly created point and move it on the X-axis so it looks like this:

Now take the Knife and add two vertical cuts as shown in the image below:

Select the single point on the spline and set it to Soft Interpolation (Structure > Edit Spline > Soft Interpolation). Adjust it with the Bezier handles so that it smoothly follows the curvature of the cover (you might have to move the other points slightly as well):

OK. one side is done so move over to the other. Select the two right most points and run the Subdivide command again, then select the newly created point and set it to Soft Interpolation. Move it a bit on the X-axis to get a nice curve like this:

Now switch to Right view, select the Use Model Tool and move the spline to the end of the covers, like this:

Create an Extrude NURBS and drop the spline in that. Our spline is already facing the Z-axis so simply increase the default value of 20 for the Extrude NURBS Movement in the Z field to cover almost the complete length of the covers:

And the basic book is done! It should look something like this:

Next up we'll deal with the dust cover, so on to part two!

| >>