When you’re making things in 3D computer graphics, you eventually run into the need to decide how big things are going to be. My 3DCG application Cinema 4D uses its own internal units system so it doesn’t really matter that much what size you think you’re working at. C4D will allow you to just say that 500 of its internal “units” are 500 meters or 500 miles or whatever.

Now ever since about fourth grade I’ve been a big metric fan, in spite of growing up in Detroit (must have been all those Canadian TV ads I saw as a kid). I remember we’d occasionally have a section on the metric system in school, and I always looked forward to it, in the same way I might enjoy playing a game at a really easy level for the cathartic experience of blowing away all the puny weak bad guys without breaking a sweat. None of the other kids seemed to share my enthusiasm at the time, which I always considered rather odd, as all you had to do was move the decimal point back and forth and you’d get 100% on all the tests...

Now when it came time to build the Equinox sets, I started with the bridge. I soon learned that the actual bridge set was built to exacting American standards, which is to say, in inches and feet and furlongs and such. 36 feet in diameter, to be precise. Which is....uhhh, 432 inches. I wanted my sets to be relentlessly accurate, so I dutifully set C4D to set its units to inches, and modeled away.

I soon ran across a problem though. C4D likes to work with numbers that are in the middle of its units range, which means that models that are too big (tens of thousands of C4D units) or too small (tiny fractions of C4D units) start to get clumsy to edit. C4D’s world has a grid that’s “about the right size” to make things easier on you, and my entire bridge set was a tiny little thing like a doll house in the middle of this. I ran into the problem on the small end, as when you start working with inches you soon wind up fiddling with 1/2 inch and 1/8 inch and 1/32 inch measurements. Orders of magnitude smaller than the units that the app was trying to use, so soon the editor camera’s movements started being too rough to easily display really tight detail. I’d either be too far away from my focus to edit it easily, or I’d zoom in and shoot right past it.

I also learned that Cinema 4D’s nifty hair simulator has settings that are optimized for rather larger objects — if I put my characters in the scene at my inches scale, I’d have to make their heads about 17 feet across to get optimal hair calculations... Now I like stylization as much as the next guy, but even funkiness has limits, so I eventually realized that I’d have to change my scale.

I first tried scaling everything up by a pretty-arbitrary 15, but making new objects with any accuracy immediately became impossible, so now everything’s back to the comfy metric system. 1 C4D unit = 1 millimeter. I feel so Canadian!

The bridge set is now more or less the size of the default grid, and hopefully all my texture settings are more or less preserved. It’ll take a bit of test rendering to check, but everything looks pretty good right now.

If I find any characters with 17-foot heads lurking around, I’ll let you know.