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These are extremely simple to make. All it is is an extruded object in a radial cloner + a sphere.
I love, love, love the cloner object so much! 👏🏻 Instead of thinking of how the flower will look as a whole, I try to focus on a single petal and go from there.
This is what the spline looked like for the petal. Just two points, extremely simple. Once the spline is perfect, I put it into an extrude object. For this piece, I set the extrude to 20cm to make it extraaaaa plump. ✨ I also put a round bevel on the edges to smooth it out and make it look more like “clay”.
Once the extruded object is complete, throw that sucker into a cloner. The mode I used was radial. This duplicates all the petals and will place them perfectly around a central point. For style purposes,
I kept them pretty tight and almost fused together to ensure there were no gaps between the petals. The radius was set to 0 to get this effect. I also added some slight rotation on each petal to give it some more dimension.
Then I just added a sphere in the center to cover the point where all the petals met
The snake took a bit longer to figure out. LOL. But I used another one of my favorite tools in Cinema 4D – sweep nurbs! I use this tool for a lot of various effects - 3D typography, animating single points, and now to make snakes. I think I love it so much because I get to use splines.
To start, I drew the shape of the snake I was kind of envisioning in my head. Just a simple ‘S’ looking shape. I used 6 points for this shape. I think having a good grasp of using the pen tool is critical for modeling with the sweep nurbs. You can always adjust the points later to to tighten up the composition, but this is a good start.
Once the spline is drawn, I added it into a sweep with a circle. That’s when the ✨sweep magic✨happens! The circle basically follows the path you set and turns your points into a 3D shape. After that, I set the radius of the circle at the start to be larger than the radius at the end to add the taper at the end of the tail.
The final step is to make everything round which I did by adding caps to both ends and setting the bevel shape to round and set the size to 100cm (the highest it can go lol). Now you got a fancy little snake thing! Yay!
Now all that’s left is putting some details that will bring your snake to life! Since this is already a pretty stylized version of a snake, all I added was an eye and a tongue.
I made the tongue by using the same spline + extrude method. I drew the shape of a forked tongue with the spline tool. Beveled the edges, made it round. Plopped it on to the top of the snake.
The eye is just a sphere that I stretched to make it have a little more of snake eye shape. And huzzah – you got a snake! Now there are endless combinations of styles, colors, details, etc you can add to make it your own
