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cardboard box
I have a project coming up where I will have to accurately model beer packaging, namely 12 and 24 bottle cardoard boxes. I’m wondering how best to tackle the job. What’s the best way to model the boxes? – I’ll be working from flat cutter guide artwork, indicating the net shape of the box and where it folds. Ideally I’d like to create a flat piece of card with thickness, and then fold it up to form the box.
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6 Replies
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Sounds like you have the right idea. Get a pic or drawing of the flattened box and build it with polys/snapping. You can then fold it by using the modeling axis to select the relevant edges, switching the axis to free mode, then selecting the polys and rotating into space — pivoting around the edge.
I would model it without thickness and then extrude all polys with caps to add thickness later. That’ll make the modeling job much quicker/easier.
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Thanks Adam,
I can get actual cutter profiles of the box in Illustrator to import into C4D, which I guess I can add knife cuts to at the folds.
Extruding at the end sounds good, how do I create rounded folds at the corners if you know what I mean, i.e the box shouldn’t have 100% sharp edges?
Also regarding texturing the box – some artwork has to run around corners and edges. Would it be best to apply one large texture to the flattened box, then generate UVs before folding it up and extruding? What’s the best approach here?
This is what I’m eventually trying to achieve:
https://web.mac.com/itchymitchy/Site/Carboard_Box_Examples.html
the bottom box has some nice folds in it on the front face, do you think that’s a bump map or actual modelling?
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I would select the edges that should have a little rounding and use the bevel (fillet) tool on them. For the UVs, it would probably be easiest to apply flat mapping before you start folding and then, also before you start folding, select the texture tag and run the OM>Tags>Generate UVs command to convert the flat mapping to UVW mapping.
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Thanks for all your help Adam, I’m trying the techniques out.
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Im a newb and Im trying out how to do this exactly. I cant seem to find any tutorials on how to do this. I have a flat image of the box in illustrator. I imported it into cinema 4d. But I cant seem to figure out how to get the bends correct. How I change the rotate axis so that it rotates on the line I want it to. Also, How would I set up the UV map?
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Robert did you ever find a tut?
I think it would also be great to see a tutorial on this too. It has a wide range of applications, from boxes to maps to sheets of paper and would be great if there was a resource for those of us less adept at the finer points of 3D animation 🙂
I guess this is the dream!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd8YiTGrfK8Thanks,
Stu
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