Apple Pro Speaker Cinema4D Tutorial

Welcome to my first tutorial.

Apple Pro Speaker Cinema4D Tutorial

The Design of the Apple Pro Speaker by Harmon Kardon is as simple as ingenious. Because of that this tutorial should be especially useful for beginners.

I am not claiming that my speaker is correct in its dimensions, I created it strictly following the looks of it.

Part 01: Let us begin with the speaker's protection shell

Step 1: We have to create a SPHERE. (Objects-->Baseobjects-->Sphere).

Would be best to choose a high number of segments (Doubleclick the symbol behind the Sphereobject in the object manager), say 100, so the sphere is nice and round.

Then we COPY the SPHERE and SCALE it a bit, to achieve the neccessary thickness of the shell, as can be seen on the left. On the image the smaller sphere is displayed in orange.

We place both SPHERES in a BOOLEAN OBJECT (Objects-->Modelling-->Boolean). The smaller sphere has to be placed first, or, when opening the bolean object the smaller sphere has to be below the bigger one. Because the standard boelan function is "A minus B", the smaller sphere will be cut out of the larger ball. This can't be seen yet.

Step 2: We create a CUBE (here in orange) and place it like depicted on the image. Here the sideview (left)...
 

...and here the top view.

Step 3: We create another boolean object and place the box first, then the sphere-boolean second, into the new boolean. The cube will cut a piece off the sphere.

Step 4: We create three further spheres and position them like on the image. Then we create a null object and put the spheres into it. Afterwards we create another boolean object, put the null object in first and the boolean object that contains the spheres and cube from earlier.

The result can be seen here.

Step 5: Now we create a tube (Objects-->Baseobjects-->Tube). The settings should be identical to the thickness and diameter of the sphere-booelan.

It should be looking somewhat like on the image to the left.

Here you can see the first part of our speaker in Gouroud-Shading.
We name this object "Shield".

Part 02: Let's continue with the actual plastic shell

Step 6: We have to copy the boolean that holds the two spheres (we need to make the opposite part of the "Shield") Then we create another cube, this time cutting off the part where the shield will be later on (see image). We won't cut the sphere precisely but move the sphere a little bit to the left to amintain a little distance to the shield.

In order not to lose control, I blended the shield out.

Should be looking like this.

We create a cylinder to cut out the hole through that later the cables will be coming through. The orignial boolean and the cylinder are placed into a new boolean.

Here the front view.

Step 7: We create another tube, this time simulating the piece that will later hold the actual speaker.

This is what it looks like in Goruoud-Shading mode. The bolean and the tube are put into a null object.

We name this object "Body".

Part 03: The inner sphere of the plastic shell

Step 8: Again the same procedure as before. We copy the bolean object but scale it down by 20%. Especially the smaller sphere some more so that we achieve a higher thickness. Shield and Body are blend out..

Step 9: This time around we create three spheres, as seen on the image. Again, like before, we choose a high amount of segments, to avoid "splinters".

From above.

The boolean will look like this.

Step 10: We place all objects in a null object and rotate everything around the z-axis by 25 degrees.

We create another cube and cut it out of the sphere-boolean.

Looks like this.

Like this from above.

And like this in Gouroud-Shading.

We name this object "Inside".

' '

Part 4: The plastic shell

Step 11: Let's place the objects shield, body and inside in one null object and rotate them by -25° (minus!). Then we create another cube, position it like on the image and place both, cube and null object, in a new boolean.

Here you go.

Gouroud-Shading.
We name this object "Plastic"

Step 12: Now we make a texture. The plastic texture has the following values:

Colour:
RGB 100%
Brightness 80%

Transparency:
RGB 100%
Brightness: 90%
Refraction: n1.03
Fresnel active

Reflection:
RGB 100%
Brightness 20%

Specular:
Modus: Plastic
Width 100%
Height 11%
Loss 0%
Inner Width 0%

We assign the texture to the plastic. We make a ground, that we place under the plastic object accordingly. Then we create a light source, that has soft shadows. The shadow should have a "thickness" of 70%. and a map of 2000x2000. Place the light at X=1000m, Y=5000m and Z=-2000m.

It's supposed to look like this. (Antialiasing= Best, Edges= 10%)

And the body...

and the inner object.

This would be the whole object.

Part 5: The loudspeaker

Step 13: We create a number of circle splines (Objects-->Splines-Baseobjects-->Circle) and arrange them as shown on the image. Here's the view from the side. At the transitions I positioned the splines tighter together to achieve harder edges.

Afterwards we place all splines, one after another, in a Loft-NURBS object. (Objects-->NURBS-->Loft-NURBS)

Step by step.

Step 14: We create a box with a decent chamfering. The chamfer can be achieved by double clicking the box in the object manager and activating "chamfer".

Then we position the box at the place of the uppermost box on the image. Now we place the box in a null object and duplicate it 6 times along the x-axis (Functions-->Duplicate = 6 Copies, no Y-offset 360° (P-Value)). A null object is created which contains the new boxes. The old null object can be deleted.

Then we put the new null objct with the boxes and the Loft-NURBS object in a boolean.

Looks like this.

Step 15: Because the boolean wouldn't have worked correctly, we create another Loft-NURBS, which splines embrace the the holes. We copy the first spline into the new Loft-NURBS object and build it first upwards then to the left (See image). We strengthen the edges by placing the splines tightly together.

Again step by step.

So it looks.

Step 16: We use splines to construct the chrome parts.

Side view...

...and front.

This is what it looks like now. The frontmost spline is farther inside, that's how the soft rounding is achieved.

Step 17: We fill up rhe room with another tube, as seen on the image.

Step 18: The rest is filled up with a ring-base object (Objects-->Baseobjects-->Ring).

Here it is.

The speaker from behind.

Step 19: For the ring we make a texture:

Colour:10% Brightness
Specular:Plastic
Width 100%
Height 24%
Loss 3%
Inner width 0%

Part 06: The Rest

Step 20: We create 5 cylinders and chamfr them. One will be the piec of plastic, thorugh that the cables go.

The other four will be positioned and scaled accodrding to the image (orange cylinders). It is important that only the cylinder in the center goes through the cylinder that is going to be the piece of plastic!

Then we create a null obkject and place the orange cylidners into it (except for the bigger one in the center), create a boolean object and put the null object and the center cyilnder into it.

Sideview

"Booleand" it will look like this
 

Step 21: We create a spline object (Objects-->Spline object), the Mode automatically changes to "edit points". We place
the points like on the image (on the Mac we hold the CTRL-key pressed while doing so.)

Then we create a Sweep-NURBS-Baseobject (Objects-->NURBS-->Sweep-NURBS) and a Circle-Spline.

The Spline and the Circle-Spline are put into the Sweep-NURBS object---the circle has to be on top, the upper spline is always the radius of the Sweep-NURBS.

It is likely that the circle has to be scaled to fit the diameter of our cable.

It should look like this (left).

And like this in Gouroud-Shading modus....
 
So, done! Rendered the whole thing looks like this (see below).

Got questions? Please contact me here.

Fetching comments...

Post a comment