Creating a Lego Man

We followed a tutorial in class on creating a lego man in cinema4D.
The tutorial showed how to:

Set up reference images in the viewports. Browse to an image for the background of the viewport.

Create the body.
Create the 'body' by reshaping a cube to the right dimensions.
Make the body thinner towards the top by scaling down a group of vertices.

Create the waist.
Change the dimensions of a cube to the right size.
Use a cylinder to cut away part of the waist, creating the leg 'sockets'. (using the boole tool)
Use a cylinder to create the groin area piece.

Create the legs by resizing a cylinder for the 'hip' and connecting a resized cube for the leg.
creating the foot by extruding polygons from the leg.

Create an arm using 'Sweep nurbs' to 'sweep' a closed spline (circle) along a spline (line drawn with bezier tool) This would be useful for things like a hosepipe or tentacles.

Create a hand by using a cube to cut away a piece of a tube using the boole tool.

Create the head by creating a cylinder and using the 'fillet' tickbox and values to 'round off' the edges. The small noddle on the head is extruded polygons.




In the above image, I have created and applied 4 materials and adjusted the various values in the specular settings of each material to give a 'lego plastic' look.

I have also placed 3 lights in the scene, 1 of which has soft shadows.

You can see that the legs and waist have very sharp corners and edges, and the body has subtly rounded corners, as this is the case with the actual lego pieces.
This was done (after gleaning advice from my tutor) by using the knife tool to 'cut' through the body close to each edge (except the bottom edge). A hypernurbs object is then applied to the mesh that rounds off the edges. (applying hypernurbs without the cuts would have resulted in a blob like object)