Scene three has been created, here is my scene!

To create the poppies I used the same process that I had used in scene one. Draw a line outline of a petal, then edit the vertices in editable line mode. Once I was happy with the design I extruded the drawing and added a bend to the petal.

I wanted to add more detail to the flower so I created another line drawing this time one of a stamen. Then after modifying it and cleaning up the drawing I lathed it to complete the object.

Then came the very tedious task of placing them all on the center sphere I had made, then I colored them nearly back and the task was complete.

Creating the poppies green leafy base, I cloned one of its petals and modified it, making it bigger and flattened it out.

Then I arranged it in a similar fashion to the petals.

Once all had been arranged my poppy was complete,

Next came the graves and the tombstones. The grave was a cylinder placed in a box and then grouped together, very simple yet effective. As for the tomb I created a flat cube, beveled one of its faces then extruded the object to form another box, then beveled again and extruded once more. I even created one more box on its side then used the pro Boolean subtract mode to create an indent in its side. The cross was made from two rectangular cubes placed on one another.

In Photoshop I was able to edit a few photos of monuments I once took and put them on the objects I have created. This makes the tomb look real-ish and at least the graves now have text on them.

Here’s a church I have made, to build it easily I cut the church up into some shapes. The most time was taken making shapes to pro boolean out the windows in the walls.

Finally I set the stage with my cloned graves the church, a few dead trees that I did not use in scene 2 and my tombstone. I arranged them in a nice order and set up the camera and tried to finalize my scene.

Texturing and lighting in 3ds max is the hardest thing I have yet to master. My textures don’t seem to fit properly and when they do finally, they seem to always have some problem or other. When I try to set the lighting up I to rectify this I thought I would add a fog, that way it would be a lot harder for the viewer to recognize a fault. Or that is what I thought anyway. The fog effect to me hours to correct and I must’ve tried all of the lights in the program to try and get the right one. It has been a horrible nightmare and one that I had to succumb to.

Conclusion

This year’s modeling has been great; I have learnt so much useful tips about 3ds max. I have succeeded in producing some good quality models, including lots of plants and trees, and have had a lot of fun in doing so. Some of my techniques need a lot of practice, but by the time I return next year for my animation part, I think they would be honed quite well.

On a technical level my planning mode is very poor and organizing the objects for the scene with relevant names too, needs a great amount of work, I lack patience and when something goes wrong I am likely to boot the machine. So this year has been quite a mission for me and with a deadline of just 12 weeks it has been a struggle.

That seems to be just about it. My work here is done, have a Happy Christmas
All of you and ill see you all back in the New Year.

Scene two is finally here!!

Making the scene was pretty straight forward once the trees had been made, the only other objects to be created was the fence, and the land that one can see in the background. The textures I had got from the web in the form of pictures were converted in Photoshop and used in max. I even went walking in the parks where I live to photo trees, leaves, tarmac and wooden fence posts for ideas, some were used too.

Creating the hills, to start with I chose patch grids from the Create>Geometry. Drop down list and in the top viewport dragged a quad patch to a certain specification like the picture below. A Quad Patch grid is a flat plane that can be modified into 3D surface. Quad Patch refers to patch grid with four vertices.

Making sure Quad Patch is still selected I Right click and chose Convert To>Convert To Editable Patch. Then I went to the modify tab, activated Vertex selection. Then, I moved the vertices up and down to create a slope.

Next came the fence, the fence was very simple too, just made by creating two rectangles of different lengths then cloning them and adding them in a fence like manner, then it was just a job of moving them about and keep cloning them until a very long fence was made. Then I cloned the whole length and put the cloned one parallel.

As for the trees, the tutorial in week 5 explains how I made them; it was then just about time to set the scene up. I had cloned the trees and rotated them to give the illusion that the trees were different. Once the scene was in place I had to create the lighting, this was the most time consuming. I had wanted to add a fog effect to give that September morning feel to the picture but I kept getting a problem with the way light passed through my leaves, because they were not a “real” 3D object and just a texture on an invisible box the volumetric light (in the fog I presume) kept showing the leafs in their true form (not invisible) like the render shown below.

To overcome this problem I dismissed the fog effect and rendered the scene with mental ray and my lighting in the scene was of the same caliber; this made my scene very colorful and added some good quality shadows.

Scene one has been created!!

This scene is a 3D image produced in 3ds max; it has been created for my month March.
The picture depicts a pond with rocks around the edge, a water lily is in the center of the scene and there are daffodils and other yellow flowers in the background. I have added some green plants to fatten out the scene. The main effect was the water which in my option adds a very nice effect to the overall picture. In the next few paragraphs I will try to explain how the image was created.

The daffodil has been created from a line drawing then I lathed it to create a bulb like feature, I had to set the pivot point first to get the lathe I had wanted. Then I edited poly and went about molding the lathed line in to the perfect bulb for my daffodils, as you can see by the result below.

Then I repeat the whole process to make the petals for my flowers and the leaves for their stems only instead of lathe modifier, I use the extrude modifier, this makes my 2d object a 3d one.

Once one petal has been made I use a bend and twist modifier to create the right shape then all that is left is to clone the petal and arrange in nice way. I repeat process for leaves and stem then put all objects together to see how they look.

I repeat the process again for a different kind of flower; I liked the daisy shape so I made one like a daisy. And it was pretty simple to make, so why do anything to complex.

The flowers have been created, we now needed a water lily or two and another flower for that these were easily created too. I created a cylinder and adjusted the slice on it to ten degrees. Then I edited in poly mode and deleted one of its sides added a noise modifier to warp its shape a bit. Mesh smoothed it to add a nice effect and came up with a water lily pad shape. Then cloned the result three times and arranged in a nice way.

To create the lily flower I re-used the daisy petal but instead of arranging petals like daisy arranged them in different way, it worked rather well as you can see.

The palm leaves you can see in my picture, were used to fatten the scene out, they were originally thought up to be ferns but alas something along the way went pear shaped and palms were created. I wanted foliage to fill out the scene but I dint know where to start so I searched Google for planets and tried my hand at creating some. I made a thin plane triangle shape to produce a tip and another rectangular for a leaf and then started to arrange them into a position that looked plant shaped here’s what I came up with.

Having no ideas to reference your object with can cause problems to a beginner, when starting an object just be patient and try to cover all angles. When I persevered it started to take shape so I kept working on it:

Now some rocks were needed for the pond scene so I set about making some. This was a pretty easy object to create, all one needs to do I create a shape like a box, then select its vertices and push and pull it into a required shape. Remember to give your box many segments to have full manipulative control.

Finally for the water effect I followed this tutorial here:

http://storm.prohosting.com/mindcndy/watertutorial.html

Lastly the objects were placed around the water plane the rocks were given a texture. And the camera was placed from the lily’s point of view, this way the scene captures the reflections very well.

So there you have it, one simple scene for March and it contains some of the plant objects I had wanted to do from the start, and a very nice water effect.

Week 5

This week I am starting to model some trees, I have spent many hours browsing the internet looking up tutorials on how to make tree trunks, branches and even leaves.

Many of the ones I have read through teach you the simplest way is to start from scratch and extrude and bevel your way from trunk to tip. One problem I found using this method was that if you didn’t have a picture of something in your head to reference it to, it just seemed to start to get messy as you can see below.



Another tutorial showed how you can draw your trunk and branches in line mode and then convert it all into 3d. This was a very straightforward tutorial to work through and the results were surprisingly rewarding. However I started to expand on my new found knowledge and wanted to create more branches and even some twigs for the branches and creating them this way started to get very complex indeed so some limitations apply.

So I went back to the drawing board and just by using cylinders started drawing my tree from scratch. This was a very simple way of producing a tree and its branches; every cylinder can be moved without messing up any other part of the tree. They can be scaled, rotated moved etc very easily. When I was finally happy with the set up of my tree I started to connect the pieces together. This was a little bit time consuming but I think it was well worth it, as you can see with the following screenshots.

This final image of the trunk and its branches has a mesh smooth modifier just to round off the edges a little bit and has given my tree a cool effect. All it needs now is a realistic bark texture and I can proceed to the next step; its leaves.

Leaves

Now this is proving to be the hardest part of these models and the most time consuming too, I tried making a leaf by drawing a picture of one using the line tool and then extruding it but drawing in max without a pen is pretty difficult, so I dismissed that idea.

So I have discussed this problem with a few other students and found out that all I need to do is make a box as thin as possible and map a leaf texture on to it. So it will give the illusion that the tree has leaves. So quite simply I made it so:

Then it came to the really tedious task of scaling, rotating, moving and cloning the leaf all around my tree and then repeating this task over and over and over again…

Now all I have to do is find some more leaf textures, and make some other trees!

Week 4

This week a start has been made of my project, I must create three 3D still images to represent three different months of the year in 3ds max. After careful consideration I have chose March, September and November. In all of the scenes I will try my modeling hand at plants.

March is the start of spring, and should be bright, lots of colors, bright, birds singing, tadpoles swimming and new daffodils budding. So I will try to recreate this. I will try to create a garden setting with pond and create daffodils, daisies, lilies and pads and any other plants to fatten the scene out. I would like to add a water effect and maybe an animal or two.

September conjures up images of autumn, where the wind is picking leaves up and blowing them everywhere. Leaves fall from the trees in a spectacular array of colors, trees are bare, and the ground is wet from the odd showers. Still a little bit unsure as to how the scene looks, maybe a park, or a forest, or just a road with trees lining the sides.

I picked November because of Remembrance Day – also known as Poppy Day. I will try to create a scene with poppies and monuments, to symbolize this. A cold bare scene with a deathly quiet feel to it, Perhaps a church graveyard should be the starting point; although this scene will require a good deal of work.

Week 3

In this week we learnt about the different types of materials that can be put on objects to make them appear more lifelike. They simply define an objects look, color, texture, glow, transparency etc.

We learned that the primary driving force for materials is color, however there are several ways to describe the color of a material; the three main forces are ambient, diffuse and specular.

To simply explain this; Ambient color is the color of a material when it is exposed to ambient light; it will appear this color in indirect light or shadows. Diffuse is the color of a material when the object is exposed to direct light and specular color is the color of a shiny objects highlight.

As you can see from the explanations above, materials are reliant of lighting and lighting in 3ds max is one of its most important aspects. Light is everything! By light we see and by light we show. Light shapes the world around us, and defines shape, color and texture.

Lighting in 3ds max copies techniques used in photography and film making. Lights are placed around a scene to illuminate. Your scene and what’s in it dictate to some degree at least, which lights to put where. At a basic level you want your lights to illuminate your scene. Without lights your cameras have nothing to capture. Lighting is the backbone of CG; it’s how you light your scene that will make or break it. Lighting requires a lot of experimentation and patience.

Things can go wrong if there is too much light in your scene or if you do not have enough. This was the main problem I was having when I started experimenting with light. Putting to much light in your scene will flatten your image and lose details in form, while too little light will make it go muddy and gray and lifeless. A perfect balance must be found, like a photographer you want your image to have the best exposure, the richest blacks and the brightest whites, to create a deeper sense of detail. The light and shadow should complement each other and the lighting works to show off the features of the objects in your scene.

Week 2

Ok haven’t posted on here for a while, a lot has been happening here with all my other projects and home life, so here goes.

Week 2 pushed us deeper into the world of 3ds Max. We were taught some of the interface and the commonly used windows and panels and how to operate them. Most important was the command panel which is split up into tabs according to function. Everything you need to create, manipulate and animate objects can be found here.

In 3ds Max, you can directly affect geometry objects and you can transform two dimensional objects into three-dimensional geometry. Extruding, beveling, lofting, and lathing are just some of the ways to create geometry from splines.

Making a Chest of Drawers is a good way to show all of this in action.

Start off with a cube and modify the parameters to suit your needs. Have height segments too as this helps later on. Select all of the box and covert to editable poly!

Select the top polygon of the dresser and start beveling!
I used 6 bevels to get the curve right!

While we are still in Poly sub object we start work on the bottom of the dresser
Start using the extrude panel to carefully pull the bottom of the dresser away and insert (on the same panel) to move the polygons towards the center.

After extruding and inserting;

To cut a design I selected the relevant polygons, locked the selection. Then turned off shaded edge mode (F2) this selects the poly by highlighting the edges of the poly not the face then edit geometry panel to select the slice plane tool.

Using slice plane tool, select quad menu and rotate the splice tool 90 degrees on the y axis.

Then I cut 4 slices at each end of the dresser, I want to be able to precisely move individual parts to form a design.

After four slices on each end are maneuvered into the correct position;

Next we need drawers;

Splice the middle of the top six polygons, then extrude & insert like I we did for the bottom of the dresser to make drawers stand out. Then do the same for the other drawers at exactly the same calculations.

Using splines and a few surface creation tools we create the drawer knobs for the chest.
Here’s a quick rundown of what a spline is: a spline is a group of vertices and connecting segments that form a line or curve. To create the knob profile, we are going to use the line spline, shaped in the outline of, you guessed it, a knob.

Step 1, select the line tool from the shapes panel in the create tab. Draw roughly a door know like the photo it doesn’t matter if if goes squiggly we can adjust it by selecting one of its sub object modes, I used vertex and by just moving one of them I got the required effect.

Choose Modifiers, Patch/Spline, Editing, Lathe. Go to Parameters rollout and under the Align Heading, click the Max button. It’s a knob! You just have to change the alignment of the axis so the lathe revolution would be correct. Rotate the Perspective view so you can see the top of the knob. You should notice a strange artifact. To correct this, check the Weld Core box under the Parameters rollout for the lathe.

Then all you need to do is rotate the knob and stick it in the appropriate place,
then clone it horizontally and vertically and align them correctly.