Cinema 4D Tutorial: Pumpkin — Happy Thanksgiving

4 min readNov 26, 2020

Thanksgiving is a great time opportunity to express your thankfulness to those who give you help, encouragement, and support. 2020 is a tough year for many people, and I have also experienced a transition in my career and encountered some difficulties this year. The lucky thing is, even though the rocks on the road, I always met someone who was willing to give me a hand and guide me the way. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to them. I combined with my Cinema 4D learning to create some lovely pumpkins and then used photoshop to design a thank you card. Let’s dive in!

2020 is a tough year and when I looked back my heart is filled with thankfulness.

I was always intrigued by beautiful 3D artwork when I look for inspiration in Dribbble and I am very curious about the process of creating that. As a product designer, I believe 3D skills could broaden my horizons and open up opportunities, therefore I taught myself to learn Cinema 4D. Cinema 4D is an all-purpose 3D software made by Maxon and there are other options in the market such as Blender.

Pumpkin’s blush

First to create the eyes for the pumpkins and build a sphere set the segments as “80”. Then convert the sphere (parametric object) to a polygonal object. Use loop selection to select the circle on top of the sphere and extrude to pull it a bit higher than the surface.

Then change to the “edge mode” and select the outers circle and then use bevel to pull it back to the surface and set the subdivision as “80”. The last step is to delete the other remaining surface and we will have the blush for our little pumpkins.

Shortcuts:

N ~ B — Gouraud shading lines, to view the lines on the sphere

U ~ L — Loop selection

M ~ T — Extrude

M ~ S — Bevel

Pumpkin’s eye

Quite similar to the creation of the blush, we also use the sphere as the basic shape, and this time we select another shape on the surface. As shown in the below screen cut, I select the parts that later build the shape of the eye then use split to duplicate the selected part, and delete the original one. To use melt to create two triangles.

Then change to the edge mode and use the “line-cut” to cut the cured edge and back the polygons mode to delete that. The next step is to apply the “atom array” and assign the sphere under the “atom array” and set the sphere radius as the same as the cylinder radius and subdivision of “80”.