STEP BY STEP GET STARTED WITH NODES
01 CREATE A CUBE IN C4D
For this tutorial I am using Cinema 4D. It has both a ‘standard’ and nodal workflow available for its main components. In the standard method, if a cube primitive needs to be created, for example, it is a single click of the Cube icon in the toolbar, which places the primitive into the Object List. It is therefore easy to see comparisons between the two workflows.
02 CREATE A CUBE, THIS TIME WITH NODES
In the Nodes Layout of Cinema 4D R25, here is a cube primitive created using nodes. The nodes are connected like a tree, with the 'Scene Root' node being what the artist sees in the viewport. While many attributes are available in the Cube node, having the Compose Matrix node pulls the Transform, Scale and Rotate attributes into their own node.
03 RENAME NODES TO BENEFIT WORKFLOWS
An important element of using a nodal workflow is customising the names of the nodes, so that it is easy to see what the intention of the node is. In this example, a Value parameter is controlled by pulling a connection from a newly named ‘Value’ node, which will control the number of divisions on the cube in the Y-axis.
04 USE A SINGLE VALUE TO CONTROL MULTIPLE OBJECTS
A cylinder has now been added to the node scene. This was achieved by copying and pasting the nodes and changing the Mesh Primitive to a Cylinder. The Value node is connected to the Height Segments parameter of the Cylinder node. This allows the artist to change the value and affect both the objects, without needing to do that on a per-object basis in the Object List.