Learning the basics in 3DS Max

 

The castle screenshot above, was created to learn the essential basics in 3DS Max. The tutorial covered how to create and manipulate basic shapes. The different screens on the left and right are different perspectives of the shapes being made. It was soon made clear that when an object may appear that it is in line with another object, when looking at another perspective, it will show that it is nowhere near. The other views on display that appear to be in a blueprint layout, help distinguish how close objects are to one another.

The next exercise involved creating a snowman, introducing an environment for the snowman and then adding a snow effect, so that when played, the animation would display the snow falling across the snowman.

Some new skills included naming different parts of the snowman's body to make it easier, when locating objects by name. Plus, I learnt how to create groups of objects to create one larger object, this was the case when creating the hat. 

The snow was created by placing a rectangle above the snowman, and rotating the rectangle so that when time was added to the animation, the snow fell across the screen.

Organic Modelling

The next exercise incorporated Organic Modelling; the concept of making an object look more organic. For example, creating fruit, organic objects rarely have very straight edges, instead they normally have soft curvaceous edges and surfaces. To create two instances of the apple, once one apple was made, the clone feature was used and then rotated to make it look like a new object that had been created. At the back again, by manipulating the vertices to make it look more organic, a new shape was created to make the pear. This was achieved by converting the objects to poly's.

Spline Modelling

Finally, the last concept that was covered was Spline Modelling. This works by creating a shape using the line tool and then modifying the shape using different types of curves to manipulate the shape. This is generally used when the shape that is desired is not available as a template. This can be very useful if vertices need to be added to the shape later, parts of the abstract shape can be extruded or bevels before more in depth detail is added to the overall shape.