Xpresso.

Lately I've been messing around with a lot of Xpresso in Cinema 4D. I got into a little project after awhile to challenge myself to learn more & different ways to use Xpresso in a "rigging" sense.

I'm sure everyone using a three-D program dreams of building a whole city from scratch (Well Nick Campbell & Chris Schmidt made that pretty easy to achieve). So I thought I'd try to full-fill that little dream a little bit with a tool that would help me do it faster with controls that easily manipulate the scale of the model with changing attributes pretty quickly. & most importantly make it run smoothly with tons & tons of buildings populating the scene.

The modeling itself isn't too complex but I wanted to concentrate more functionality then looks. Besides I wanted to more of a "toon" look for it.

Pretty much I've just a levels control to change the height, as well as depth & length. Pretty standard to making different shape & sized buildings. Then went on to having a control for windows & roofs. Building definitely always don't have the same windows & roofs so I made five variations that weren't too thought out but did the job. I can always swamp them out later. The fun thing about the windows & roofs is they generate accordingly with the height, length, & width of the building. That was a fun one setting up in Xpresso. I went on with a couple more details & then onto color schemes for the building & windows, cause you know, not all building are the same color. Pretty much there are five slots of colors to choose from & the slots of colors can be changed to different color as desired.

The last thing I added was the "Optimize" button. Naturally the poly count would get a bit high when making a block of buildings all looking different so I decided when you're done making the building you'd be able to swap it out with a "stand-in" that used less polys but the cool thing about it is that when you render it will maintain the original look of the building you picked. Your view-port is running fast & your render is looking good.

I plan to add some more to the rigg that will make it much better but thought for now I thought I'd share it. It was quite a fun challenge I must say.