Essential 3ds Max 2008

Essential 3ds Max 2008 ®

Sean McBride

Wordware Publishing, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McBride, Sean. Essential 3ds max 2008 / by Sean McBride. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-1-59822-050-6 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-59822-050-0 (pbk.) 1. Computer animation. 2. 3ds max (Computer file). I. Title. TR897.7.M386 2008 006.6'96--dc22

3. Computer graphics.

2007052752

© 2008, Wordware Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved 1100 Summit Avenue, Suite 102 Plano, Texas 75074 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from Wordware Publishing, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-1-59822-050-6 ISBN-10: 1-59822-050-0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0802

3ds Max is a registered trademark of Autodesk, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other brand names and product names mentioned in this book are trademarks or service marks of their respective companies. Any omission or misuse (of any kind) of service marks or trademarks should not be regarded as intent to infringe on the property of others. The publisher recognizes and respects all marks used by companies, manufacturers, and developers as a means to distinguish their products. This book is sold as is, without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, respecting the contents of this book and any disks or programs that may accompany it, including but not limited to implied warranties for the book’s quality, performance, merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose. Neither Wordware Publishing, Inc. nor its dealers or distributors shall be liable to the purchaser or any other person or entity with respect to any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

All inquiries for volume purchases of this book should be addressed to Wordware Publishing, Inc., at the above address. Telephone inquiries may be made by calling: (972) 423-0090

Dedication To my wife. Thank you for being understanding and putting up with me and the long nights spent on the book. To my family. If you hadn’t allowed me to go after something I wanted so badly and supported me so heavily, I would be stuck in a suit doing something I hated for the rest of my life. To the Polycount crew (www.polycount.com). Without you guys, I wouldn’t have known where to start and how to improve. Thank you for helping me and so many other budding artists.

iii

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Chapter 1

Understanding 3D Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What Exactly Is 3D Space and How Does It Work? . Basic 3D Objects (Standard Primitives) . . . . . . . Lights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cameras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 2

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11 18 23 24 26 26 29 36 38 42 46 48 53 54 56 59 59 61 62 63

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Modeling 101 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

How to Make a Standard Primitive an Editable Object Sub-objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selection Tricks for Edit Poly Objects . . . . . . . . . Edit Polygons Modeling Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extrude and Bevel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv

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3ds Max at a Glance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Navigating with Viewports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Create Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extended Primitives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2D Objects (Splines and Text) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Working with 3ds Max . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Undo, Redo, and Selection Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . Moving, Rotating, and Scaling Using Gizmos . . . . . . Snaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clone, Mirror, and Align Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . Grouping, Selection Sets, and Layers . . . . . . . . . . Hiding and Freezing Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modify Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Remaining Panels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing Viewport Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Customizing Your User Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Custom Colors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating Hotkeys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding Buttons to the Modifier List. . . . . . . . . . . Adjusting the Size of Your Gizmo . . . . . . . . . . . . Time Slider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding the Right-Click and How It Can Improve Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 3

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67 69 77 80 81

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Hinge From Edge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Inset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Collapse and Remove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Chamfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Connect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Cut and Slice Plane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Weld and Target Weld. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Split . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Bridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Create . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Turn and Edit Tri(angulation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Make Planar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Attaching Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 A Reminder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Chapter 4

Creating Materials and Using Texture Maps . . . . . 107

The Material Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Material Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applying a Material to an Object . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing Colors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adjusting Specular Levels and Glossiness . . . . . . . Self-Illumination and Opacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adjusting the Shader Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using the Maps Rollout to Add Realism . . . . . . . . Creating Bump Effects and Navigating Your Materials Loading Texture Maps into Specific Channels . . . . . Chapter 5

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108 109 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 119

Rendering Your Scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Understanding What Rendering Is . . . . . . . . . Renderers in 3ds Max . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Render Scene Dialog Box. . . . . . . . . . . . Viewing the Safe Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing from the Default Renderer to the Mental Ray Renderer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 6

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123 124 124 128

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Adding Lights to Your Scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Understanding the Importance of Lights in a 3D Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Standard Light Types in 3ds Max . . . . . . . . . Creating a Light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding the Light Settings . . . . . . . . . General Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intensity/Color/Attenuation . . . . . . . . . . Spotlight Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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131 132 134 135 136 137 139 v

Contents

Advanced Effects . . . . . Shadow Parameters . . . . Shadow Map Parameters . The Basics of Good Lighting. Lighting Objects . . . . . . Real-Time Shadows. . . . . . Chapter 7

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140 142 142 143 144 150

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154 155 156 159 160 161 162 165 166 167 170

Architectural Modeling Exercise: Interior . . . . . . . 175

Creating a Floor Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding Doorways and Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating Trim Detail Around the Bottom of the Walls . Creating the Floor and Ceiling Planes . . . . . . . . . Creating a Basic Floor Material with a Reflection . . . Setting Up a Beauty Render . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 9

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Additional Modeling Tools and Modifiers . . . . . . . 153

Bend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FFD(box) and Others. . . . . . Lathe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Push . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Taper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Twist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TurboSmooth . . . . . . . . . . Lofting vs. Renderable Splines Chapter 8

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175 179 183 188 189 194

High-Poly Modeling Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Understanding the Concept of Subdivisional Modeling Working Under Your TurboSmooth Modifier . . . . . . Gaining Back Definition That You Have Lost. . . . . . Keeping an Even Polygon Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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201 203 205 207

Chapter 10 Non-Organic Modeling Exercise: Creating a

Dagger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Creating the Blade . Creating the Hilt . . Creating the Sheath Adding Details . . .

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210 222 232 235

Chapter 11 Organic Modeling Exercise: Roughing Out a

Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Setting Up the Isometric View Reference . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Torso. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 vi

Contents

Pelvis . . . . Legs . . . . . Arms. . . . . Head . . . . . Final Tweaks

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250 253 261 269 271

Chapter 12 Advanced Modeling Exercise: Creating a Suit of

Fantasy Armor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

Starting Out . . . . . . . . . . The Roughout. . . . . . . . . Making the High-Poly Armor Final Details. . . . . . . . . .

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275 277 283 293

Chapter 13 Advanced Organic Modeling Exercise: Creating

a Human Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

Getting Proper Reference . The Eye . . . . . . . . . . . The Mouth . . . . . . . . . The Nose . . . . . . . . . . Completing the Facial Area Completing the Head . . . .

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298 300 303 306 309 310

Chapter 14 Spline Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

Understanding How Spline Modeling Works . Creating the Spline Cage. . . . . . . . . . . . Applying a Surface to the Spline Cage . . . . Adjusting the Splines . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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317 318 322 323

Chapter 15 Spline Modeling Exercise: Creating the Hull of

a Boat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Chapter 16 Becoming an Advanced Modeler/Artist . . . . . . . . 333

Don’t Make Common Industry Mistakes . . . . . . . . . Understand How Animation Will Affect Your Geometry. Reusing Models with Proper Edge Loops . . . . . . . . The Realities of High-Poly Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . Setting Up Your Character Pose Properly . . . . . . . . Think in Pieces and Parts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Does Customizing Help Me? . . . . . . . . . . . . What about MaxScript?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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333 335 339 340 341 343 344 344

Chapter 17 Using UVW Map and Unwrap UVW . . . . . . . . . . 345

What Does Unwrapping Mean? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 Using the UVW Map Modifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348

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Contents

What Is the Difference between UVW Map and Unwrap UVW? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction to Unwrap UVW . . . . . . . . . . Max 2008 Changes to Unwrap UVW . . . . . Unwrapping Your Model . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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353 353 369 371

Chapter 18 Advanced Modeling Exercise: The Human Ear . . . . 379 Chapter 19 Normal Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389

What Normal Maps Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389 A Brief Overview of Creating Normal Maps . . . . . . . . . . 390 How Normal Maps Fake Detail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 Chapter 20 Advanced Modeling Exercise: Generating a

Normal Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397

Setting Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modeling the Sci-Fi Wall Panel . . . . . . . . . . Render to Texture — Normal Maps . . . . . . . . Using the Projection Modifier . . . . . . . . . . . Render to Texture — Light Bakes . . . . . . . . Render to Texture — Ambient Occlusion/Global Illumination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using DirectX and Normal Maps in the Viewport Exporting to Other Software Packages . . . . . .

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398 399 402 405 407

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Chapter 21 Animation Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Creating and Deleting Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416 The Curve Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 Chapter 22 Creating a Basic Composite over a Background

Plate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425

Loading Your Background Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Camera Match and CamPoint Helpers . . . . . . . Adding a Ground Plane with a Matte Material to Match the Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lighting and Rendering Your Scene . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439

viii

Introduction Thank you very much for picking up Essential 3ds Max 2008. I hope this book will get you started and push you in the right direction as you are learning 3ds Max 2008. In this book, we will touch on all the major aspects of 3ds Max — everything from customizing the user interface to creating a composite shot with your own background plate. Throughout the book I’ve tried to depict fun and interesting art while keeping the material attainable for someone just entering the 3D modeling world. I also go about creating this art in a realistic fashion. All too often when I pick up a book to flip through it, I see a perfect path drawn from point A to point B while creating a model. As nice as it would be to know just exactly where each edge loop and vertex needs to go, that’s not how it is in real life. I want you to see the real process of creating a model for yourself so you can develop a keen eye for creating the correct shape to finish that set of armor you’ve been working on or giving the right overall feeling to a dagger. I also want to mention that this book is meant to be a one-on-one sort of teaching guide. By no means is this a textbook or a technical manual. I want this to feel like we’re sitting down together and walking through the key features of 3ds Max. I’ve always enjoyed learning by doing, and I’ve always consistently been able to recall more if I learn this way. If you’re a get-your-hands-dirty kind of person, then this is the book for you. The only barrier keeping you from creating models that you see in your mind’s eye is the interface and the creation process. This book should help you with both of those things. While you may still not be a rock star of modeling after finishing the book, I hope it inspires you to keep moving forward, always learning new techniques.

ix

Introduction

Throughout the book I’ve included Notes and Tips. Notes are meant to clarify a topic, while Tips are something I use in my workflow to speed up the process dramatically. Pay close attention to both of these elements. They’ll help you learn the correct way to go about things and give you the boost that I didn’t have when I was learning 3ds Max.

. Note:

The companion files are available for download at www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008. The files are organized by chapter and include color images of all the figures in the book and example files used in the modeling chapters. I strongly suggest grabbing these files if you have Internet access and downloading them to your hard drive as they will help in your learning process!

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Chapter 1

Understanding 3D Space My love of graphics and video games began when I was very young. I remember as a little kid playing Zelda on my new NES and having to call my mother into the living room to read to me what the poor two-dimensional man on the screen was saying to me in Rygar. Even at that young age, not knowing how everything was put together, I knew that I loved this media. Graphics have evolved at an amazing rate since that time. We’ve gone into three dimensions. We use different lighting and texturing techniques than we did in the Quake 1 era. Completely new complex shader systems control how surfaces not only look but act. Movies like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within have completely pushed the limits of what we could do graphically. Everyone has a story as to why they love this media. With this book I hope to help you no longer be limited by the means to create something, but only by your own imagination.

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Chapter 1

What Exactly Is 3D Space and How Does It Work? Think about your favorite character from either a fully rendered movie like Final Fantasy or a game that is rendered in real time. All these characters are made up of a collection of vertices and triangles. These vertices are just positions in space. The vertices are all connected by lines to form triangles, or polygons. These polygons are what you actually see when you are looking at a rendered movie or a game. In a movie you can have millions upon millions of polygons that make up the surface of a character’s skin, armor, and the scene around him. Obviously, all of these polygons are driven by math. As artists we have enough to think about trying to accurately capture the objects we’re working on without having to deal with the math. Fortunately for us, the nice programmers at Autodesk have created an application that does all this for us. Unless you plan on diving into MaxScript sometime soon, you won’t be doing any math that is more advanced than 2+2. So let’s look at the most basic 3D object — a box.

Understanding 3D Space

3

Figure 1-1

A box is made up of 8 points, 6 polygons, and 12 triangles. Remember, a triangle is a polygon, but a polygon isn’t always a triangle, as polygons can have many numbers of sides. Each of the vertices making up a box has an XYZ coordinate. X is left and right, Y is forward and backward, and Z is up and down. These three positions tell the program where a vertex is located. On a higher level, the object itself has a coordinate, or a “pivot” as 3ds Max calls it. This pivot controls the entire object and makes moving the object as a whole quite easy. All of this information is purely used in the background though. If you don’t want to deal with moving a vertex to the 15230 unit on the x-axis, you don’t have to.

4

Chapter 1

Basic 3D Objects (Standard Primitives) Almost everything you create in 3ds Max will be based on a simple object. No matter how complex the render or how detailed the model, it’s always a simple object at its core. Take the following, for example.

Figure 1-2

As complicated as it is, at its core this dagger is still a collection of vertices and polygons that can be created by starting with a simple box. 3ds Max gives you a host of objects to start with called standard primitives. These objects are located inside the Create panel under the Geometry section. Figure 1-3: The Create panel’s Geometry section

Understanding 3D Space

. Note:

The Create panel has several sub-tabs: Geometry, Shapes, Lights, Cameras, Helpers, Space Warps, and Systems. We will be visiting some of these other areas later in the book.

These are the basic 3D objects that you will see in most 3D packages. The basic standard primitives are: box, sphere, cylinder, torus, teapot, cone, geosphere, tube, pyramid, and plane, which are available as buttons in the Object Type rollout. Max has also taken it a step further and given you even more objects in the Extended Primitives drop-down. You can access these extended primitives by pressing the drop-down arrow next to Figure 1-4: A list of objects that can be Standard Primitives. This list gives you even more objects created with more options. In most cases, these will be very helpful for industrial or machinery design. These are things that although simple are mind-numbingly tedious to create in large quantities. I am personally grateful for these extra primitives. 3ds Max even gives you primitives for stairs, windows, and doors. The door and window primitives act just like the other primitives in that you have sliders that will affect height, width, depth, etc. You can even change the way the windows and doors open. You can make double doors or windows, and so on. The pivots are created and adjusted on the fly so that everything opens and closes on the proper hinge. This is a very fast way to get a great starting point for an object that may otherwise take you a long time just to get proportionally correct. Likewise, Max gives you a few other treats such as the ability to create trees and walls on the fly. These are located in

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Chapter 1

the AEC Extended section of the drop-down, and are pretty neat additions to the Max arsenal. These primitives are not objects that you’d want to use as a finished product obviously, but they are great tools to move you in the right direction.

Lights Lights play an important role when creating anything in 3D. In fact, without proper lighting it doesn’t matter what you make or how good you make it; if it’s not lit properly, your 3D object can look as flat and boring as a sheet of paper. Lighting is what gives everything, including the objects you create in 3D, depth. You only know that a ball is round because of the way light bounces off Figure 1-5: The Lights it, as shown in Figure 1-6. section

Figure 1-6

Understanding 3D Space

7

If you flooded that same ball with light from all directions, it would be just as flat as a sheet of paper, as shown below.

Figure 1-7

Certain lights will accomplish certain things for you. Knowing how to properly use your lights and having a good understanding of how light reacts in the real world will be invaluable to you as a 3D artist. The biggest misconception about lighting in 3D is that you simply add “lights” and blam! — you are done with your lighting. This is not true. Lighting is an art form in itself. In most cases you are often faking real lighting in order to make your scene look realistic. Even with a good model, bad lighting will result in an image that is horribly lacking. What makes things look real is the way light bounces off objects. For example, when you stand outside and face the sun, your back will also be lit. Why is this? Because the sunlight is bouncing off the ground behind you and then back up to your legs, shoulders, head, etc. You can do this on the computer at the expense of severe render times, or you can fake it by using multiple lights.

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In the beginning, I think it is best to learn how to light without relying on the computer to do everything for you. After you learn how to light and create well-lit scenes on your own, then you can explore things like radiosity solutions, global illumination, and other renderers in order to create completely photo-realistic lighting. We will talk about good lighting technique in a later chapter.

Cameras The camera is just what you think it is: a virtual camera that gives you something tangible to view and control in 3D space. When you are modeling and twirling around in 3ds Max you are actually looking through your Perspective viewport. The Perspective view is not something you can literally move and control. You can only look through it. A camera, however, is something that you can actually Figure 1-8: The see in your scene. You can view through Cameras section your Max camera just like a home video camera. You can animate the camera, tell it to follow objects, change the field of view (or your viewing angle), and so on. In The Lord of the Rings, a camera starts at the top of a tower and flies deep into the ground. This effect was accomplished by creating the set and then animating the virtual camera in that scene according to the desired camera path. Being able to create these CG environments and then animate a virtual camera through your environment is something that has completely changed filmmaking. There is no way to create the same shots in, for example, the movie Spider-Man with an actual camera. It is simply impossible to do it otherwise.

Understanding 3D Space

As you progress as a 3D artist, you’ll use cameras to create dramatic effects and make spectacular camera moves. Before you get to that point, however, you need to understand the user interface of 3ds Max.

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3ds Max at a Glance Navigating with Viewports Figure 2-1 shows 3ds Max in all its glory. Try not to be overwhelmed if this is your first time looking at the interface. There are many buttons and drop-down boxes, but in good time you’ll know the ins and outs of Max 2008. Don’t worry; I don’t expect you to remember every little detail from this chapter — just remember to look back once in a while. I’ve made sure to add many important workflow tips that will help you in the end.

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Figure 2-1: 3ds Max user interface

Before we have you recreating scenes from The Lord of the Rings or doing anything too dramatic, you need to understand the basics of moving around in Max. When you first load up 3ds Max, you will notice that your screen is broken up into quadrants. These are the four basic viewports (Top, Front, Left, and Perspective). This is the standard layout in most 3D packages and the default for 3ds Max. The only actual 3D viewport is your Perspective view. The others are two-dimensional views only, or orthographic views.

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Figure 2-2: 3ds Max viewports

If you look to the bottom-right corner of the 3ds Max interface, you’ll find the viewport navigation tools. These are the tools that allow you to zoom in, zoom out, pan left and right, as well as rotate around your objects in the four views. There are two ways to zoom and pan in 3ds Max. You can Figure 2-3: The viewport use the Zoom tool (identified by the navigation tools magnifying glass), or you can use your mouse wheel to quickly zoom in and out. If you move your cursor to the Perspective viewport and click the left mouse button, you’ll notice that the viewport is highlighted by a yellow border around the edge. That means the Perspective viewport is now active. When the Perspective viewport is activated, you can use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Rolling up will zoom in and rolling back will zoom out.

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If you want to use the Zoom tool, just click the magnifying glass. Next, bring your cursor into the viewport, and hold the left mouse button down while dragging the mouse toward and away from the screen. You’ll notice that you are now zooming in and out. These functions will work in any of the four viewports inside 3ds Max.

. Note:

“Click” means to press and release the left mouse button (as long as you’ve kept the default configuration for your mouse). “Right-click” indicates you need to click the right mouse button. “Hold” means to click and hold the indicated button. From here on, this is the convention we’ll use throughout the book.

There will be many times when you want to see something as large as possible, and zooming in is just not enough. You may want to maximize your viewport so that you are only looking at a desired quad. To maximize the Perspective viewport, you must first make sure it is highlighted (as indicated by the yellow border). Next, select the Maximize Viewport toggle tool.

Figure 2-4: The Maximize Viewport tool

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When you select the Maximize Viewport tool, you’ll notice that your Perspective viewport now takes up the entire viewing area of 3ds Max. Ahhh, isn’t being able to see nice? Tip: Maximize your view Why look through a postage stamp-sized viewport? I suggest working with a maximized viewport most of the time. You can change what viewport you are looking through with the hotkeys B, F, L, P, and T (in order, Back, Front, Left, Perspective, and Top views). The Maximize Viewport tool is a toggle button. If you want to minimize the viewport, simply hit the button again. The default hotkey for this function in Max is Alt+W.

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Now that you can zoom in and out and maximize your view, you need to know how to pan left and right within a view. Return to the navigation panel on the bottom right and select the Pan View tool (identified by the hand).

Figure 2-5: The Pan View tool

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Return to your Perspective viewport, hold down the left mouse button, and move the mouse around. You’ll notice now that you can grab the entire view and move it up, down, left, and right. You can also achieve this by pressing and holding the mouse wheel while moving the mouse. Tip: Zooming Get comfortable using the mouse wheel for zooming and panning; it will speed up your workflow dramatically.

Now for the fun stuff — rotating around your Perspective view! Go to your Perspective viewport. Then go back to the viewport navigation tools on the bottom right and select the Rotate View tool. This tool works the same as the others. After you select it, go back to your Perspective viewport, hold the left mouse button, and start moving your mouse. You will be able to tell you’re rotating around your view because the grid in the viewport will be moving. You can also achieve this by holding down the Alt button and the middle mouse button (mouse wheel) together.

. Note:

When you are in Rotate View mode inside 3ds Max, a circle will appear within the Perspective viewport. If you rotate within that circle, you will rotate around your scene. Rotating outside of that circle rotates the entire view, similar to what would happen if you turned a camera on its side.

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Tip: Using Alt+Middle Mouse button Use Alt+Middle Mouse (pressing the mouse wheel down) to rotate around your viewport. Using this in conjunction with the mouse wheel to zoom and pan around your scene lets you maneuver between viewports with just two buttons. Nifty, isn’t it? It was designed this way to give you complete and quick access to maneuver around your scene. This alone will increase your workflow an amazing amount.

After you are comfortable with rotating around in your view, try using combinations of moves. Rotate around for a second and then pan to the right. Then zoom in and out. Then rotate your view again. Being able to quickly navigate your scene is something that will come with time. You do have to make an effort, however. Try to use the mouse wheel as often as possible instead of manually going to the viewport navigation tools every time you want to change functions. You will also find in time that you may want to create hotkeys for some of these functions in order to improve your workflow. Tip: Adjusting your viewport quickly A perfect exercise to practice moving your viewport around is rotating the viewport and then panning it off of the center of the grid so you’re no longer looking at the center of the grid. Rotate the viewport up so you’re looking nearly straight down on the grid. Now pan over and center the middle of the grid in your viewport. Then rotate down 90 degrees so you are looking at the grid system from the side (it should look like a line). Pan the camera so that the grid is centered in your viewport again. Now rotate around. You should be fully rotating around the center of the grid. You can do this with any object in your scene. If you rotate the camera to the top, center the object, rotate to the side, and center the object again, you’ll be rotating around that object. With practice, you will become very quick at moving around the scene this way. A video can be found at http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008/.

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The last tool I want to show you is the Zoom Extents tool.

Figure 2-6: The Zoom Extents tool

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“Zoom extents” is just a fancy way of saying that you want to bring the selected object or scene back into view and center the viewport on that object. Sometimes you realize you have moved, panned, and rotated all over the place and your view is all turned around. Or maybe you simply want to select an object and then have Max zoom in on it for you. Just use Zoom Extents to perform that function. No object needs to be selected for this to work (which is good since we have not yet created anything). If you click and hold the button, you can see a white box version of Zoom Extents. This is just a selected object version of the same functionality. If you select an object and then click this button, it will zoom to the selected object instead of the whole scene. Tip: Undo and redo viewport change If you move or rotate your viewport in such a way that you just can’t seem to find your way back, 3ds Max has a viewport undo and redo function. Shift+Z will undo what you did to the viewport, and Shift+Y will redo the action. These changes are kept in a stack separate from your undo actions (such as moving an object), so there is no need to worry about undoing an action that you did after you moved the viewport.

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Create Panel The command panel to the right of the viewports is where all of your creation will start off. From here you can create any of the primitives and other types of objects Max 2008 comes with. Let’s start off with the Create panel. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Create panel is where you can create geometry, shapes, lights, cameras, helpers, space warps, and systems. Let’s take a look at the standard primitives and how you will go about creating them in your 3D space.

Figure 2-7: The Create panel

We’ll start off by creating a sphere. Within the Create panel, make sure that the Geometry icon (sphere) is selected. Notice that the Geometry section of the Create panel contains several button options, including Box, Sphere, Cone, etc. 3ds Max works differently than other 3D packages in that you select what you want to create and then create it using a series of clicks on the screen. This is quite nice because you get to create the object where you want at the size you want right off the bat. 3ds Max lets you create primitives on the fly right where you want it. With that in mind, let’s create a sphere now. Select Sphere in the Object Type rollout, and take note of the Name and Color section near the bottom of the Create panel. You can name your object here and also change its

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wireframe color. This is very useful when you have a scene filled with many different objects. Now move your mouse cursor to your Perspective viewport (which should be the viewport on the bottom right of your screen). Next, click and hold the left mouse button anywhere in the Perspective viewport. You’ll notice that if you continue holding the left mouse button and drag up and down you will manually change the size of your sphere. Create the sphere at the desired size and then release the mouse button. Think of where your first click was to be the origin of the sphere and where you are dragging to as the radius from the distance of that first click. Congratulations! You’ve just made your very first 3D object!

Figure 2-8

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After you create your sphere you remain in Create mode, as indicated by your cursor. This means if you want to make more spheres you don’t need to reselect the Sphere button; you just keep on making spheres now by using the left mouse button.

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Make a few more spheres at various locations and of various sizes in your Perspective viewport just for practice. Try out the Tip below and use the AutoGrid check box. You can very quickly create what looks like a screen full of bubbles pressing up against one another.

Figure 2-9

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Tip: Using the AutoGrid feature When creating your sphere, you place your sphere based on where you are clicking on the grid. If you want to create an object on the surface of any other object, check the AutoGrid check box. This little check box is a huge time-saver. Instead of having to move and rotate the object to match the surface, Max does it all for you. Try this when you are practicing creating your primitives. If AutoGrid is checked, uncheck it before moving on.

Now let’s create a box. Return to the Create panel and select Box this time instead of Sphere. After selecting the Box button, return to your Perspective viewport and place the cursor at your desired starting point. Just as before, we are going to click and drag the mouse. You’ll

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notice that moving the mouse up and down has a different effect than moving left and right. A box requires more mouse clicks because it has length, width, and height information; a sphere simply has a diameter. While you’re holding the left button, move the mouse around a bit until you get your desired box size. (Essentially you’re creating the bottom of the box first. It should look like nothing more than a simple plane.) Release the left button and move the cursor up and down. You’ll notice that now you are affecting the height of the box. Move the cursor up or down to your desired height and click again to finish. That’s it! Repeat this process several times. Try to make boxes of different lengths and widths. Again, you can play with the AutoGrid feature and create boxes on the surface of other boxes.

Figure 2-10

I’ll let you experiment on your own with the other standard primitives. Try creating a whole scene of random selections from the Create panel. Some of them, like the cone, have three different stages of creation, so just keep toying with

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them until you have a complete object. If you ever want to cancel in the middle of object creation, just right-click. This will delete the object you were in the middle of creating. These objects are all created with the same principles in mind. There is even the famous Utah teapot for you to create.

Figure 2-11: A teapot on top of another teapot

Congrats, you have just taken your first step to becoming a 3D artist. I know it doesn’t seem like much now, but in a couple of chapters you’ll be creating some very interesting objects out of these basic primitives.

3ds Max at a Glance

Extended Primitives Extended primitives are just an extension of the standard primitives. Go back to your Create panel and select Extended Primitives from the drop-down box. The extended primitives are basic 3D objects just like the standard primitives, but they are designed with more of a specific purpose in mind. You can create a procedural hose on the fly and adjust its shape or change the number of rings it has. You can also create a “ring Figure 2-12: The wave.” This is something you might use extended primitives if you were creating an explosion and you wanted a blast ring to emit from the center. Figure 2-13 shows a quick example of this extended primitive.

Figure 2-13: The RingWave primitive

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Please take some time to explore the additional primitives. I would also encourage you to look under the Doors, Windows, and Stairs sections as well (see Figure 1-4). Having the ability to create doors, windows, and stairs on the fly is absolutely invaluable and gives you more time to work on other more important things.

2D Objects (Splines and Text) Even though you are working within a 3D software package, there are many times when you need to start by creating a two-dimensional object. First, a spline in Max is simply a line or collection of lines. Splines can be curved or straight. One of the more common uses for splines is simply to create quick three-dimensional text. In order to create anything, we need to return to the almighty command panel on the right. Make sure you are in the Create panel of the command panel. Everything is created here, including Figure 2-14: The your 2D splines. To access your 2D Shapes section of the objects, select the Shapes icon in the Create panel Create panel. In this new section you will see a list of 2D shapes you can create (circle, arc, star, etc.). Let’s maximize our Perspective viewport as this is where we will create our 2D objects. Next, select Circle and return to the Perspective viewport. Click and drag up to create your circle size. When you are finished, simply release the mouse. A two-dimensional circle is born! I’m pumped, aren’t you? Most of your objects will be created with a single click and drag. Next, let’s manually create our own spline instead of using a default shape. Go back to the Shapes section of the Create panel and select Line. Go back to your Perspective viewport and click once. That places your first vertex. When you move your cursor around now, you’ll notice a line is attached to it.

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Basically we are just connecting the dots at this point. Every time you click you will place a vertex. Just start clicking to create the shape that you want. By default you are placing corner vertices. If you want to create a curved or smooth vertex, just click and drag while creating your series of points. To complete your spline, just right-click. Don’t worry about getting crazy with your splines right now. We’ll talk more about them in Chapter 7. Creating text works a little bit differently than creating other shapes and splines. Go back to the 2D shapes in the Create panel and select Text this time. After selecting the Text object type, you need to type the text. This happens in the Create panel’s Text area. (This is a great example of when you will want to pull out your Create panel in order to see all the options.) Either scroll down in the Create panel to see the Text area or mouse over the Create panel until the cursor changes into a hand. Now simply click to grab the Create panel and pull it up or down by holding the left mouse button. You should see the Text area with the words “MAX Text” inside it. This is where you will type your text. Delete the words “MAX Text” and type the text of your choice. You’ll notice that you have basic font options as well. After you have typed your text, click inside the Perspective viewport. Max will have created a spline version of your text.

Figure 2-15: Homage to programming class

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Now that you can see what you wrote in the Perspective viewport, you can go back to your text options and make any changes you want to the text. You can adjust the size, kerning, leading, font, and so on. Congrats, you now know how to create two-dimensional objects in 3ds Max.

Working with 3ds Max Now that we can create objects, we can talk about the main toolbar at the top of Max just under the menu bar.

Figure 2-16: The main toolbar (formatted to show all the available tools)

Undo, Redo, and Selection Tools The two arrows in Figure 2-17 are the Undo and Redo tools. These are some of the most common features in any application. For the most part, you’ll just use the traditional Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y commands to undo and redo.

Figure 2-17: The Undo and Redo tools

Skipping over some more advanced buttons, we then have a selection filter in the form of a drop-down box. It only allows objects that fit your selected filter to be selected. It’s handy if you have a huge scene and only want to pick an object of a certain type. Let’s say you want to only select geometry and not splines. No problem; just pick the Geometry filter. Just

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remember to turn it off so you don’t pull your hair out later when you can’t select something!

Figure 2-18: Filter selection drop-down box

Next, we have the Select and Select from Scene controls. Select can be used if you want to select an object but don’t want to worry about moving the object you are selecting.

Figure 2-19: The Select and Select from Scene controls

Select from Scene is possibly one of the coolest new features of Max 2008. Autodesk spent a lot of time completely reworking the Select by Name dialog. It’s now called the Select from Scene dialog and it’s got lots of awesome little features!

Figure 2-20: The completely new Select from Scene dialog

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These features include: A. Find — Quickly find any object by name. If you add a prefix or suffix to your objects, you can search based on that. A very nice feature for huge scenes. B. Access to selection sets — We will talk about selection sets later in this chapter, but simply put they are an editable grouping of objects given a name. Here you can select any number of objects within a set. C. Filter buttons — Filter out objects based on type. If you don’t want to see helpers, cameras, and lights, you don’t have to! Just unpress the button to disable them. D. Face count — One of my personal favorites is face count. Every object’s face count is right there so you can easily see which objects might be over the polycount. All in all, the new Select from Scene dialog is awesome for managing large scene files.

. Note:

As with Windows Explorer and other applications, just hold Ctrl to select multiple objects within the viewport or Select from Scene dialog.

Next are the Selection Shape and Window Crossing buttons.

Figure 2-21: The Selection Shape and Window Crossing buttons

By default, the Selection Shape button is set to the rectangular selection. If you click it and drag in your viewport to select something, you will see a rectangle. Clicking and holding the

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button changes what shape you’re drawing to select your objects. Most of the time, you will end up using the trusty old rectangle. The other selection types are very similar to Adobe Photoshop’s lasso and polygon lasso. Another interesting selection type is like a paintbrush that as you drag will select anything you “paint” over. After that we have the Window Crossing tool, which can be infuriating if you forget it is turned on. This button makes you fully encase the object you want to select. If it’s not fully inside of your selection area, it will not be selected. Most of the time, you’ll want this button to be off. It’s quite annoying if you forget it’s on and you can’t figure out why Max won’t select the objects.

. Note:

A little notch in the lower right-hand corner of any 3ds Max button indicates that you can click and pull down or to the right. This allows you to change the type of button it is. Keep this in mind with all sections of 3ds Max.

Moving, Rotating, and Scaling Using Gizmos Moving on down the main toolbar we have Move, Rotate, and Scale tools and a very cute little drop-down box. Selecting an object and clicking on a tool such as Move places an axis gizmo at the pivot of your object. The axis gizmo is a wonderful thing! This gizmo is what you will use to move, rotate, and scale everything in three dimensions. Unless you turn it off, the axis gizmo is always displayed when using the move, rotate, or scale functions. Of course you must have something to move before you can use the Move tool, so let’s create a box in the Perspective viewport. After creating the box, click the Move tool to activate it.

Figure 2-22: The Move tool

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If your box is not selected, just click it. Tip: Selecting objects with other tools The Move, Rotate, and Scale tools also act as selection tools, so clicking anything while using these tools will select the desired object.

Now that we have the Move tool activated and the box selected, you’ll notice that you have a gizmo with handles on it in the center of your box.

Figure 2-23: The move gizmo

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Accidentally pressing X on the keyboard will turn off your gizmos. Since this is a toggle, you can press X if you don’t see a gizmo.

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These handles show the x, y, and z axes. Notice that each axis has a color: red for X, green for Y, and blue for Z. This can be helpful if you’re looking at an odd angle in the Perspective view and want to move or rotate something. If you want to move something on a specific axis, you would move your cursor over the desired axis (in this case it’s X) and then click and hold. Start moving your mouse along the x-axis. The box should be moving according to your mouse movements. If you want to move along a different axis, mouse over the desired axis. Click and hold and then move your mouse along that axis. Play around with the different axes. You can move things around very efficiently this way within your viewports. Tip: Moving on multiple axes You can also move an object along multiple axes (moving on a plane) at the same time. Your gizmo has two different sets of handles: single-axis handles and multiple-axis handles. To manipulate along multiple axes, simply grab the desired plane. In Figure 2-23, the X,Y plane is active and highlighted in yellow.

Rotating an object works similarly to moving one. You have handles to rotate in a specific direction and you also have a free rotation, which allows you to rotate along multiple axes at the same time. Make sure your box is selected. Move to the top of the user interface again and select the Rotate tool (next to the Move tool).

Figure 2-24: The Rotate tool

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Figure 2-25: The rotate gizmo

The Rotate tool gives you five options for rotation: X, Y, Z, Free Rotation, and one of my favorites, Screen Rotation. Mousing over each line turns the line yellow; this indicates you’re going to rotate around that particular axis when you click. As with the move gizmo, the green line is the y-axis, the red line is the x-axis, and the blue line is the z-axis. If you want to rotate around multiple axes, bring your cursor to the center of the rotate gizmo. You know Free Rotation is activated when the center of the gizmo turns gray. Once Free Rotation is activated, click and hold and give your mouse a little spin. You’ll notice the box react accordingly. With Free Rotation you can rotate around all three axes at the same time. You may notice that there is always a gray circle surrounding the entire rotate gizmo. This is rotation based on your screen axis, and is basically the line between you and what your viewport is pointed at. This can be extremely useful

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when doing composites within 3ds Max that are based on a stationary camera view. Using the Scale tool should be very easy now that you know how to use the Move and Rotate tools.

Figure 2-26: The Scale tool

The same color rules apply here too. Select the Scale tool at the top of the user interface. The Scale tool works exactly like the Move tool: You scale on the desired axis by grabbing the appropriate handle. Similarly to the Move tool, you can scale along multiple axes by selecting an axis plane.

Figure 2-27: The scale gizmo

You can also scale up in all directions by scaling in the middle of the gizmo. Clicking and holding on the Scale tool shows you more scale options, one of which is the Select and Squash tool.

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This tool scales on the axis or plane you select but also scales inversely on the other axes. The result looks like you are squashing and stretching your object. Tip: Type-In dialogs This tip is pretty huge. If you right-click the Move, Rotate, or Scale buttons, a type-in dialog will open. This type-in dialog will show you the position, rotation, or scale percentage that the object is currently set to. This is extremely handy when you need exact rotations or movements. You can also right-click the up and down buttons to “zero out” the box. This sets the value to zero, but not having to reach up and type zero in every box can save you some time. I constantly use the type-in dialog boxes and usually keep them open but off to the side.

You know that cute little drop-down box by the Scale tool? It’s a handy one. Pick the Rotate tool and rotate your box around to an odd angle. Now pick your Move tool. Notice how the move gizmo is still oriented to the left and right views. By default, Max has this drop-down set to View. Click the arrow on the drop-down box and select Local.

Figure 2-28: Set the local axis in the Reference Coordinate System drop-down box.

This will make Max move the object based on the local axes of the object. Since you rotated the object, the axes for this box are different from that of the views. Pretty cool, huh? You can do the same with the Rotate tool. This is particularly useful for cylinders that you want to rotate on the local axis.

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Figure 2-29: Moving along the local axis

Keep this drop-down in mind when you are modeling. It will make your life easier when rotating objects. You have several settings to choose from, but most of the time View, World, and Local are your best bets.

. Note:

The settings in these drop-down boxes are on a per tool basis. If you were moving on the local coordinate system and you switch to the Rotate tool, you won’t be rotating around the same system unless you select it again. The Move tool, however, is still set to Local. Be sure to change them back or keep in mind that you’ve changed them.

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Tip: Q, W, E, and R — your new best friends Conveniently placed but not so obviously named, the shortcut keys for Select, Move, Rotate, and Scale are Q, W, E, and R in that particular order. I’m a huge fan of using shortcut keys, and you’ll soon learn over the course of the next few chapters that they will save you hours a day if used religiously.

Run outside now and go play with your new gizmo skills. Move, rotate, and scale to your heart’s content. Then come back and we’ll learn something else.

Snaps Snaps are another great way to ease your workload. Just like the name sounds, snaps make your object “snap” into place. There are four Snaps toggle buttons.

Figure 2-30: The Snaps toggle buttons

The leftmost Snaps toggle is for movement. There are two forms of snapping by movement. Figure 2-31 shows the snap gizmo. This snap gizmo shows the closest grid point. If this gizmo is showing when you click and hold on your object, you’ll be moving the object based on how much you’ve moved that snap gizmo. A more useful way of using snaps is to click when there is no snap gizmo showing in your viewport. Drag to a grid point to snap the object to that grid point based on its pivot position. Now your object’s pivot is set to the value of that grid point. This can save time if you are trying to put pieces together that you intentionally modeled to fit together.

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Figure 2-31: The snap gizmo

Not only can this Snaps toggle snap to grid points but by right-clicking on the button you can bring up the dialog shown in Figure 2-32 to change what you snap to. This can be very handy if you want to move something to a specific vertex or the center of a face.

Figure 2-32: Grid and Snap Settings dialog

The Angle Snaps toggle is for rotation. It’s a little simpler than the regular Snaps toggle. It snaps your rotation to increments of 5, by default. The Percent Snaps toggle is for scaling objects. While scaling, this tool snaps your scale percentage at increments of 10%, by default.

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The Spinner Snaps toggle is used in conjunction with any spinner in Max. A spinner is a numeric box with up and down arrows to the right of it. Clicking on the arrows will snap your value to an increment of 1, by default.

Figure 2-33: An example of spinners

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Tip: Change your snaps to fit your needs If you want to change the default snap values, which you probably will need to in the future, right-click on any of the Snaps toggle buttons. This will bring up the Grid and Snap Settings dialog so you can edit the default values Max uses. Don’t be afraid to change the values to suit your needs. They can be very helpful.

Clone, Mirror, and Align Objects Since we are working digitally here, why rework any of what you’ve done already? Just think — somewhere in the world some poor artist was made to make 100 different buttons for a jacket. Not you, my friend! Max has many tools that will make your life easier when it comes to reusing what you’ve already made. To clone an object in Max, all you need to do is Shift-click or Shift-click and drag on the object. Depending on what tool you have selected, clicking and dragging will either move, rotate, or scale the object that you are copying before you copy it. As you drag the mouse, you can see the copied object you are creating from the object you already made. When you release the left mouse button, you’ll see the Clone Options dialog box appear. You will need to specify if you want the object to be a copy, instance, or reference and also how many times you want to clone it. Copying the object

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is straightforward. You are simply copying the object, which is a totally separate object and has no tie to the old cloned object. Instancing not only clones your object but remembers the object you cloned. Any changes to either of these objects will affect any number of instances of these particular objects. So why are instanced objects so amazing, you ask? Say your boss wants you to change all of the light switches you used in your scene. Only one problem — you have at least 100 different places where you’ve used these light switches. Since you’re a good little artist and used instances, you won’t have to call your wife to tell her you’ll be home sometime within the next 48 to 72 hours. All you have to do is go to a single instance of that light switch, make the change, and poof! Max has made the change to all of the instances of the light switch. Crisis averted! Tip: Use instances religiously If you know you’ll be reusing an object, make it off to the side of where you’re going to place it in the scene. Create an instance of that object and move the instance into the place where you want to use it. Anytime you want to make a change to that or any other instance, you can go back to your object that’s off to the side and make your change easily.

A reference acts similarly to instanced objects, except that the object you referenced is somewhat of a “master object.” This object controls any reference. However, unlike instanced objects, you can apply modifiers to the cloned object without affecting this “master object.” The Number of Copies spinner box controls how many times you want to either clone, instance, or reference that object. For example, create a box anywhere in your Perspective viewport. Now select the Move tool and Shift-click and drag the box along the x-axis enough to create a gap between the old and new objects. Select Copy, and set Number of Copies to 4 when the Clone Options dialog appears. Now click OK. Voilà! We have a perfectly spaced array of five copied objects. This can also be done with the Rotate tool.

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Figure 2-34: An array of five objects created using the Clone Options dialog

When modeling an object that is somewhat symmetrical, isn’t it silly to model both sides of that object? Say you are working on a character. Why model two completely different hands? This is where the Mirror tool shines.

Figure 2-35: The Mirror button

Figure 2-36: The Mirror dialog box

This time let’s create a teapot from the standard primitives within the Create panel. Just click the Teapot button and click and drag somewhere in your Perspective viewport. Make sure your teapot is still selected and click the Mirror button. Select the X axis and No Clone. You should see your teapot mirror and face the other direction. Try selecting the other axes. Max even allows you to mirror two axes at once if you like.

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The same rules apply to the Copy, Instance, and Reference selections here too. Play around and get familiar with these features, as they’ll make your life a lot easier later on down the road! The Align button is another handy little invention.

Figure 2-37: The Align button

To make sure we are on the same page, create a box and enter these attributes in the Create panel. Length: 50 Width: 50 Height: –10 Now create a teapot and enter 5 as its radius. Select the box you just created and, as we talked about before, rotate the plane about 45 degrees so it’s tilted. Select your teapot again, and this time click the Align button. Now you can mouse over the box we created and see a little icon that resembles the Align tool icon we just clicked. Click on the box; a dialog box will pop up, but you will also see our teapot has snapped to the pivot of the box! A more useful feature of this tool is that it allows you to quickly make your object appear to be sitting on a slanted surface. Check the X, Y, and Z rotation check boxes. Now the teapot is sitting on the surface of the box and we didn’t have to spend five minutes tweaking the position of the teapot! There are also check boxes for scale. This simply grabs any scale adjustments you’ve made to the box and applies them to the object you’re aligning.

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There are also other options like Normal Align, which is similar to AutoGrid for already created objects. You should explore the use of the Align tool while you’re modeling. It saves a lot of time and frustration when you’re trying to line something up correctly. Perfect! On to bigger and better things!

Grouping, Selection Sets, and Layers Let’s say you’ve been working on a scene for a week now and you’ve got over 100 objects in that scene. You say, hey, I’d love to be able to create groups of objects so I can make changes or move them all together. There are many different reasons you may need to create a group or selection set. Max has three different implementations of this feature. We’ll discuss these in order of complexity. Grouping is the most simple of the three. It’s a little hidden in Max’s interface but quite useful. It does just what it says: groups objects into one object. Create three different objects in your viewport. Select all of these objects and go up to Group in the top menu bar next to Tools. Now click Group within that menu. A little dialog comes up for naming your group, so name it whatever you like and click OK. As you can see, it grouped all of the objects and averaged all of the pivots of these objects into one group pivot. Now you can move, rotate, and scale all of these objects together. Even clone them if you like. Another interesting feature of the group function is that you can select your group and click the Open feature within the group drop-down. This feature allows you to edit the objects within the group while still leaving brackets representing your grouped objects. Later if you want to break these objects out of the group, just select the group, return to the Group menu, and click Ungroup.

3ds Max at a Glance

Figure 2-38: Two separate box objects grouped together

]

Tip: Instances within a group If you include an instanced object in a group, the object will change within that group if you change a different instance of that object.

Think of selection sets as allowing you to group Figure 2-39: The a bunch of selected Edit Named objects but not make Selection Set button them into what appears to be one object. This allows you to edit a single object within a selection set without having to ungroup them as you do with grouping. To make a selection set, create a few objects in your scene. Then select any number of those objects and click the Edit Figure 2-40: The Named Selection Set button. Now click the Named Selection Sets dialog Create New Set button (the leftmost button in the Named Selection Sets dialog).

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That’s it! Name the set whatever you like. You can add other objects to the set by selecting them and clicking the + button located in the Named Selection Sets dialog. To remove an object, select it and click the – (minus) button. Just play around with selection sets. They are pretty simple and you’ll catch on quick! Selection sets are what I use the most. Typically I think most Max users will use layers, which we talk about in a second, and that’s fine. However, with layers you can’t add one object to multiple layers. When you try adding an object to multiple layers, it will remove the object from the current layer and place it in the new layer. Finally, the Layers feature is the most robust of the three. You can hide or freeze the layer, tell the object not to render, change the color, and calculate indirect lighting, all in this little dialog. Layers are best explained with an example.

Figure 2-41: The Layers button

Figure 2-42: The Layer dialog

Create a sphere, a cylinder, and a box in a row. Now Shift-click and drag to copy the objects and use the Number of Copies option to create a row of three or more. You should have something similar to Figure 2-43.

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Figure 2-43: An array of three objects

Now, select all of your spheres. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to select all of your spheres without either rectangularly selecting them or clicking on every single one? Click the Layers button. By default, everything you create will go into a layer named “0 (default).” Let’s create a layer for the spheres. Click the Create New Layer button and rename the layer Spheres. Since we had all of our spheres selected, they were taken out of the default layer and moved to our new Spheres layer.

Figure 2-44: The Layer dialog with the new layers

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Now anytime you want to select all of your spheres, you can right-click on your Spheres layer and click Select. Pretty neat, huh? Now try creating some more layers and adding your cylinders and boxes. Practice renaming the layers and moving objects to different layers. The Hide, Freeze, Render, Color, and Radiosity columns are a neat feature in layers. You can hide, freeze, turn on and off rendering or radiosity, set the colors of an entire layer with just one change, or expand your layer and change the object’s visibility individually. Tip: Work within layers By default Max throws every new object in layer “0 (default).” To change your working layer, look for the column with the check mark (see Figure 2-44). When you check the box in this column, any object you create will be placed in that layer.

. Note:

You can have different selection set groups contain the same object. With layers, however, your object can only be in one layer. I use both selection sets and layers in my workflow.

Hiding and Freezing Objects You may have noticed in the last section I talked about hiding and freezing. Say you’re trying to work on a forest of objects and you only need to see a select few. Let’s walk through another example. Create four spheres of any size near each other. Now, say we only want to work on and see one of the four spheres but we don’t want to delete them; we just want them to go away for a little while so we can work without things obstructing our viewport. Select the sphere you want to see (any one for this example) and right-click on it. Now you’ll see a context-sensitive menu come up.

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Figure 2-45: Our first peek into the contextsensitive “quad” menus

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We’ll talk more about this menu later, but for now look at the upper quadrant. This quadrant contains hiding and unhiding functionality by default. Let’s pick Hide Unselected to hide any objects we don’t have selected. This works for even a set of objects! Now we only see the objects that we want to see and nothing else. To get those objects back, all you have to do is right-click anywhere and click the Unhide All button. Poof! Your objects are back. If you wanted to unhide a specific sphere, you could unhide by name also. Tip: Using Isolate Selection Within this quadrant we were just talking about is an option called Isolate Selection. This acts very much like Hide Unselected. The difference is that it saves the state of all the hidden objects and returns there when you click the Exit Isolation button. When you come out of isolation mode, the camera acts funny, throwing your viewport pivot way off. The simple fix is to immediately press Shift+Z to undo what Max did to the camera.

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Now, freezing objects is much more useful that it sounds, I assure you. Freezing objects allows you to still have an object in the scene, but you can’t modify it in any way. You can’t even select it! It’s very useful if you need a reference in the scene for what you’re modeling but don’t want to be bothered by accidentally selecting it or moving it around. It’s extremely useful for animators who are working with a bunch of models that have bones going through them.

Modify Panel The Modify panel is where you will spend most of your time in 3ds Max. It has several options that correspond to different areas of 3D. This is where Max gets a little bit more fun than clicking and dragging. This panel allows you to apply “modifiers” to objects that you’ve created through the Create panel. The modifiers can do very interesting things to an object, some of which are more useful than others.

Figure 2-46: The Modify panel

The default display of the Modify panel looks quite boring with not a whole lot going on. Max intentionally has kept all the modifiers listed in a rollout because there is a huge list. This is not the most efficient way of working. Sifting through them every time you want to get to something is a bit of a pain. Max starts you off this way because it

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wants you to configure your modifier buttons yourself. Everybody uses different techniques, so most of the time when you look at someone else’s collection of modifier buttons they’ll be different. Max has some default sets you can choose from, but in my experience you’ll want to create your own button sets depending on what type of modeling you are doing. We’ll talk about that in the “Customizing Your User Interface” section of this chapter. For now we’ll just use the drop-down box to pick our modifiers. Alright, let’s set up a simple scene to show you what these modifiers can do. Go to the Create panel and create a cylinder in your Perspective viewport. Make sure the cylinder is selected and click on the Modify button. It’s the one just to the right of the Create button. See how we have a similar selection of parameters as in the Create panel? Now enter these values: Radius: 10 Height: 75 Height Segments: 20 Cap Segments: 1 Sides: 20

. Note:

If you don’t have an object in the scene or any object selected, then you won’t see any modifiers in the list. Simply create a cube or any other primitive as we talked about earlier and make sure it is selected. Then return to the Modify panel.

Now let’s look at our arsenal of weapons. To access the Modifier List rollout, you just click the drop-down arrow next to the text “Modifier List.” Yep, like I said, it’s a huge list! Don’t worry; you won’t be using but a handful of these modifiers at first. For now let’s pick the Bend modifier, so scroll down and find that one. This will apply a bend to the top of your cylinder. Hmmm, although we have added a Bend modifier to our cylinder, it

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looks like nothing has happened. That’s because the bend angle is set to zero. If you look in the Parameters section of the Modify panel, you’ll notice you have bend settings (Angle, Direction, Bend Axis, etc.). Adjust the Angle setting by placing your cursor on either the up or down arrow, and click and drag up or down slowly. You’ll notice the cylinder is starting to wiggle a bit. Sweet, huh? Now drag upward until you have an angle around 190. Your cylinder has a nice bend to it now. Go back to the Parameters area and adjust the direction of the bend. Click and hold over the up and down arrows of the Direction setting just like before, and start sliding up or down with your mouse. I’ve been doing this a long time now and it still cracks me up to make a cylinder wiggle back and forth. Okay, so I’m easily amused. Time for the juicy stuff. Go back to the Modifier List and apply another Bend modifier to the cylinder. I know it’s crazy, but just do it. Now your stack should look like this:

Figure 2-47: The bend modified stack

Just as before it, should look like nothing new has happened to the cylinder. So let’s make some adjustments to our new modifier. Apply these settings: Angle: –76 Direction: 0 Bend Axis: Y

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You should have a wacky shape now that looks something like this:

Figure 2-48: Our bend modified cylinder

Now the great thing is that everything is a modifier in your stack. This works just like layers. If you have ever used Adobe Photoshop or any other program that makes use of layers, then you will understand how the layering works. In Max you can keep applying modifiers on top of modifiers. The modifier on top will affect everything underneath it in the modifier stack. This also means you can go back to the beginning and make changes. For example, let’s select the cylinder in our stack. This brings you to your original cylinder settings. Change your original cylinder settings to have only six sides instead of 20. The Bend modifiers are still affecting the cylinder, even though we are at the beginning of the stack making changes. Likewise, you can go to any modifier in your stack and make adjustments at any point. When you went back in your stack to the bottom, did you notice that the cylinder popped back

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into an unbent state? What if you needed to see your cylinder with the Bend modifier on it and at the same time change how many segments the cylinder had? The Show End Result button to the rescue.

Figure 2-49: The Show End Result button

With this toggle turned on, you can modify how many segments or sides your cylinder has on the fly. This button will be your friend in later chapters, but for now just make a mental note. A similar function is the lightbulb button next to each modifier. Clicking this lightbulb turns that modifier on or off, similar to hiding an object but for modifiers. This is a great way to toggle through your layers and decide if you like what a certain modifier is doing to your object. You can turn them on or off in any order you want. You may also notice that next to the lightbulb you have a + sign. Clicking this will open your modifier and allow you to manually adjust that modifier via a gizmo. For example, select the Bend modifier that is on the top of your stack, then click the + next to it. This will open up your Bend modifier and allow you to actually select the gizmo in your viewports. Click the word “Gizmo.” Now if you go back to your Perspective viewport you’ll notice that you can actually move the bend gizmo around. Move it around and rotate it a bit. This is a nice way to add manual controls to an otherwise static modifier. Once you are done manually tweaking your bend gizmo, you turn it off by reselecting “Gizmo” in your modifier stack.

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The Remaining Panels The rest of the panels have some good functionality, but you just won’t spend nearly the time in them as you do in the Create and Modify panels. Throughout the book so far you’ve seen me use the term “pivot” and here’s where that comes into play. Where you see your move gizmo on an object is its position, or “pivot.” You can move this pivot around independently of the object and even rotate the pivot without moving the object! This is handy if you’ve moved the vertices within an object and the pivot stayed in the same place. As a quick example, just create a box anywhere in your Perspective viewport. Go to the Hierarchy panel, located right next to the Modify panel. Now click the Affect Pivot Only button. You’ll see your gizmo look a little different. While this button is toggled you can move the pivot around without the object moving. Move the pivot off to the side on the x-axis. Now toggle off Affect Pivot Only and rotate around the y-axis. You’ll see how your box comes up off of the grid based on where your pivot point is. Use this to your advantage! It’s amazing how much time you can save if you set up your pivot before you move an object into place. New to Max 2008 is the working pivot. This is pretty neat! It gives you the ability to create a temporary pivot for an object and go back and forth between your actual pivot and the working pivot. Under Working Pivot, you’ll find the Edit Working Pivot and Use Working Pivot buttons. First, rotate your object around and you’ll see where the pivot is. Click Edit Working Pivot. This will put you in a mode similar to Affect Pivot Only. However, you’re actually editing a cloned pivot of your object pivot. Just move your working pivot off somewhere to the side of your object. Now click Use Working Pivot. Using the Rotate tool you can now see we are rotating around our working pivot! All you have to do to go back to your real object pivot is click the Use Working Pivot button again.

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In your viewports you also should take note that Max tells you that you are using a working pivot. Just under the viewport name (Perspective, for example) will be “Edit WP” or “Use WP.” For a video example of this, grab the companion files at www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008. The Motion tab is pretty animation specific. As we are focusing mainly on modeling, the Motion panel is not really covered in this book. The Display panel is where you can find all the hiding and unhiding tools we talked about in the “Hiding and Freezing Objects” section. The Utility panel contains a collection of tools that aren’t very commonly used. I’ll cover these as needed, but for now we’ll skip over them.

Changing Viewport Preferences Depending on what you are doing, you may want to adjust your viewports in 3ds Max. There are many ways to do this; the most basic way is to just manually move them to suit your needs. For example, let’s say I want to see all four views but make the Perspective viewport larger. When you click and hold one of the viewport’s border lines, you will notice that your cursor changes to a crosshair. This means that this is an adjustable part of the user interface. Simply click and hold and move your mouse up and to the left. The viewport will expand on the fly. This is true for all bordering lines in all four viewports. Experiment for a moment and start scaling your different viewports. This is the fastest and most flexible way to adjust your viewports. If you are like me, however, you don’t always need to see all four views. You may only want to work with two or three views. That means we need to totally change our layout. At the upper-left corner of all four viewports, as shown in Figure 2-2, you’ll see the name of that viewport (Top, Front, Left, Perspective).

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If you mouse over the text and right-click, you will get a series of options. Go all the way to the bottom of those options and select Configure to display a dialog box with a series of tabs. Select the Layout tab. This tab shows you a series of new layout options. If you select one of the different layout options at the top, Max will preview it for you in the window. Choose your desired layout and press the OK button. After pressing OK you’ll notice that Max has updated to your new layout. Just like the default Max layout, this new layout can be adjusted manually. Lastly, you can dictate which viewport goes where. That means if I want the Perspective viewport to be in the upperleft corner instead of at the bottom right, I can do that. Just right-click the name of the viewport you want to relocate. Instead of choosing Configure this time, select Views from the context menu. This will give you another menu that shows you all available views (Perspective, Top, Front, Left, Right, and so on). Just highlight the desired view and then click your mouse. Using these viewport options gives you almost unlimited options for your user interface. As you progress as a 3D artist, you’ll find that certain user interface layouts are more efficient depending on what you are trying to achieve.

. Note:

Max automatically remembers your last layout. When you restart Max, it will return to the way you left it.

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Customizing Your User Interface Now we’ll focus on customizing your user interface. Max is very user friendly, in that you can move portions of the UI around and even dock it to other parts of the UI. You can create your own custom toolbars and modify existing ones. We’ll start off with the absolute basics. Let’s start adjusting the current UI and moving things around a bit. The big command panel to the right of your screen is where you will access almost every tool in 3ds Max. This is what houses all your modifiers and their settings (among other things). The problem, however, is that sometimes a modifier or object has so many settings that you run out of room in this panel. When that happens, the excess settings are displayed below the other settings on the screen. Similar to navigating a long web site, you have to keep scrolling down to see more information. This is not a problem, although it can become cumbersome to scroll down to the bottom of your settings over and over again. To accommodate the display of extended settings, you can pull this panel out horizontally. The settings will automatically adjust to the new room made available. To extend the panel, just move your cursor to the left edge of that panel. Your cursor shape will change when you get to an adjustable area. Grab the edge and pull to the left. You can actually pull the panel out so far that you almost completely lose your interface. You can also tear off parts of your interface and dock them to other parts of your UI or keep them as floaters. If you have dual monitors like I do, it’s nice to tear off your command panel and put it on your second monitor. This way you can use one monitor as your 3D viewport and the other monitor to house all your tools. There are two ways to tear off parts of your UI. You can grab the corner of your panel and right-click. When you do that, you will see a context menu with a few options (Dock and Float). You can also manually pull a panel off and move it about the UI.

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Let’s move a few things around for practice. Move your mouse cursor to the upper-left corner of the command panel. You’ll notice that your cursor changes when you get to the correct place. When the cursor changes, you can right-click to float the command panel or you can click and hold and manually pull it off to the left. Pull the command panel off and keep it as a floater. Let’s do this with the remaining toolbars by tearing off the top of our main toolbar next. If you move your cursor to the left of the main toolbar, you’ll notice your cursor change again. Just as before, click and hold and pull the toolbar down. Now your main toolbar is floating as well. All that remains from the default user interface now is the set of Reactor tools to the left. (These are advanced features dealing with physics and dynamics, and are not covered in this book.) What the heck, let’s tear that off as well. Go to the top of that toolbar and tear it off just like you did the main toolbar. Your entire user interface is now floating. Go ahead and start docking your toolbars to different sides of your interface. Simply grab the toolbar and manually move it to the left, right, top, or bottom. Move them around at random and practice a bit. Also notice that you can stack your toolbars. Take everything and dock it to the left of the interface. They will automatically dock to each other.

. Note:

You can take any horizontally docked toolbar and dock it on the side as a vertical toolbar and vice versa.

You can also create your own custom toolbars. Let’s add a custom toolbar as a floater. Go to the top of the UI and, from the Customize menu, select Customize User Interface. This will bring up the Customize User Interface dialog. We want to create a new toolbar, so select the New button. You will be prompted to name your new toolbar. Let’s name it something totally random, like “Sean is a 3D Jedi.” Max will float an empty toolbar in your interface.

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You can put absolutely any function in a toolbar. You can place a custom script into a toolbar or you can insert objects or modifiers that you use on a regular basis. As an example, let’s put some modifiers into the new toolbar. If you go back to the Customize User Interface dialog, you’ll notice a long list of actions to the left. These actions are organized by categories. We want to add a couple of modifiers to our new toolbar, so select Modifiers in the Category rollout. You’ll get a new list of actions in the Action list. Cursor over the Bevel Modifier action and drag it to the new toolbar. Next, grab the Cap Holes Modifier and drag it to the new toolbar. Go ahead and grab two or three more actions and move them to your new toolbar. Now that we have our new toolbar complete, we can dock it to any part of the user interface. This is now a functioning toolbar. The modifiers we added to it are working modifiers and act as buttons. Once you get your interface layout the way you want it, you can save it. To save your custom Max layout, go to the top of your Max UI and open the Customize menu. Click on Save Custom UI Scheme. Max will prompt you for a name for your new UI layout and a path to save the file. Anytime you want to load a custom UI, go back to the Customize menu and select Load Custom UI Scheme. You will be prompted to select a custom UI to load. Select the UI of your choice and then select Open. This can be particularly helpful when you want to use different layouts for different tasks. If you are animating, you may want a layout that is set up for animation. Likewise, you may want a different layout if you will be doing more modeling.

. Note:

Max already has preset UI schemes: “ame-light,” “ame-dark,” modular toolbars UI, and Default UI.

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Custom Colors But wait! The fun does not stop there. You can also customize your UI colors in 3ds Max. Head back up to the Customize menu and select Customize User Interface. Select the Colors tab in the Customize User Interface dialog. The Colors tab allows you to change just about every single color 3ds Max applies to its UI and viewports. For example, to change the viewport background, choose Viewports from the Elements rollout. Then scroll down to Viewport Background. Highlight Viewport Background, then use the color swatch to the right to change the color. After you select the appropriate color, select the Apply Colors Now button. This will apply any color changes you have made. Just like all other customizations in Max, you can save these color settings by using the Save button. After you have been using Max for a while, you will no doubt want to change a few things to what suits your color preference best.

Creating Hotkeys Creating hotkeys is not super important in the beginning. Just relax, take your time, and play with the buttons. It’s not like you’ve got some publisher breathing down your neck saying you have to have these five models finished by the end of tomorrow! This is more for future reference. I, however, can’t stress enough — once you’ve learned the program — please don’t go about clicking every single function button. It’s just silly and you can do some amazingly fast things with just a few hotkeys. I personally use a combination of what Max has set by default and my own hotkeys. When you know Max like the back of your hand, why search around in the UI for a button when you could just hit a key on your keyboard without even looking for it? You go about creating hotkeys in much the same way as you create custom colors and toolbars. Return to the top of your UI to the Customize menu and select Customize User

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Interface. This will bring up our now familiar customization tabs. You want to make sure you have the Keyboard tab selected. Here you have a Group rollout, a Category rollout, and a list of options specific to that category. I am not going to have you change any hotkeys at the moment, but I would like for you to understand how it works so that you can do it when the time is right. First, select the group that relates to the type of command you are trying to find. If you are working with Edit Poly, pick this group. Then scroll through the list to find the specific action, or command, you want to attach to a key. The Main UI group contains most of the navigation functions and viewport settings. If you want to create hotkeys for the Edit Poly functions, then you would need to go to the Edit Poly group. For now, make sure you are in the Main UI group. Below the Group rollout is a Category rollout. If you know what category your function is in, you can select that category from the drop-down list. If not, then simply keep your Category rollout on All Commands. This will show you all possible commands in the Main UI group. When you select an action in the Action list, you’ll notice that it will show you any hotkey that it is currently assigned to in the Shortcut column on the right. Once you have found the action for which you want to create a hotkey, click on it to highlight it. To the right of the Action list are Hotkey and Assigned to boxes. After you select the action for which you want to create a hotkey, you simply click in the Hotkey box and press the key you want to assign. The Assigned to box will let you know if the key you have chosen is already assigned to another action. If it is, you can remove it by pressing the Remove button. Pressing the Assign button creates the hotkey. Bam! You are officially a customizing 3D ninja. Of course you have the option of saving your custom keyboard hotkeys. Just select Save (at the bottom of the dialog) and tell Max where to save it. You can also load any other keyboard hotkeys you have created in the past.

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Adding Buttons to the Modifier List After a while you may realize that you need to create a custom button set for your modifiers. To do this, just right-click the Modifier List and select Configure Modifier Sets. This will pop up a brand-new dialog in which you simply drag and drop what you want into your new list.

Figure 2-50

Just so that we are on the same page, make sure you have selected Mesh Editing from the Sets drop-down.

. Note:

In the future it does not matter what “set” you have selected. You can add or remove buttons no matter what is highlighted here.

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Let’s go ahead and get rid of a couple of buttons and replace them with something else. Go to your Modifiers buttons, and click and hold any desired button. Drag the button back into the Modifiers list on the left. Max automatically removes the button, giving you an empty space. Go ahead and get rid of a few more by dragging them into the Modifiers list. Also note that you can drag and drop anything anywhere. You can drag a button (up, down, left, right) to a different button position and so on. You can also drag an action from the Modifiers list on the left, and place it as a button to your right. After you move a few things around to your liking, you may still have a few empty slots left. Since there is no reason to have empty slots, you can change your button count. Just raise or lower your button count to the desired number. Being able to customize your button configuration is just another way to design your workflow around your personal needs.

Adjusting the Size of Your Gizmo You can quickly adjust the size of your gizmos by pressing the plus or minus keys at the top of your keyboard (not on the number keypad). Pressing the plus key will increase the size of your gizmo, and pressing the minus key will shrink it. Oftentimes animators want a large gizmo because they need to make changes quickly. This makes it easier for them to grab the gizmo and move or rotate around a desired axis.

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Time Slider At the bottom of your Max UI, you’ll notice a series of numbers. This is your time slider, which is used for animation purposes only. Animators use the time slider to pace their animations and add or remove key frames. This is extremely efficient for doing quick animation blocking or simple animations. It allows you to animate quickly without having to open the Curve Editor for detailed animation work.

Understanding the Right-Click and How It Can Improve Workflow The three ways of creating efficient workflow are interface customization, hotkeys, and the right-click. Since we have already gone over interface customization and hotkeys, we need to explore the right-click a bit. Most programs have a “right-click” feature. They may call it something different, but they all serve the same function: to provide a fast way to access parts of the program without having to use a hotkey or going to the UI to get it. In 3ds Max this function is in your right-click. The right-click menu pretty much covers everything you could want to do in Max so we’re not going to explore every option, but again, when the time is right you’ll know exactly how to modify your right-click menu. The right-click in Max is quite useful. The right-click will show you different options depending on what you are doing and what you have selected in your scene. And, like everything else in Max, the right-click is totally customizable. You can find customization options for your right-click menu (aka quad menu) in the Customize User Interface dialog’s Quads tab.

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Make a sphere in your Perspective viewport and rightclick it. You should see a context-sensitive menu that looks something like this:

Figure 2-51

The right-click menu is broken up into two sections here, but in other cases it will increase to four sections, or “quads.” The top has display options such as hiding, unhiding, and freezing objects. The bottom has transform options such as Move, Rotate, Scale, and so on.

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Earlier in this chapter I showed you how to access the Move, Rotate, and Scale tools in the UI. Now that you know how they function, don’t keep going up there and clicking on them! Use Q to choose your selection type, W to move, E to rotate, and R to scale. This will greatly reduce the amount of time you spend just trying to get an object into place!

For everything you are doing in Max, the right-click will update according to your actions. If you are editing a poly object, it will give you edit poly options. If you are editing a

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mesh object, it will give you edit mesh options. By default it may not do everything you want, but with just a little customization you can fit it to your needs in any situation. In the next chapter we will start to get our feet wet with modeling. I will show you where your modeling tools lie in the UI and the corresponding tool in the right-click menu. After you know where everything is, I would suggest doing pretty much all modeling via the hotkeys and the right-click. This is especially fast. You can even model in what Max calls “Expert mode.” This is when you completely hide your UI. A bit advanced for the time being but you’ll get there!

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Modeling 101 How to Make a Standard Primitive an Editable Object Whew, you’ve made it through the explanation of the UI and all the basic tools. Good for you! If you put as much determination into your modeling as you did into trudging through that second chapter, then you’ll be well on your way to knowing Max like the back of your hand. I do apologize; I realize the basics can be amazingly boring, but it is something we all have to get through. Before we start modeling, I want to stress the importance of understanding the tools Max gives you. It’s much like a traditional art class. Day one your teacher will have you play with your pencils, pens, and charcoal sticks, just to get you familiar with what you have at your disposal. Think of this chapter just like that. You want to just play around with the tools 3ds Max comes with and we’ll worry later about creating an object that resembles something. With that being said, on with the show… A standard primitive is simply an object with adjustable values. A sphere, for example, has an adjustable radius and adjustable segments.

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The sphere is not actually an editable object at this point. In order to make it an editable object, you need to collapse it to the desired editable object. There are many editable object types in Max, including Edit Poly, Edit Mesh, Edit Patch, and Nurbs. All of them have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I never ever use anything other than Edit Poly modifiers. If you have followed the industry for a while, then you have seen nurbs and patches come and go. Poly modeling has consistently been a fast and effective way to model almost anything. Edit Poly and Edit Mesh are both polygon modeling; however, Edit Mesh is the old way of doing poly modeling. 3ds Max developed Edit Poly as a newer and faster way of modeling. It has all the same features of Edit Mesh, plus a lot more. Edit Mesh has not been removed in order to make sure the software is reverse-compatible with older files. However, there is really no reason to use Edit Mesh these days, as it’s not half as powerful as Edit Poly. To make a standard primitive an Edit Poly object, select the object and right-click it. At the bottom of your context menu you’ll see the Convert To option. Highlight Convert To and a list of options will roll out. Select the Convert To: Editable Poly option.

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You can also right-click in the modifier stack and then click Convert To: Editable Poly.

You’ll notice that your standard primitive looks exactly the same. Converting the object to an Editable Polygon object doesn’t change any of the geometry. However, you now have access to the vertices, edges, and polygons that make up that object.

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Sub-objects Sub-objects are what you actually use to edit an object. Sub-objects, simply put, are just vertices, edges, and polygons. Max gives you a couple more options such as borders, which are made up of open edges, and elements, a collection of faces that aren’t attached in any way. Remember when we talked about grouping objects in Chapter 2? Think of an object as a collection of sub-objects, much like a group is a collection of objects. So you can have multiple spheres in one Edit Poly object. But instead of spheres, they are just a collection of polygons that make up a sphere within one “object.” Let’s all start on the same page. First of all, enable edged faces by right-clicking on the name of the viewport in the upper left of your viewport and selecting Edged Faces. This will allow you to see the edges of the object you are working with.

Figure 3-1: The Edged Faces toggle

Now, create a cube in your Perspective viewport, then convert it to an Editable Poly object via the right-click menu. After converting it to an Editable Poly object, Max automatically takes you to the Modify panel. The Modify panel should look like Figure 3-2.

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Figure 3-2: The Modify panel of the Editable Poly (cube) object

As we quickly talked about before, by default all additional modifiers show up in the Modifier List drop-down. Max also allows you to work in Button mode, which allows you to access buttons here instead of using a drop-down. Button mode is much faster. You may be wondering, “Why would they set it up this way if it’s faster to work in Button mode?” Well, Max does not presume to know how you want to work, so you have the option of loading button presets here (or customizing your own). To access Button mode, right-click on the Modifier List drop-down arrow. Then choose Show Buttons from the list of options.

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Figure 3-3: Right-clicking the drop-down arrow

A number of buttons will appear below the Modifier List drop-down.

Figure 3-4: The new buttons shown on the Modify panel

Now before you can edit any of the sub-objects, or parts of your object, you need to select which sub-object you want to edit. Each one will bring up a different set of options and rollouts. Let’s first learn to select different types of subobjects.

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Here’s where one of the coolest new features of 3ds Max 2008 comes in. Previously we had to use the 1 through 6 keys, or manually click on the buttons to select the different sub-object modes. We don’t have to do this anymore!

Figure 3-5: The new Preview Selection section of the Editable Poly

New to Max 2008 are the two modes under the Preview Selection section of the Editable Poly. SubObject mode will allow you to preview what you’re going to select by highlighting it in yellow before you pick it. Multi mode is the best of the two. Multi mode not only highlights in yellow what you’re going to be selecting but also allows you to select other sub-objects. If you go over a face, it will select that face. If you go over a vertex, it will select that vertex. This will save quite a bit of time for those who weren’t using the hotkeys to select sub-object types. To see a video of this feature in action, you can check out the companion files found at www.wordware.com/files/ 3dsmax2008. To be completely thorough I’ll walk you through the classic way of sub-object selection. Understanding how the older method works will allow you to see the more complete picture of how Max functions. In the Selection rollout of the Modify panel, from left to right, are the Vertex, Edge, Border, Polygon, and Element buttons.

Figure 3-6: The Vertex button

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Select the Vertex button, or hit the number 1 at the top of your keyboard. The Vertex button should now be highlighted in yellow. After doing this, you’ll notice that your cube has small dots on its corners.

Figure 3-7: The vertices that make up our cube

These are the actual vertices. In your Perspective viewport, select one of the vertices and move it around a bit. You can only move a vertex; you cannot rotate or scale it because it does not have a defined size or shape. It is simply a position. Next, go back to the Modify panel and select the Edge button, or hit 2 at the top of your keyboard. This puts you in Edge mode.

Figure 3-8: The Edge button

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You’ll notice that your dots have disappeared. That is because we want to select our cube’s edges now. Click on at least one edge in the Perspective viewport and move it around a bit. Now try to rotate it and scale it a bit.

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If you want to see the edges of any object in your viewport, press the F4 key. Or you can right-click on the viewport name and it will give you the option of turning on edges. This will show a wireframe over your object, which can be very, very helpful.

Return to the Modify panel and select the Border button, or press the number 3 on your keyboard.

Figure 3-9: The Border button

Border is simply a very fast way to select an “open” set of edges. An open edge is one that doesn’t connect with another polygon. Let’s start by deleting an edge, so pick any edge and hit the Delete button on your keyboard. This will delete two polygons and create a bunch of open edges. After selecting the Border tool, select the hole we created by deleting the edge. Now you can move, rotate, and scale that hole to the desired size. You can use this tool to find any holes in your model that you may not have been able to find easily and may have been created accidentally. Either undo your changes to the cube or create another for the next step. Let’s jump to polygons next. Select the Polygon button, or press 4 on your keyboard.

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Figure 3-10: The Polygon button

A polygon is just two or more triangles put together to make a square.

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Depending on which industry you are in, “polys” or “polygons” are relative. In the game industry while doing your low-poly assets, polycount usually refers to how many triangles make up the model. This is because the real-time rendering of that object is on a per-triangle basis. The more polygons, the more time it takes to draw the object! Although a little off, it’s not wrong to call a triangle a polygon, but not all polygons are triangles.

Select the Polygon button in your Modify panel and then select one of the sides of your cube. The polygon should be highlighted in red. After selecting a polygon, practice moving it around. Also try rotating it and scaling it. After you are done moving your fun new polygon around, press the Delete key (assuming you still have the polygon selected; if you don’t, then select the polygon and press Delete). Your polygon should disappear, leaving you with a hollow-looking object. 3D objects are not solid objects; they are simply shells and are always hollow inside. Lastly, I want to show you the Element button. Logically, the quick key for this one is 5.

Figure 3-11: The Element button

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The Element button is a quick way to select any contained object, meaning if you have a full sphere and a full cube in one Edit Poly object you can use this button to quickly pick the whole sphere or cube sub-object within that object. If you select the Element button and then select any part of the box in your viewport, the entire box highlights. This is a very fast way to select entire groups of polygons. When dealing with a small number of polygons or simple objects, it may be hard to see the benefit of such a tool. I assure you, however, as your object models become more complicated and busy, the Element tool becomes a lifesaver and saves you tons of time. Some packages still don’t offer it as a selection option. The last hotkey that isn’t provided as a button is the 6 key. It allows you to break out of your sub-object mode and go back to object mode. This allows you to quickly select a different object without having to click a bunch of buttons on the screen. This is where it is important for you to just go nuts on your own and start “breaking stuff.” Go crazy a bit and start playing with the different options in the Modify panel. Also explore those same options via your right-click menus. The right-click menus have the common functions associated with each sub-object built in for you. For example, if you select an edge and then you right-click, the bottom-left quad will give you a list of modification options available for edges. Selecting a vertex and right-clicking will give you vertex options, and so on. I urge you to get used to the right-click. If eventually you find some needed actions are missing, you can add them to your right-click menus. Create some new objects like a teapot or sphere and convert them to Editable Poly objects. Then use the sub-object tools to pull the sub-objects around and shape them as you like. You really can’t do anything wrong — just play around and have some fun.

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Tip: Use the sub-object hotkeys! This workflow tip is huge! Use 1 through 6 on your keyboard to select the different sub-object types. Note that these keys are right above the Q, W, E, and R keys, which are your Select, Move, Rotate, and Scale keys. Using these keys will improve your workflow dramatically!

Selection Tricks for Edit Poly Objects I am going to show you some selection tricks associated with Edit Poly objects now. One of the best parts about using Edit Poly is the speed with which you can select multiple subobjects. For example, create a sphere with a large number of segments (around 50). Collapse it to an Editable Poly object. Next, go to your Modify panel and select the Polygon button. Now go to your Perspective viewport, select a single polygon, and return to the Modify panel. You should notice under your sub-objects you have two buttons: Shrink and Grow.

Figure 3-12: The Shrink and Grow buttons

These will shrink or grow your selection. Press the Grow button several times in a row. You’ll notice that the number of selected polygons in your viewport increases with each click. Now press the Shrink button several times; the number of selected polygons decreases. Using the Grow and Shrink buttons is a very fast way to select desired areas of an object without having to manually go through and select specific sub-objects. For example, if I want to select a character’s left arm, I would simply drag-select his left hand up to the wrist. Then I’d use the Grow button until the selection grew all the

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way up to his shoulder. This is much faster than manually selecting it. (The Grow and Shrink buttons also work when you are in Vertex mode or Edge mode; they are not just limited to polygons.) Next, I want to show you how to quickly select edge rings and edge loops. Make sure you are in Edge mode and select a single vertical edge on the sphere. Now directly under the Grow and Shrink buttons you’ll see two more buttons: Ring and Loop. Select the Ring button. Max will automatically select a ring of edges that goes around the entire sphere. Basically the ring selection will keep going until it selects back into itself (like in our sphere example) or until it hits a triangle.

Figure 3-13: Loop and Ring examples

Note the importance of triangles here. Typically speaking, triangles formed by your edges should be avoided. Keeping a smooth flow of polygons is the cleanest way to model and will in the end help you work faster and yield a better-looking model. However, if you need a triangle to pull off the shape you are after, go for it. Think outside the box, or square as the case may be. Deselect all edges now by clicking outside the sphere. Select any single edge again, and this time press the Loop button instead of the Ring button. Loop will select a line of contiguous edges until it wraps back into itself or it hits a triangle.

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Tip: Converting your selections from one type to another Even some professionals don’t know this trick for some reason. While selecting a polygon, sometimes you may want to select the vertices that make up that polygon. All you have to do is select the polygon, then Ctrl-click on the sub-object type you want. Max automatically selects the sub-objects that make up what you have selected. Pretty nifty, huh? This is a huge time-saver! This works with any type of sub-object to any other type of sub-object. Try it out!

Another cool feature is the ring and loop selection grow. You can now grow and shrink your ring and loop selections just like you can grow and shrink a polygon selection. You do this with the up and down arrows next to the Ring and Loop buttons. Another very useful type of selection is Soft Selection, which can be used with any type of sub-object. Soft Selection is simply the ability to have your movements affect the surrounding areas. Choose Polygon mode and select a single polygon on our trusty sphere that we are still abusing. Return to the Modify panel and locate the Soft Selection rollout. (You may need to open the rollout if it’s closed.) For right now we are keeping it super simple and really quick. Click the Use Soft Selection check box at the top of the Soft Selection options. This will activate the Soft Selection mode. You’ll notice that the sphere will show a gradient of colors around your selected polygon. Red represents a fully affected area, and it Figure 3-14: The fades to green and finally blue after that. The closer to red it is, the more that area Soft Selection rollout for the Editable Poly will be affected. Before we actually move object anything, play around with the Falloff

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option a bit. Falloff is located under the Use Soft Selection check box. If you scrub the Falloff up and down with your mouse, you’ll notice the affected area update in real time in your Perspective viewport (cool, huh?). Just to make things a bit easier on the eyes, let’s press the Shaded Face Toggle button. These colors make it easier for you to tell how your movements are going to affect the surrounding sub-objects. Go back to your Falloff setting and scrub it up and down again. You’ll notice the shaded highlight updates in real time also. Finally, go into your Perspective viewport and move your selected polygon. You should be moving that selected polygon along with the surrounding area that you designated. This helpful tool is a very quick way to morph your model around to make large-level adjustments to many surrounding edges and vertices. You’ll learn to love this tool! It makes doing large-scale adjustments possible without wanting to pull your hair out.

Edit Polygons Modeling Tools So now you know how to select and move sub-objects around and edit them a little bit. Now we can really get into the good stuff! This is where the real magic happens. Note that not every tool is available for every sub-object type. Let’s start off by resetting Max and starting fresh. Go to File > Reset and save your file if you like. This will reset Max back to how it looked when you opened it. Create a sphere anywhere in your Perspective viewport. Make this object an Editable Poly like we talked about before. Turn on edged faces by right-clicking on your viewport name and checking Edged Faces. Finally, scroll down in your Editable Poly modifier and find the Edit Polygons rollout. This is where all of the tools we will be talking about reside.

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Extrude and Bevel Let’s start with Extrude and Bevel. First, click the Extrude button on the command panel under Edit Polygons. Similar to the Move tool button, the Extrude button itself won’t extrude your mesh. It’s just putting you in Extrude mode. In Extrude mode you still have the ability to select faces, so go ahead and pick a few faces. Now, click anywhere on the faces you’ve picked and drag. Easy, huh?

Figure 3-15: A bunch of random faces extruded

Now let’s select a polygon and click the Grow button we talked about earlier. You may have noticed the small button that looks like a tiny window. Go ahead and click on that small button to bring up the Extrude dialog.

Figure 3-16: The Extrude dialog box button

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This dialog gives you a few more advanced options. Under Extrusion Height, enter a value of 10. Under Extrusion Type, click between the three options there. By default, the Group setting averages where all the polygons are facing and pulls them in this direction. The Local Normal setting takes into account where each polygon is facing and expands them all as it extrudes them. Finally, the By Polygon setting extrudes each face separately. Some of them may seem useless now, but you’ll eventually use each one. Another cool little feature is that while you are in the dialog box for the Extrude tool, you can change what faces you have selected to extrude. This means that you get to preview what your extrude results are going to be before you commit to them. Extrude works with any of the sub-object types except elements. Try them all out!

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The Extrude tool remembers your last extrusion height and will repeat that same height until you change it.

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Tip: Dialog box buttons Whenever you see a button in 3ds Max that has a small dialog box button next to it like we just talked about, click on it! It may have settings that you haven’t seen before.

Next is the Bevel tool. Bevel works a lot like the Extrude tool except it grows or shrinks the top of your extrusion. Go ahead and click on the Bevel tool. Now, pick any face(s) and click and drag. While you drag, it’s exactly like Extrude. Now, release and drag up and down again. As you drag, your selection will grow and shrink, effectively setting your bevel. Click again and voilà!

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Figure 3-17: A bunch of beveled selections

Try it again on a few more faces. Don’t forget you don’t always have to extrude or bevel up; you can extrude and bevel inward also. This can be very useful for creating pockets in a model.

Hinge From Edge Hinge From Edge is a very unique tool. In theory, it’s like rotating a face around an edge that you pick. The Hinge From Edge tool will not allow you to select faces while it’s in use because you’re going to be selecting an edge to rotate around. Select a single face on your sphere. Then select the Hinge From Edge tool. Your cursor will then change into a “pick” mode cursor. Put your cursor over any edge of the selected face(s). Your cursor will change to let you know you are in an active area. Click and drag upward. You’ll notice that you are rotating the face around the edge that you had clicked on.

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Figure 3-18: A Hinge From Edge modification

The Hinge From Edge tool also has a dialog button. This allows you to pick your edge, set your angle numerically, and add segments to your newly created faces.

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Something to watch out for when using Hinge From Edge on multiple faces is to be sure that it only hinges from one edge that you pick. If you have many faces that share a similar edge, you’ll have some vertices to get rid of; we’ll talk about how in a little bit.

Inset Ah, another very useful tool. If you need to, create another sphere or just modify the one you have. The Inset tool may only be used in the Polygon sub-object mode, so be sure to have that one selected. Click the Inset button and select some faces. Click and drag as we’ve done before. As you can see, Inset literally takes the faces and insets them, framing them with new polygons connected to the old adjacent faces.

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Figure 3-19: A group of inset faces

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Watch out though; 3ds Max doesn’t limit you to shrinking the face down to 0. In fact, it allows you to go into an almost negative effect, flipping your face around. This can create a mess for you to clean up, so be careful using this tool. Inset also has a dialog box button. The dialog allows you to choose if you want to inset based on faces or the whole selection and change your inset based on a numeric value. Now, leave at least one of your insets so we can use it in the next section. Tip: Adding detail to mechanical and architectural models One of the more interesting things about Inset is that it can be used around corners. This make Inset a great way to add details to mechanical and architectural models.

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Collapse and Remove Collapsing faces or edges can be quite useful, especially when used in combination with the Remove tool. First, Collapse does just what it says. It collapses an edge into a single vertex or two edges into two vertices (both located in the midpoint of the two collapsed edges). It also collapses faces into a single polygon. Create a sphere and convert it to an Editable Poly object. Select any edge ring and hit Collapse. It now becomes a single line of edges.

Figure 3-20: Left, a ring selection; right, that ring selection collapsed

This usage is great for optimizing a model if you need to remove a bunch of polygons along a curved surface while still maintaining pretty much the same curve. With the same edges selected, click Remove or hit Backspace. This removes that new edge we created. However, there are still vertices left over. Go to Vertex mode and select these floating vertices. After all of them are selected, click Remove or hit Backspace. This gets rid of the vertices and cleans up the area where we removed the edges.

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You can use the Remove tool in Vertex and Edge modes. If you remove an edge, the vertices will remain! You have to manually switch to Vertex sub-object mode and remove the remaining vertices.

Chamfer The Chamfer tool is great for rounding out a harsh edge or creating two edge loops where you only have one. I find this tool great to make a pinch in a high-polygon sub-d model even though that’s not its original purpose. Start off by creating a box and making it an Editable Poly object. Pick any edge and use the Chamfer tool on it. See how it kind of rounds off and flattens at the end? Max auto-selects the two new edges for you so if you chamfer these again you get an even more round edge.

Figure 3-21: A nicely chamfered edge on a cube

You can use the dialog box button here to control your chamfer numerically. There is also a check box to keep from creating a new face and keep your new edges open.

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Connect Mmm… the Connect tool. Let me start off by saying it’s one of the top five tools I use the most! This time let’s make a box and turn it into an Editable Poly again. The Connect tool may be used in both Vertex mode and Edge mode. For now let’s work with Edge mode. Select all the vertical edges and hit Connect. This essentially creates a loop perfectly around the middle of your box!

Figure 3-22: Left, vertical edges selected; right, loop created by Connect

Connect in Edge mode always finds the exact middle of an edge and runs an edge perpendicular to the edges selected. However, you can pretty much pick any edges that share a polygon and use the Connect tool on them. In Vertex mode the Connect button simply connects the two vertices with an edge as long as they share the same polygon. You can’t connect vertices that are separated by an edge. In the later modeling chapters we’ll talk about why the Connect tool is so amazing, but for now put a mental sticky note there. Have fun trying out the Connect tool on other objects, such as a sphere.

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Cut and Slice Plane The Cut tool — some people swear by it, other people hate it. I’m somewhere in between the two to be honest, and it’s mostly due to its inability to work correctly in the Perspective view sometimes. I’ll explain in a bit, but for now let’s start off by creating a sphere and making it an Editable Polygon object. In the Edge sub-object mode, scroll down on the command panel until you see the Cut tool. It will be in the Edit Geometry rollout. Go ahead and click on it, then click somewhere on your sphere. This will place a vertex where you want to start your cut, almost like you’re pushing a knife into the sphere. Now click somewhere else on your sphere, even quite a few polygons away. The Cut tool will connect these two points with a straight line as if you are slicing a knife across the surface of the model between the two points.

Figure 3-23: A cut on the surface of a sphere

On an object like a sphere, the Cut tool should work flawlessly so this will be a good example of how the Cut tool should work. At times when you’re working with the Cut tool, you’ll

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find some inconsistencies when it won’t want to place your vertex where your mouse is. It’ll drive you mad, but push forward! You can always come back and move your vertex where you want it to be. The Cut tool will get you halfway there in those cases, so it’s not useless — just frustrating at times. In any other view mode, such as the Front or Right views, including user camera mode, the Cut tool places a vertex wherever you click flawlessly and connects that vertex to any consecutive click. Similar to the Cut tool and located right next to it, we have Slice Plane. Make sure you are in Vertex or Edge sub-object mode. When you click the Slice Plane button, you get a plane gizmo that you can rotate, move, and scale just like any other gizmo. The plane literally slices your model on the surface wherever the plane would be going through your model. When you are happy with your placement, click Slice to perform the action. You can now move your plane and perform more slices if you like.

Figure 3-24: The slice plane gizmo

Quick Slice is also another nice little feature of the Slice Plane tool. Once the Quick Slice button is clicked, you click twice in

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your viewport to create your slice plane, once to define the start point and once to define the end point. Your slice is performed after the second click.

Weld and Target Weld There will come a time when you need to get rid of vertices and merge them with other vertices. This is called welding in Max. Whether you are attaching two element’s open edges or you are trying to remove some extra vertices, the weld tools are how you will get the job done. As we did in the Connect tool example, create a box and select a vertical edge. Click the Ring button to select all of your vertical edges and hit the Connect button. Using the Target Weld tool, we can remove this loop we’ve just created. Go to the Vertex sub-object mode by hitting the 1 key.

Figure 3-25: A horizontal edge loop

Click on the Target Weld tool and select one of the vertices we’ve just created by connecting the vertical edges. You can see a line drawn from the vertex you selected to the place

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where you want your vertex welded. Click on the vertex above this one that makes up the top of the box.

Figure 3-26: One of the vertices welded to the top vertex

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As you can see, Max has “welded” the vertex you picked first into the one you picked second. This is called target weld because you get to pick the target where you want your single vertex. Repeat the process for the three other vertices and you’ve successfully removed the loop! Tip: Quickly removing a loop This is only one way of removing a loop you’ve created. A little-known feature of Max is its ability to quickly remove edge loops. Select any edge, click the Loop button, and press Ctrl+Backspace. As you now know, Backspace is the button assigned to remove by default. Holding Ctrl and pressing Backspace will not only remove the edge but also remove the vertices that make these edges. This is extremely helpful!

The Target Weld method is great for doing precise welding, but what if you’re working with too many vertices to do it all by hand? This is where Weld comes in. Create a sphere and

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make it an Editable Poly object. Select one of the horizontal edges and click Loop. Hit the Delete key on your keyboard to remove the adjacent polygons.

Figure 3-27: A sphere with deleted polygons

Now select the top piece with the Element sub-object button and move that down so it’s nearly sitting on top of your other piece.

Figure 3-28: Edges are close together but still contain open edges.

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Hit 3 on your keyboard to select Border sub-object mode. Click and drag to select the two open borders and Ctrl-click the Vertex sub-object button to select the vertices that make up this border. Now click the Weld tool’s dialog box button. Scrub up and down on the Weld Threshold box; eventually you will see all the vertices “pop” and weld to selected vertices within your threshold.

Figure 3-29: The vertices are now welded together.

Watch out — you can set your threshold way too high and pretty much garble any of your selected vertices. Click OK and you are done! If you need to use the Weld tool again, clicking the Weld button instead of the dialog box button will weld using your previously set threshold.

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Split Split is a very simple tool and can be great for breaking up one element into two. Create a sphere, select a horizontal edge as we’ve done before, and hit the Loop button. Now, press the Split button. At first it doesn’t look like it’s done much, but click on the top of your sphere with the Element sub-object button and move this piece up. As you can see, the Split tool has done just that — your element is split on the edges you selected.

Figure 3-30: The split sphere with one of the halves moved upward for clarity

In Vertex mode, Split is called “Break.” Notice when you try out break on a vertex on your sphere that it doesn’t look like it’s done much, just like the Split tool when you break a vertex. All of the new vertices are stacked on top of one another, so just click on what seems to be that one vertex and move it up. As you can see, only one polygon’s edge came up and there is a hole in the model now. Keep clicking where the original vertex was. You should have four vertices total now, one for each polygon touching this vertex.

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Bridge Bridge is a very unique tool. I find it extremely useful for the type of modeling I’ll be showing. There are a couple of ways you can use the Bridge tool. Let’s try an example. Create a sphere and select and delete some of the horizontal edges, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 3-31: A sphere with deleted inner faces

With the Border sub-object button selected, click and dragselect over the whole object. This will select both of the open edges on the two remaining pieces of your sphere. Now, click Bridge. You should have something similar to Figure 3-32.

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Figure 3-32: The bridged gap

The results are somewhat of a pill shape. Congratulations — you’ve just bridged between two separate elements. You can do this in Edge mode too for a group of edges or just between two edges. You’ll find many uses for the Bridge tool. As always, don’t be afraid to toy around with the tools!

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You may not bridge any edge sharing a single vertex.

Create Create is a very simple tool. Just like it sounds, it creates vertices, edges, or polygons based on which sub-object mode you are in at the time. Create in Edge mode is basically the Connect tool; it simply creates an edge between two vertices. Typically I just use Connect because I’ve already got it assigned to a hotkey.

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Create in Polygon mode is very similar to Bridge, only a little more flexible. That flexibility comes at the cost of it being a little more involved to use. Create a box and delete one of the polygon sides. While still in Polygon sub-object mode, click Create.

Figure 3-33: A cube with a deleted side

Now click on a vertex that is on the open border. Like the Bridge tool, your cursor has a line connected to it showing that you have started creating a polygon. Continue around the open edge either clockwise or counterclockwise. Once you get to the last vertex, click two times on it to finish and create the polygon. Poof! We have a brand-new custom polygon based on the vertices you wanted to include!

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The minimum number of vertices you can use to create a polygon is three, since this creates a three-sided triangle polygon. There is theoretically no maximum number of vertices you could use to create a single polygon.

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Turn and Edit Tri(angulation) I keep telling you that everything is made up of triangles, and now you get to see how this comes into play. Create a sphere and make it into an Editable Poly object once again. Click the Edge sub-object button and then click the Edit Tri button. There you are! Now you can see every edge that actually exists. The edges that are shown by default are the edges that really matter, but sometimes triangulation comes into play, especially when you are doing a low-polygon model. The dotted lines are hidden edges that make up all of your triangles, and the true edges are solid.

Figure 3-34: Triangulation

For high-polygon modeling you won’t really need to worry about triangulation, but here are some examples in case you are interested in low-polygon modeling. If you’re only interested in high-polygon modeling, you can skip this section if you like.

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The triangulation of the surface in Figure 3-35 shows you what looks like a sharp cut in when you actually want it to be an outward mass.

Figure 3-35: An incorrectly triangulated surface

This is quite easy to fix; just click the Turn button and click on the hidden triangle edge that you want to stick outward instead of inward. This will make the triangle turn, connecting with two different vertices and more accurately representing what you had intended, as shown in Figure 3-36. A simple fix like this is more quickly done with Turn but can also be accomplished by using Edit Tri.

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Figure 3-36: The correctly triangulated face

Next up we have a surface that won’t vertex light correctly because the triangulation is completely out of whack. We can easily fix this by clicking the Edit Tri button. Click on one vertex and then another vertex that you would like to connect with your hidden edges. The software auto-adjusts the other edges based on your change. Typically if you’re looking at a surface’s triangulation, you don’t want any super-long connections. If there is a vertex closer than the one it’s connected to, then change its triangulation.

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Figure 3-37: Left, incorrectly triangulated face; right, correctly triangulated face

The right side of Figure 3-37 shows the correct triangulation for this surface, and as you can see it is lighting much better. Keep in mind that triangulation makes a huge difference when you are generating normal maps.

. Note:

When you use the Remove tool or hit Backspace on your keyboard, you are actually just hiding an edge. It’s still there, part of the model’s triangulation.

Make Planar Make Planar is an amazing tool! Let’s start off by creating a sphere and making it into an Editable Poly object. Select a group of polygons on the surface of the sphere and hit Make Planar. Simple, isn’t it? This will get the average facing of all of the polygons and flatten them out based on that facing. I can’t explain how amazingly useful this is when you’re doing mechanical objects and trying to integrate them into an organic flow!

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Figure 3-38: A sphere with a flattened planar surface

Attaching Objects Typically while modeling you use many different objects to create the shapes you are looking for. Eventually you’ll run into a situation where you need to attach objects together. This makes 3ds Max consider them to be one object. What does this mean? Quite simply put, it takes all of the sub-objects and moves them into the object you are attaching to. There are a couple of ways you can attach objects, so let’s walk through this together. Reset your scene and save what you had if you like. Now, create a sphere, a cylinder, and a box somewhere in your Perspective viewport. Select your sphere and make it an Editable Poly object. On the right side panel, right under the Create button, you should see the Attach button. It also has a dialog box button next to it. Click the dialog button to bring up the Attach dialog.

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This is the first way of attaching objects to one another. With your sphere selected, by using the dialog we can attach objects by name to your sphere. This is especially helpful if you need to either attach many objects to one or just pick one out of a whole mess of objects. Pick your box (Box01 if you didn’t rename it) from the list and click the Attach button on the dialog. Now your sphere object contains the box geometry!

Figure 3-39: A sphere and a cube in the same object

The other way is even simpler. This time, click the Attach button and mouse over the cylinder. The cursor should change into a plus shape, signifying that this object can be attached to the object you want to attach it to. Go ahead and click on the cylinder. If you had many objects, you could stay in Attach mode and keep clicking on more objects. Now all of our geometry that we created as separate objects is contained within one object! If you go into any sub-object mode, you can see that all of the vertices, edges, and polygons can now be edited within that single object. That’s all there is to attaching objects together.

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A Reminder I know I’ve written this time and time again but it is really important: As you learn how to use 3ds Max, it is best to customize the UI to your liking. The more you set what you like in the UI, the more you’ll remember where things are, limiting the time spent searching and getting irritated about not being able to find something. If I write something that you think will be helpful, go ahead and make it a hotkey or put it in your quad menu. Your learning experience will be greatly improved and you’re probably not going to get lost in 3ds Max’s sometimes-intimidating UI. By default 3ds Max has many of the features talked about in this chapter in the quad menus. Don’t be afraid to explore Max more and even reread some of the sections above to customize your quad menu and hotkeys! Now let’s explore the Material Editor.

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Chapter 4

Creating Materials and Using Texture Maps So now you know the basics of modeling. Let’s talk about materials and textures now. Materials and textures make up the surface of our model and play a major role in what you actually see when you’re looking at a model. Think glossy chrome vs. dried and cracked paint. These two surfaces have vast differences in terms of color, glossiness, and even texture. We can’t stop there though. We also have to define where the model should be shiny and where it should be dull, where rust should and should not be. This is achieved through the use of texture maps.

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The Material Editor To access the Material Editor, click on the Material Editor button in the main toolbar.

Figure 4-1: The Material Editor button

Pressing this button will open the Material Editor. You may also use the M hotkey. The Material Editor is broken up into a few major sections. At the top of the Material Editor you will notice several spheres. These are empty shaders that you will eventually use to preview your custom shader or material before you apply it to the objects in your scene. Below that part of the Material Editor are parameter rollouts that you can use to create your own custom material.

Figure 4-2: The Material Editor

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Tip: Enlarge your material view If you double-click on the material you want a better view of, Max will open a new little preview window. This new window is adjustable. Just grab either bottom corner and drag it up or down in size. The larger you drag this window, however, the longer it will take to refresh your material updates. Likewise, you can right-click a shader and adjust your viewing size.

. Note:

Throughout your experience with modeling you may hear people refer to materials as shaders. Even 3ds Max does this. A material in 3ds Max uses a shader to make up part of its effect. A shader is a collection of instructions to tell the hardware how you want to render an object.

Material Terminology To fully understand materials, you need to have some basic knowledge of the terminology. Here’s a list of important terms: 2-Sided — Makes the object render both the front and back of a polygon. Bump — Using a grayscale height map, bump makes the surface appear to have nicks, scratches, or dents. Diffuse — The base color of the object. Think of diffuse texture as the base, or what it would look like if it were fully lit from all angles. Displacement — Using a grayscale height map, displacement actually adds geometry to deform the surface of your model. Faceted — Makes the material ignore its smoothing and draw every polygon as flat.

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Glossiness — Controls the size of the sheen given off by Specularity. You may have seen this called “Specular hot spot” or “Specular Power” in other applications. Opacity — Controls how opaque a surface is and how much light may pass through that object. Self-Illumination — Tells the material to ignore lighting based on the percentage you’ve set. If set to 100%, it will completely ignore the lighting you have set and only show the diffuse color/texture. Shader — A collection of instructions to tell the hardware how you want to render an object. Specular Color — The color of the sheen given off by the Specular Level. This is usually something that new modelers forget about. Adding a little color to your Specularity can be a huge visual improvement. Specular Level — A brightness control for Specularity. Specularity — The sheen a surface gives off when the light hits it. This includes all properties of specularity including Specular Level and Glossiness. Texture Map — A bitmap image that controls a particular channel whether this channel is diffuse, specular, or opacity. Wire — Makes the material render as a wireframe similar to the one you see in your viewports.

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Applying a Material to an Object

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Before we explore how to modify materials, we need to be able to view a material on an object in our scene. There are a few ways you can apply a material to your object. First, make a sphere somewhere in your viewport. 3ds Max applies a random color to the object on creation. Now, make sure the Material Editor is open and put your mouse over the top-left material. Click on the material and then drag it onto the sphere in your scene. You should see your sphere turn gray, resembling the material seen in the Material Editor. If you’d rather not click and drag, you can always apply materials to objects another way. Start off by clicking on your object. Then click on any of the materials in your Material Editor. Finally, press the Apply to Selected Object button. It’s that easy! Tip: What material is applied to this again? You can easily tell what material is applied to an object by clicking on the object in question and opening the Material Editor. The material that is applied is the one with the white brackets over the corners as seen in the figure below. Also, if a material is in use but the object using the material isn’t selected, the material will have grayed out corners.

Figure 4-3: A sphere with a high specular material. On the right, brackets over the corners indicate the applied material.

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. Note:

When modifying materials, any and all objects with that material applied will be changed and updated whenever you make a change to your materials.

Changing Colors So let’s pick up where we left off by applying materials to our sphere and changing it to another color. In the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout in the Material Editor, you will see the Diffuse color box. It will be gray just like our sphere. Click on this color box to open a color picker dialog. If you know the 0 to 255 color range values, you can manually type them in here, or you can easily pick from the color swatch to the left by clicking and dragging if you like. For now, let’s just pick a nice bright red color. Click OK and we are done! The sphere is now red. You may also notice that when you change the diffuse color, the ambient color changes with it. Ambient color is simply the background or surrounding color. By default, 3ds Max locks these two colors so they are the same. If, for some reason, you ever want an ambient color different from your diffuse color, just press the Lock button to unlock these two colors. You are then free to adjust the ambient and diffuse colors independently of each other.

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Adjusting Specular Levels and Glossiness As in real life, different types of surfaces have different levels of specularity and glossiness. For example, cloth would have a very low specular level and low glossiness due to its ability to absorb light. On the other hand, a bright shiny plastic ball would have a very high specular level and high glossiness to mimic its ability to bounce light off of its surface. Different materials have different levels of shininess. If you are making a cloth texture, for example, you want a very low level of shininess because cloth absorbs light. If you were making a polished marble texture, then of course you would want it to be very glossy. To make simple adjustments to your material’s specular highlights and glossiness, open the Material Editor. In the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout, you have a few basic options. Let’s focus on the Specular Highlights area. Note that many options in the Material Editor work via a spinner — the arrows to the right of a box. You can type the desired number in the box or you can adjust the spinner up or down by clicking. Now let’s give our red sphere a glossy toy ball type of surface. First, click on the arrows next to the Specular box. As you click, you can see the curve on the right changing in real time to reflect what kind of specular curve you are giving your material. Keep clicking (or click and hold) until you see the top of the curve just pass the top of the scale. By default, our glossiness is very low and visually too broad for a plastic ball, giving it a flat finished look. Now, click on the arrows next to Glossiness to increase the value. On the right, you can see how you’re modifying the specular curve. This time it’s getting sharper and narrower as we increase the glossiness. Set it to a value of around 20. To add a higher specular level to your material, increase the Specular setting. There is also a Soften setting in the Specular Highlights area where you can soften up that specular highlight we just gave our sphere.

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Self-Illumination and Opacity Sometimes you may need an object to not be lit but rather glow in the dark. Using the Self-Illumination setting you can set how dark you would like the object to be at its darkest.

Figure 4-4: Left, no Self-Illumination; right, full Self-Illumination

Opacity is how opaque, or transparent, the object is (depending on whether you’re a glass is half full or half empty kind of guy or gal). You can adjust an object’s opacity by using the Opacity setting. Click on the spinner arrows to make the object become more or less transparent.

Figure 4-5: Left, fully opaque; right, half opaque

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. Note:

Because there is no background in your Material Editor, it may look like nothing has happened. To add a default Max background, select the small checkerboard image at the upper-right side of your Material Editor. This will add a checkered background to your selected material.

Adjusting the Shader Type Most 3D applications have default shader types. Certain shader types work better for certain results. Some allow for multiple highlights, and others absorb light better for skin textures. Basically, they are preset material types that give you a good starting point when creating your own materials. I don’t want to get into a lot of detail regarding shader types right now, but rather show you where they lie in the editor and let you explore a bit on your own. In the beginning it’s not very critical to use anything other than the default shader type (called Blinn). As your skills progress within the Material Editor, you will inevitably explore these on your own. The different shader types are located in the Shader Basic Parameters rollout.

Figure 4-6: The Shader Basic Parameters rollout

If you open the shader types list, you’ll find a number of different shader options. Some of these are fairly obvious (Metal and Translucent Shader), while others are a bit more obscure sounding. Play around with each shader type on your own. In most cases, the basic parameters won’t even change; the only

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thing that actually changes is the way your new shader reacts to outside influences such as light. There are some great plug-ins for 3ds Max that even give you a node-based system similar to other modeling packages. A node-based system is great for visualizing how your shader is made up and will function.

Using the Maps Rollout to Add Realism Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, we can get to the nitty-gritty stuff. First of all, let’s open the Maps rollout so I can explain what you are looking at. This will open up a long list of empty slots along with their corresponding names and spinners, as shown at the left of Figure 4-7. The names to the left let you know what channel you are working in. The spinners and empty map slots to the right are what you will use to modify that channel. Map channels often rely on images. You can use a color image or a black and white image. For your Diffuse Color channel, you would obviously want to use a color texture, but for most others, you would want to use a black and white image. 3D packages use black and white images to assign properties; white is positive and black is negative. A very basic example of this would be if I created a black and white checkerboard pattern and placed it into the Bump channel of my Maps rollout. The bump I would get as a result of this would be everything that is white would be “raised” and everything that was black would be “lowered.” This rule applies to almost all channels. Just remember: White is positive and black is negative. Once you start to understand the map channels and how they affect each other, you can very quickly come up with realistic-looking textures.

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Creating Bump Effects and Navigating Your Materials Let’s create a very basic material that has a nice bump map in the Bump channel. Create a shiny red material using the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout. Then let’s add our bump map. Select the empty Bump channel by clicking the None button next to it. A long list of different map effects you can apply to your material will appear. For now, we will look at the Smoke map.

Figure 4-7: Left, “None” button; right, list of map types

You’ll notice that the bump map makes your material appear as if it has a very rough surface. Pretty neat, huh? You’ll also notice that anytime you enter a map into an empty slot, it takes you into a totally new section of the Material Editor. All channels have their own individual editors. They are very easy to navigate and can really help you get those final little tweaks you want. Skip over the Coordinates options for now and look at the smoke options. Here we can control size, phase, iteration (or quality), and exponent (or range), and set the two colors between which the smoke is generated. You can even add more layers of effects by replacing one of your colors with another map by clicking on one of the None slots just as we did to get to these options in the Smoke map. Play around with these settings all you like!

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With the Material Editor you can layer effect upon effect to your heart’s content! Just remember the drop-down box in the middle of the dialog just under the material preview spheres.

Figure 4-8: Navigation drop-down box

This drop-down box shows how many steps you are away from your base material. The button next to the drop-down box represents the map you are currently looking at. If you’d like to change the map or just remove the map altogether, you can click on this button. For now, go back to your base material. This will be the selection at the very top of the drop-down. Note that the spinner next to the Bump channel is set to 30. This is where you adjust your intensity settings. Raise the value to 60. Next, try 120. You’ll see the bump starting to get a little out of control at that level. This is a great example of how to use your map channels and spinners at their most basic levels.

Figure 4-9: A bump map set to various values

If you ever want to go back into the Bump channel and make adjustments or use a new map, click on the Bump slot again.

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This will take you back to the options portion of the Bump channel. Before moving on, let’s briefly talk about copying channels. You can very quickly and easily copy channels just by clicking on any channel button and dragging it to another. Try it out by copying your Bump channel to your Diffuse channel. Just click and drag the Smoke map over the None button next to Diffuse. You will see a dialog box similar to the one that appears when you copy objects in your scene. This behaves exactly the same way it does in your scenes, so pick Copy. You’ll see your sphere’s color change to what the Bump map channel is being affected by. To remove this, simply click on the None channel button below and drag it back into your Diffuse channel button. This will effectively remove the smoke layer from your Diffuse channel. You can also right-click on the button and select Clear.

Loading Texture Maps into Specific Channels To load a texture into a desired map channel, just click on the appropriate empty slot. In this example, let’s load an image into the Diffuse Color slot. This will bring up that same scary-looking window of presets. Selecting Bitmap will open a normal Windows browser. Find any image, or use Ch04_SampleImage.jpg, which is supplied in the book’s companion files (www.wordware.com/ files/3dsmax2008). Now that you have an image loaded, scroll down to the Bitmap Parameters rollout. These settings can be pretty handy.

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Figure 4-10: The Bitmap Parameters rollout

You can crop images very quickly using the Cropping/Placement group of settings. Check the Apply option, then select the View Image button. Within your viewer, adjust the viewable area. The Place option lets you place the image at an exact location. If this image had an alpha channel, we could tell Max to use that alpha channel by selecting the Image Alpha option in the Alpha Source area.

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These are just a few really fast ways to make quick texture adjustments without having to flip back and forth to Photoshop or a similar package to do things like tile adjustment and cropping. This is the part where I really want you to just go in and break stuff. I want you to explore the Material Editor on your own. Load things into various slots and just watch the results. You will learn more that way than just reading through this chapter.

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Chapter 5

Rendering Your Scene Understanding What Rendering Is What exactly is rendering? Well, rendering compiles all the information in your scene. It takes all your shaders, lighting, models, effects, and everything you have created and makes your final image or animation. When you watch Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, you are watching a final render. It’s got all the bells and whistles. It takes hours and hours for “farms” of machines to render out these final scenes. We’ll talk about the basics of rendering in this chapter and the next. Unfortunately, rendering is a huge topic that could have a series of books written on it, but we’re focusing on modeling in this book. After reading this chapter, explore the Scanline and Mental Ray renderers. There are a good number of interesting effects you can achieve.

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Renderers in 3ds Max Max has two renderers: the default Scanline renderer and the Mental Ray renderer. By default, you will be using Max’s Scanline renderer, which can do most effects. After all, it is the original renderer of 3ds Max. After you’ve gotten more comfortable with Max, I would recommend exploring the many options of the Mental Ray and Scanline renderers. Mental Ray is a great general-purpose renderer that can generate physically correct simulations of lighting effects, including ray-traced reflections and refractions, caustics, and global illumination very quickly — much quicker than the Scanline renderer can, in fact.

The Render Scene Dialog Box Let’s take a look at the Render Scene dialog. Press the Render Scene Dialog button in the upper-right side of your user interface.

Figure 5-1: The Render Scene Dialog button

Pressing this button brings up the following dialog box.

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Figure 5-2: The Render Scene dialog box

I know, I know, lots of scary numbers and buttons. It’s not nearly as complicated as you think at first though. At the top is the Common Parameters rollout, which houses almost all of your default rendering options. At the top of the rollout is the Time Output area. By default, Max will only render a single picture; however, if you are rendering an animation, you would need to tell Max what range to render within. For example, if you needed to render a 2,000-frame animation, you would need to activate the Range option and then enter the desired range. In that case, you would want it to look like this:

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Figure 5-3: The changed render range

Below the Range setting is the Frames setting. This is a nice feature that lets you render out specific frame numbers. If, for example, you rendered out your animation and noticed a few rendering issues on some frames, you could tell Max to render out those specific frames, even though they aren’t consecutive. Below the Time Output area is the Output Size area.

Figure 5-4: The Output Size options

The Output Size settings simply tell Max how large or small you want your image to be rendered. By default, Width is set to 640 pixels and Height is set to 480 pixels. Max has four preset output sizes already set up for you. Underneath the Output Size area is the Options area.

Figure 5-5: The Options options

This is nothing more than a series of check boxes to turn on or off the desired effect. By default, the first three options should be checked. The only one you’ll probably want to mess with is the Render to Fields check box. This tells Max to

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render its images into even and odd fields. You would want to do this if you are rendering something that will be shown on television. Next are the Advanced Lighting and Render Output areas.

Figure 5-6: The Advanced Lighting and Render Output options

By default, the Use Advanced Lighting check box is checked. If you want to speed up your render times in order to preview them, you can uncheck this box to disable all advanced lighting. The Render Output options allow you to save your animation or image automatically after it’s finished rendering. You can save out multiple file types, or tell Max to render individual frames and save them one at a time automatically. To activate the Save File check box, you must first press the Files button. Choose the designated file type and the name of your file, and press OK. After all your options are set, you simply press the Render button at the bottom right of the Render Scene dialog.

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Viewing the Safe Frame Show Safe Frame is a very handy tool. The safe frame is the actual area of your screen that your camera will render. Your Perspective viewport is, for the most part, a square. But if you are rendering out a widescreen animation or image, you would get an incorrect representation of your camera’s view. Basically what you’re seeing in your viewport isn’t always what you’re going to get in your render. This is why you turn on Show Safe Frame. To activate Show Safe Frame, right-click the viewport name to display a context menu. The Show Safe Frame command is halfway down. Click it to activate your safe frame display. The outermost yellow line on the screen now represents your actual camera view. Anything outside of that yellow line will not show up in your render. The safe frame will update instantly whenever you change your aspect ratio or rendering output size.

Figure 5-7: Perspective view with Show Safe Frame active

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Changing from the Default Renderer to the Mental Ray Renderer Once you are a little more comfortable with Max you can venture off into Mental Ray land. We’ll briefly use Mental Ray in the next chapter, so let’s cover how to switch between the Scanline and Mental Ray renderers. To do this, click on the Render Scene Dialog button and scroll down until you see the Assign Renderer rollout (located below the Scripts rollout by default). Expand the Assign Renderer section and click on the “…” button next to Production, then select Mental Ray.

Figure 5-8: Selecting the Mental Ray renderer in the Assign Renderer rollout

Done! You will now be rendering using Mental Ray. For now you can leave it on Mental Ray, as we’ll be using it in the next chapter. To switch back, just do the same steps, only select the Scanline renderer. Also note that if you ever use any third-party renderers such as Brasil or V-Ray, this is where you would choose those renderers too.

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Chapter 6

Adding Lights to Your Scene Understanding the Importance of Lights in a 3D Environment Ahhh, light. Lighting your scene is a hugely important step! You can take a room that looks cold, dark, and damp and turn it into a warmly lit room. Not only can light completely change the mood of the scene, but light also defines it by adding depth and texture. Without light, you wouldn’t even know that a sphere is round. Without shadow, a cube would look as if it were floating on the surface of another object. Light is the glue that holds your scene together. Many new artists focus so hard on creating materials or models that they fail to pay enough attention to lighting. What they don’t realize is that in order for you to properly show your 3D models, you must use lighting that showcases your work best. Often on art forums I’ve seen a new modeler post a render that was so dark you nearly couldn’t make anything out. In the end, a poorly lit good model often gets less attention overall than a well-lit okay one.

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Standard Light Types in 3ds Max By default, when you open up Max and start working, it has its own default lights set up. If it didn’t, everything would be pitch black. These default lights are not actual selectable lights; it is a built-in system that allows you to see what you’re doing. When you create a light in 3ds Max, this system automatically turns off, making the scene dark even though you’ve added a single light to it. That’s because now you only have one light source in your world.

Figure 6-1: Default lighting on a sphere

Lighting is truly an art form, and those who can light well can even hold jobs just lighting scenes. I’m going to touch on the basics specific to 3ds Max. I’ll show you the tools, but it takes much practice to learn the ins and outs of lighting. There are entire books dedicated to lighting, most of which are well worth the money spent!

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Let’s start off by going to the Create panel. Click on the Light icon to see a list of six different basic light types with two Mental Ray types under these. Let’s run down the differences between these lights.

Figure 6-2: A sample of each of the basic light types

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Target Spot: The target spot works just as a spotlight on a stage works. When creating a target spotlight, you place the light and then place its target. As the target gets farther away from the light, the light fades and gets wider based on its properties. You can also set the light’s width.

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Target Direct: A target direct light works the same as a target spot. The only difference is that a target direct light emits light from an area and does not fade outward. It shoots a focused beam of light that will not “cone” out the farther away it gets from the camera. Think of it as a cylinder-shaped shaft of light.

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Omni: The omni light casts light in all directions, much like a lightbulb hanging from a wire. The omni light is very powerful and is a great way to fill a room with light or create specific pools of light and shadow.

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Free Spot: The free spot is the same as the target spot, minus the target. In order to make a free spotlight (or any light without a target) face an object, you have to rotate it. In almost every case it is easier to just use the target spot. Being able to quickly grab a light’s target and move it to the desired location is very efficient. However, there are certain cases where you may not want a target.

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Free Direct: The free direct light performs the same as the target direct light. Its only difference is that it does not have a target. Thus, to point your light, you have to move and rotate it in order to make it face the desired location.

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Skylight: A skylight is the most unique of all the lights. The placement of the skylight doesn’t matter. The skylight sends light in all directions at all of the objects in your scene. This light is great for showing the depth of cracks in objects and showing how “hard” it is for light to get to a section of a model.

Creating a Light Creating a light is very simple. If it is a “target” light, then you must first place your cursor at the desired origin of the light and click. Then click and drag with the mouse until your cursor is where you want your target, and release. This will create your origin and your target. If it is a light type without a target, such as an omni light, click once in the desired location. Let’s start off by creating a sphere in the middle of your grid. Make it a fairly small-sized sphere. Now, create a target spotlight in one of your viewports by clicking some distance away from the sphere and dragging onto the middle of your sphere. Finally, in your Perspective viewport, grab the light and move it upward.

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Figure 6-3: A target spotlight on our sphere

You’ll notice the target, which is inside our sphere, stayed in its place but the light source moved. Now grab the target and move it around a bit. You can easily do this by guessing where your target is inside the sphere and clicking a couple times, or simply use the Select by Name dialog. You’ll see the light’s position change but where it’s pointing will always be the target.

Understanding the Light Settings Create a target spot anywhere in your viewports. Make sure the light is selected, and then open up your Modify panel to the right. You’ll notice you have a whole mess of rollouts available to you! Let’s run through the basic settings so you know what most of these things do.

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General Parameters

Figure 6-4: General Parameters rollout

By default, the General Parameters rollout should be open. It contains some check boxes and drop-down lists. You can turn your light on and off quickly via a check box. Next to the On check box is a drop-down list for the light type. This list allows you to change the kind of light you are using on the fly. This means you can create a light and position it in your scene; then if at any point you decide you need to use a different type of light, you can simply toggle it using the rollout. You don’t need to delete your light and reposition a new one and try to match your settings, etc. Just adjust the rollout to change the light type and keep your settings from the previous light. You also have a check box to turn shadows on. By default, your lights will have this box unchecked. You may wonder, why would I ever not want my shadows turned on? Well, you will notice very quickly that having shadows on can increase your render times dramatically. You may not want to turn on all your shadows until you are ready to view a final render. Under the Shadows check boxes you have another drop-down that reads Shadow Map. This drop-down list allows you to change your shadow type. By default, all lights in Max use what is called a shadow map to create their shadows. In order to not overcomplicate things, I want you to stick with the Shadow Map setting for right now.

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Intensity/Color/Attenuation

Figure 6-5: Intensity/ Color/Attenuation rollout

The Intensity/Color/Attenuation rollout lets you change light intensity, light color, and light attenuation, or “falloff.” At the top you have the Multiplier setting. The multiplier is the light’s power, or brightness. You can change the Multiplier setting to a negative number to actually remove light from an area (not many people are aware of that). You can also raise the Multiplier setting into the thousands, although after about 5.0 it basically just shoots a completely solid white light that floods anything it hits. Next to the Multiplier setting is a color swatch. This color swatch represents the light color. Double-clicking on that color swatch will bring up a color selector, from which you can choose any color you want for the light. Let’s drop down a bit now to the Near Attenuation and Far Attenuation areas. Light attenuation is the simulation of the light scattering farther apart so it appears dimmer than it would from up close. For example, if you take a flashlight and shine it onto the ground and away from you, you’ll notice that the light fades off into the distance. Max gives you Near Attenuation and Far Attenuation settings to manually adjust your light’s “fade.” By default, your Max lights have attenuation turned off. Like the Shadows setting, this is for faster render times. To use light attenuation, you need to make sure

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the Use check box is checked. The Show check box gives you a visual representation of your light’s actual attenuation. You will need to check this box in order to see how your light will be attenuated. After activating your light’s attenuation and tweaking it, the light being cast on a surface should look like Figure 6-6.

Figure 6-6: An example of light attenuation

If you want to modify the default attenuation settings, you can do so using the arrows to the right. As with most spinners in Max, you can adjust them with your mouse and watch the attenuation update in your viewport.

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Spotlight Parameters

Figure 6-7: Spotlight Parameters rollout

There are two check boxes at the top of the Spotlight Parameters rollout: Show Cone and Overshoot. Turning on Show Cone makes the light’s cone visible even when it is not selected. Turning on Overshoot makes your light shoot light outward past the area of its cone. This is useful when shooting very large outside scenes since you need your entire scene to receive light. However, you may not want your light to cast shadows on the entire scene. For this, you would set your light cone to the area you wish to receive shadow, and then turn on Overshoot. This will light everything under your light, but only cast shadows in the area that falls within your light cone. Below the check boxes are the Hotspot/Beam and Falloff/Field settings. Your light’s hotspot is the brightest part of the light. The falloff is the distance from the hotspot to the edge of the light’s cone. By default, Max lights use a cone-shaped or circular light. You can, however, change that to a square light (similar to a fluorescent ceiling light in an office). You can change your light from a circular light to a rectangular light by choosing the Rectangle option. If you want to adjust the light’s aspect ratio, simply use the Aspect spinner.

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Advanced Effects

Figure 6-8: Advanced Effects rollout

The Advanced Effects rollout is a quick way to make tweaks to your light settings. For example, after getting a light set up the way you want it, you may still find you want to adjust the light’s contrast. You may also want to adjust your shadow’s edge softness. You can do both very quickly and easily with the Advanced Effects rollout settings. You can even turn off a light’s ability to cast a specular highlight by unchecking the Specular option. This means that your light will cast an even distribution of light across an object without creating a hotspot. Another neat trick is the Projector Map option. The best way to explain a projection map is to think of the old Batman shows. Remember when they shined the Batman symbol into the sky when they needed Batman? That’s an example of a projection map. You are basically placing an image over your light in order for it to cast a specific shadow. It can be something very obvious like the Batman symbol, or it can be something more subtle like fake water caustics being cast onto a wall near an indoor pool or a shadow cast from a tree branch. Figure 6-9 shows a tree branch image used to create the shadow map shown in Figure 6-10.

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Figure 6-9: Branch image used to create shadow

Figure 6-10: Shadow from a tree branch cast on a sphere

If you want to use a projector map, you must first pick the map you want. By default, the Map slot is empty. To place an image in the Projector Map slot, press the button to the right of the Map check box. This will bring up the Material/Map browser. Select Bitmap in the browser, then find any image (preferably black and white), and press Open. After selecting the desired bitmap, make sure that the check box to the left of your Map

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slot is checked. The Map check box allows you to toggle whether or not the light is used as a projector.

Shadow Parameters

Figure 6-11: Shadow Parameters rollout

The only options in the Shadow Parameters rollout I want you to worry about are the Color and Density settings in the Object Shadows area. You can adjust your light’s shadow color using the Color swatch. You can also adjust your light’s shadow density with the Density spinner. By default, the shadow density for all lights is set to 1.0. At 1.0 the shadow is solid black. The closer to 0.0 you get, the lighter the shadow becomes.

Shadow Map Parameters

Figure 6-12: Shadow Map Parameters rollout

The Shadow Map Parameters rollout contains your base shadow settings. You have three spinners that will set the tone for the look of your shadow: Bias, Size, and Sample. The shadow bias is the distance between an object and the start of its shadow.

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Next to the Bias setting is the Size setting. The shadow size is the number of subdivisions (or resolution) for the map that is creating the shadow. The greater the value, the more detailed the map will be. Think of it as increasing your shadow density or quality. I have no official proof of this, but I have heard that Max processes values faster if you keep the shadow sizes to powers of 2 (256 x 2 = 512, 512 x 2 = 1024, and so on). Last but not least is the Sample setting. The sample range determines how much the different areas within the shadow are averaged. This basically means it will determine how smooth the edge of the shadow is. The remaining rollouts pertain to atmospheric effects and the Mental Ray renderer. However, I’m not going to cover this part of Mental Ray as this book is more focused on modeling.

The Basics of Good Lighting If I had a dollar every time I saw a poor modeler show his work with horrible lighting and get ignored on a forum, I’d be a rich man. Knowing how to model and then throwing a single light in the scene isn’t good enough these days. You need to know at least the basics of lighting, so I’ll show you a little of that here.

. Note:

The companion files (available at http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008/) contain the images in the book in full color and at full size. These should help you greatly!

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Lighting Objects

Figure 6-13: An example of a well-lit sphere

Don’t just throw a single light on your object, render, and call it done! Spend some time on lighting your objects to show all the detail you’ve slaved over! For this example, let’s use Mental Ray as we did in the last chapter. After you’ve selected Mental Ray as your renderer, we need to turn on Final Gather, which is a very handy tool in Mental Ray. Open up the Render Scene dialog box as if you were going to change your renderer, only this time select the Indirect Illumination tab. If the tab isn’t visible, you don’t have Mental Ray selected as your renderer. Go back and set Mental Ray as your renderer as we did in Chapter 5. Now that you have Mental Ray selected, let’s turn on Final Gather. To put it simply, Final Gather does light bounce calculations based on all of your lights and surfaces, which makes the scene look very believable. Click on the Indirect Illumination tab and check the Enable Final Gather box.

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Figure 6-14: The Indirect Illumination tab with Final Gather turned on

Alright! Now we’re ready to set up our lights. To start off, let’s talk about lighting a single object on a table or stand. Create a box in your Top viewport and move it downward so your grid is on top of your box. Now create a sphere and move it up so that it appears to be on top of the grid. Figure 6-14 shows what I ended up with.

Figure 6-15: A simple sphere on a surface

Light should be used to show form and texture on the object you’re looking at. Here’s how we achieve this. Go to your Top view and create a skylight anywhere in your scene. As we

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talked about before, this light simulates light bouncing around in an environment similar to what you would see on a really cloudy day. Here are the settings I used for my skylight: Multiplier: 0.5 Red: 125 Green: 140 Blue: 180

Figure 6-16: Sphere with a skylight

For this image I’ve bumped the multiplier up to 2. However, the actual value, 0.5, will give you a nice subtle atmospheric blue. This is what you’re going to be looking for. So now we have something representative of a very dark cloudy day. This skylight is called a fill light because it fills areas with light that would not be able to be seen otherwise. Let’s brighten it up a little bit more. Add a Mental Ray Omni Light, called mr Area Omni in 3ds Max, to your scene and move it around until you get something similar to my setup. The light is to the left of your sphere and raised up above it so you’re casting light on the sphere and the surface

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under it. This is called a key light. This key light is where most of your light comes from.

Figure 6-17: Top view of my setup

Figure 6-18: Sphere with skylight and key light

Starting to come together already, isn’t it? This isn’t a bad setup, but for a little dash of flavor let’s add one more light.

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Add one more mr Area Omni light so that it’s just lighting the very edge of the sphere. Make sure the light is on the same z-axis as the top of your box under the sphere so that you’re not lighting the box the sphere is resting on. Here are the settings I used for my second omni light: Multiplier: 3.5 Red: 205 Green: 225 Blue: 230 You should end up with something that looks similar to Figure 6-19.

Figure 6-19: Sphere with complete lighting

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Figure 6-20: The final setup from the top

And there you have it! This is what is called a three-point light setup. It’s fairly quick and simple to put together and gives you some good lighting quickly. You can also see that our Final Gather setting is working because there is light bouncing off of the back side of the sphere and being cast onto the surface under it. Pretty nifty! You don’t have to use a skylight for the “bounce” light. You could use another omni light or even a target spotlight. Using the skylight is an easy way to be sure to hit the right areas of your sphere. Using this with Final Gather is sure to give you the right results. So that’s lighting objects in brief. With a little time you’ll be showing off your models in style instead of getting feedback like “Who turned out the lights?” or “What exactly am I looking at again?” Hopefully you’ve learned something and will go on to light your scenes with some of these ideas. We’ll discuss lighting environments in Chapter 8; after all we need an environment to light first! If you’re into lighting, I’d suggest picking up some lighting-specific books.

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Real-Time Shadows A pretty cool feature added to Max 2008 is the real-time shadow system. It supports nearly every type of light in Max 2008’s viewport and gives you a great idea of what you’ll end up with when you render! To look at this new feature we first need something to light. Create a box on your grid and then place a sphere on this box.

Figure 6-21: A sample scene

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Now that we have a scene, drop three omni lights into your scene.

Figure 6-22: The new omni lights from the top

Go ahead and position these omni lights in such a way that you can see the object lit fairly well from each side as we did in the previous section. Now all we have to do is right-click to access our quad menus. Note the Viewport Lighting and Shadows section; this is new to Max 2008. First, select Viewport Shading > Best.

Figure 6-23: Viewport Shading set to Best

Next, select all of the lights you want to set to cast shadows. With these lights selected, go to your quad menu and select

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Enable Viewport Shadows Selected under the Viewport Lighting and Shadows section.

Figure 6-24: Choosing Enable Viewport Shadows Selected

That’s it! If you select your Perspective viewport, you can see the shadows being cast from your omni lights.

Figure 6-25: A sample scene with shadow casting lights

This is a great new feature that I’m sure many people will get tons of use out of. I’m pretty excited to be able to use it myself!

Chapter 7

Additional Modeling Tools and Modifiers Back in Chapter 3 we talked about many of the modeling tools that Max comes with. Now let’s talk about the more advanced tools. You can create all of the effects in this chapter simply by moving, scaling, and rotating sub-objects of your model. But you’ll never create them as fast as you can with these tools. Autodesk has developed quite a set of tools to make your life easier. Why not at least try them out? You’ve been using the Modify panel for some time now but never truly used any tools, or modifiers, that Max comes with. Go to the Modify panel and click the Modifier List drop-down box. That huge scary list of modifiers comes up again. Some of these tools are great, while others are a little less useful. I’ll cover some of the most useful modifiers Max comes with.

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Bend The Bend modifier lets you bend your object around a single axis. It creates a perfectly even bend across an object’s geometry. You can bend that object on any of the three axes. You may also limit the bend to only affect a portion of the geometry.

Figure 7-1: The Bend modifier in action

To bend an object, you must first have enough segments. If you don’t have any segments, you cannot bend anything! This may sound obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times in the very beginning I tried to use some of these tools and thought they didn’t work! Hey, after a long day of modeling you’ll make silly mistakes too! After applying a bend to an object, you can adjust your object’s bend angle and direction. You can also quickly cycle through your three axes to determine which axis it is bending around.

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Also, as with many geometry modifiers, you can use the Limits settings to apply the bend to a specific part of the geometry. You can also adjust your bend at the sub-object level by clicking the + next to the Bend modifier and moving the gizmo around like an object. Just fiddle around with Bend on your own and see what you can come up with.

FFD(box) and Others The FFD(box) option will become your friend down the road. FFD stands for Free-Form Deformations. There are many FFDs to choose from, but stick with FFD(box) due to its ability to change the number of “lattice” control points. This lattice is the gizmo that FFD uses to deform the object you use it on. Think of FFD as an all-over soft selection with a gizmo to control it. Create a cylinder with 12 sides and 12 height segments that is much taller than it is wide. Now apply an FFD modifier to that cylinder.

Figure 7-2: A cylinder with an FFD lattice

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If you expand your FFD modifier by clicking on the + as we did with the Bend modifier, you can select control points. This tells Max we want to only modify the lattice points within the FFD. Select some of the control points and move them, scale them, or rotate them. You’ll be surprised at how much control this lattice gives you!

Figure 7-3: The same cylinder deformed with an FFD modifier

Lathe The Lathe modifier is a slick way to create complicated circular objects. An example of this would be a pillar, a candlestick, or even a detailed car tire. Think of a real lathe. You put in a cylinder of wood, the lathe spins that piece of wood around, and you slowly take away sections of wood by pressing a tool into the surface until you have a very smooth round object such as a chair leg. The Lathe modifier works by wrapping a spline shape that you create around a designated axis. Let’s make a quick candlestick to show you just how it works. First of all, when you are using the Lathe tool, you need to think in “halves.” Let’s start with a candlestick.

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Figure 7-4: The full profile of the candlestick

You only need to draw half of that object’s profile. Think of it as cutting the object in half and then tracing what you have left with a spline. With this shape in mind, let’s recreate it using a spline. In the Create panel, select Shapes and then select the Line tool. Now, using the Line tool, trace the desired shape in your Front viewport. Every click you make will place a vertex. Don’t be too worried about the shape being exact at first. We will go back and make all the necessary adjustments to it after we get the basic shape. After tracing the candlestick half, you should end up with something similar to Figure 7-5. Now that we have our base vertices laid out, we will need to modify them to get our exact shape. There are four types of corners for spline vertices: Bezier Corner, Bezier, Smooth, and Figure 7-5: Corner. Each one has its own purpose. Half of the To change a vertex to the desired corner outer shape of type, first select the appropriate vertex and the candlestick

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right-click. This will bring up your quad menus. In the upper-left quad, you’ll notice you can change the selected vertex to one of the four corner types. Select all the vertices we created (they should now be highlighted in red) and make all of these vertices Bezier. You’ll notice now that every vertex has a pair of handles. Each of those handles can be manipulated to create complex curved shapes, even without adding more vertices. If you reselect all the vertices and change them all to be Corner, you’ll notice that you get hard edges throughout the entire spline. Changing your vertex to Smooth will have the opposite effect. Smooth automatically averages out your curve for you. This is a quick way to create smooth curved shapes. It has fewer controls than a shape with Bezier curves, but it is faster. Lastly, you have the Bezier Corner type. This type of vertex gives you the best of both worlds. You get the same handles that you get with a normal Bezier curve, but you can adjust each handle independently of the other. Reselect all your vertices and make them Bezier Corner vertices. Now just experiment for a moment. Grab a couple of handles and move them around a bit. You’ll notice that you can make sharp corners or round edges. This is the versatility of the Bezier Corner option. With all this newfound knowledge in mind, go back to your spline and add all the subtle details that make up the profile of your candlestick. When you are done, it should look something like Figure 7-6. Now that you have the world’s most perfect spline, let’s go ahead and add the Lathe modifier to it. Access the Lathe modifier in the Modifiers rollout. (The Modifiers rollout is arranged alphabetically.) You’ll notice that your Figure 7-6: The final shape immediately blows up into some weird spline round shape.

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Let’s adjust the axis really quick to make sure that we are getting the correct shape. In your modifier stack, you’ll notice a small plus sign (+) next to the Lathe modifier. Pressing the + opens up the Lathe modifier’s axis settings. You now have control over the lathe’s axis point. Go back to the Front view and move the axis to the left or right until you see the lathe reacting properly and creating your candlestick shape for you. Cool, huh? You should have a pretty nifty-looking candlestick now. The Lathe modifier also has a few settings. Most notably, you can adjust the degrees that the lathe will travel as well as the number of segments it takes to get there. Figure 7-7: The final candlestick Lathe is much easier to use than it is to explain, so just toy around with it; knowing about this tool will change the way you think about modeling cylinder-shaped objects.

Melt The Melt modifier is a fun modifier that sounds exactly like what it does. Create a sphere and apply a Melt modifier to it. Now in the modifier’s panel just drag up and down on your Amount box and you’ll see your sphere melting! It’s that easy! You can also change exactly how the melting occurs by selecting one of its presets.

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Figure 7-8: A half melted plastic sphere

Noise The Noise modifier can help give an organic flavor to a very inorganic shape. For this example we are just going to add some distortion to a sphere, so create one in your viewport. Now apply the Noise modifier to it and change the scale to something around 20. Scroll down to the Strength section. This is where you tell Max how much noise and on which axis you want it applied. Just put 10 in your X, Y, and Z boxes. You can also play with the Seed value. This just changes the random values used to deform your object. Finally, you can also animate your noise if you wanted to give it a water ripple effect. Just check the Animate Noise box and start dragging up and down on the Phase box. You’ll end up with a sphere that now looks more like a blobby rock.

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Figure 7-9: The deformed sphere

Push The Push modifier is simple and yet amazing. Applying this modifier to your object takes the vertices and moves them along their surface normal. To put it simply, it seems to fatten your object. Create a teapot from the Standard Primitives section of the Create panel and then apply a Push modifier to it. Now drag the Push value up and down. It makes your teapot appear to get fatter, as shown in Figure 7-10.

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Figure 7-10: A teapot modified with Push

I’ve used this modifier many times in my daily modeling. It’s great for fattening up hands or making arms appear more muscular and large without having to do much hand tweaking.

Shell Shell is another one of my favorites. I often hear other artists say, “Whoa, go back and do that again. Is this new?” when I use it. It’s a wonderful way to create plates of armor on a body or to quickly create an object with a set thickness. For a quick example, create a sphere and turn it into an Editable Poly object. Now in Polygon mode, select and delete the top half of your sphere. You’ll end up with something like Figure 7-11.

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Figure 7-11: The bottom half of a sphere

Now say we wanted to create a bowl out of this shape. Oops! You’re missing the interior faces of the bowl. This is where the Shell modifier comes into play. Apply a Shell modifier to your object. Poof! Instant bowl. Tweaking the Inner Amount and Outer Amount settings creates a solid object out of your one-sided surface. This is a massive time-saver no matter how you look at it. I ended up with the object in Figure 7-12.

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Figure 7-12: The bottom half of our sphere with a Shell modifier

You can add more edge loops around the “edge faces,” or the faces that are connecting the outer and inner faces, by changing the number of segments. If you need to have the edge, inner, or outer faces selected, check one of those boxes. When you collapse the stack back down to an editable poly, these faces will still be selected. Finally, occasionally you’ll get some funny results on your corners, Just check the Straighten Corners box and this usually will fix it. I’ll visit this modifier again in later chapters. I can’t stress how amazing it actually is for creating armor or clothing.

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Taper The Taper modifier produces a tapered contour by scaling one or both ends of an object up or down. You can very easily control the amount of taper or curve using the spinners in the Taper modifier.

Figure 7-13: A tapered cylinder

You can even limit the amount of taper to a particular section of your object. Like most other objects, you can adjust your taper at the sub-object level by opening up the stack. Taper also allows you to manipulate the gizmo that is controlling your taper settings to create even more custom tapers and effects. Create your own object and use the Taper modifier to come up with your own unique shapes.

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Twist The Twist modifier creates a twirling or spinning effect across an object’s geometry.

Figure 7-14: A torus with the Twist modifier

You can control the angle of the twist on any of the three axes as well as limit the twist to a specific area of the geometry. To twist an object, first select it and apply the Twist modifier. The Parameters rollout allows you to set the Twist Axis to X, Y, or Z. You can set the angle of the twist using the Angle spinner provided. You can also use the Bias spinner to “bunch up” your twists at either side of the object. Lastly, you can adjust the twist at its sub-object level and manipulate the actual twist gizmo to further manipulate your twist.

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TurboSmooth TurboSmooth was introduced in Max 7.0 to replace the original MeshSmooth modifier. TurboSmooth uses a much more efficient algorithm and performs much better than MeshSmooth. If you’re familiar with MeshSmooth from any of the earlier versions of Max, then you probably already have a good knowledge base on TurboSmooth. TurboSmooth takes your model and smoothes everything out for you. In movies or in artist’s portfolios you’ll often see amazingly detailed models with huge polycounts. The artist doesn’t actually model every single polygon, however. If the artist is using sub-d, or subdivisional, modeling, he’s only creating a basic shape out of a model with a much lower polygon count and using TurboSmooth or other very similar modifiers to create a very smooth effect. Letting the computer do most of the work is a good idea, considering you can’t really make sense of a huge mess of edges and vertices. You can also set the iteration level, which means that you control how smooth and how dense you want your geometry to become. The best way to use TurboSmooth is at the sub-object level. Apply TurboSmooth to an Edit Poly object. Your object should look like Figure 7-15.

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Figure 7-15: An Editable Poly object with the TurboSmooth modifier

By default, Iterations is set to 1.0. The great thing about TurboSmooth is that you can really up the iteration level without slowing down your viewport. In the past, keeping your iteration level at 3 or 4 would really hit your video card pretty hard. But with the new TurboSmooth, you can work very quickly, even at high iteration levels. However, don’t go crazy and crank it up to 50. You absolutely can bog your system down to waiting minutes for Max to come back from its calculations. After applying TurboSmooth, go back down your stack and highlight Editable Poly. Notice that your object pops back to its original shape before the TurboSmooth operation. That’s because you are viewing that part of the stack. If you want to view the top result of your stack, even while working at the bottom of the stack, press the Show End Result button.

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Figure 7-16: Working in Edit Poly mode under the TurboSmooth modifier

This will allow you to work in Edit Poly mode while viewing your smoothed Edit Poly object! This is absolutely the best way to work because you can see what you’re going to get as the end result — yet another thing many Max artists don’t know about. To see just how this works, make sure you are at the bottom of your stack and select Vertex mode. You’ll notice an orange outline representing the actual Edit Poly object that you’ll be modifying, even though you are viewing the top of it. You also have the option of toggling the Show End Result button if you want to work without viewing the top of your stack all the time. There are some other settings in TurboSmooth that are quite useful. For example, if you need to render at a higher iteration than you have in your viewport, you can check the Render Iters box and change how many iterations you’ll have in your render. Finally, the Isoline display is a nice feature I like to use when I’m modeling. This will show only the lines that are representative of the low-polygon version of the object you are working on. I always turn this on, but other artists I work with leave it off. It’s a matter of preference really. When you have a 1 million-plus polygon scene with edges turned on, Max starts

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to chug a little bit. This makes sense considering you are rendering much more than simple surfaces now. Having Isoline turned on minimizes this effect while still giving you a wireframe.

Lofting vs. Renderable Splines Welcome to the wonderful world of lofting! Loft objects are two-dimensional shapes (splines) extruded along a path that you designate. Loft has many options and possibilities; however, the basic procedure is very easy. One method is to create a Loft object via Get Shape. First, create a path using the Line tool. This path is simply a line that your shape will travel along. Next, you need to draw the shape that you want to send on the “path.” In this case, we’ll just use a spline circle. Next, select your path or line and then choose Create > Compound > Loft from the main menu. In the Creation Method rollout, click the Get Shape button. This will put you in Pick mode. Now click on the circle we created earlier. Done! You just created a Loft object!

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Figure 7-17: Our first Loft object

There are several settings for you to play around with. I recommend experimenting a bit. Pay close attention, however, to the Skin Parameters rollout. This is where you can add or remove detail automatically using the Shape Steps and Path Steps settings. These steps are very similar to iterations in TurboSmooth; they just set how many edge loops you have to smooth out your object. Possibly the best reason to use a Loft object is the ability to deform an object along its path. In the Deformations rollout you can turn on a deformer by clicking the lightbulb next to each option, as shown in Figure 7-18. When you click on one of the deformers, you get access to a curve that represents the amount of deformation over the length of the path. This Figure 7-18: The can be changed by adding a corner point Deformations rollout of the Loft modifier to the curve, as shown in Figure 7-20.

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Figure 7-19: A wobbly Scale deformer used on our Loft object

Figure 7-20: The scale curve used to create the Loft object in Figure 7-19

Now that lofts are out of the way, let’s talk about the good stuff. Lofts are great if you have to create a complex shape that may change along its journey, but what if you just need to create a simple hose shape? Lofts have too many complex settings and if you’re not using them, why mess with it? Using a

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renderable spline, you can view in real time exactly what your results are going to be. I’m a big fan of that, as you can tell! To use renderable splines, all you have to do is create a spline shape and check the Enable In Viewport and Enable In Renderer boxes. This will enable the Thickness setting. Once these boxes are checked, change your thickness to something appropriate. You can also change how many sides your spline has, or set Angle to change how the edges flow around the spline. The best part about renderable splines is you don’t have to fool around with any shapes. You know you are going for a cylinder type shape, so all the rest is just tweaking your spline, which is where most of your time should be spent anyway. This also allows you to get real-time feedback while you’re editing your spline. Anytime you can get real-time feedback, take it. This will save you a lot of headaches and time.

Figure 7-21: Our same path using renderable splines. There is no use of Loft here, which simplifies the process.

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Chapter 8

Architectural Modeling Exercise: Interior Creating a Floor Plan A quick way to create architectural interior areas in Max is to use its Wall primitive contained within the AEC Extended set in the Geometry section. Before we get started, however, you will need to activate your snap tools. To do this, simply press the Snaps Toggle button to activate your snaps.

Figure 8-1: Snaps Toggle button

You have many snap options in Max. To access those options, right-click on the leftmost Snaps toggle. This will display the Grid and Snap Settings dialog. 175

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Figure 8-2: Snaps options

The Snaps tab contains 12 check box options. When you check a box, your cursor will snap to that type of object. You can snap to multiple objects at the same time. This is a very helpful feature. You can simultaneously snap to your grid, an edge, a midpoint, etc. This is such a huge asset when doing architectural modeling and will speed up your creation process dramatically. For what we are doing, we will need to check the Grid Points check box. This will snap your cursor to the floor grid. Let me first explain the wall generator a bit. The wall works very quickly because you lay it out like a spline. The difference is that it has adjustable height and width settings. Moreover, because your wall is created procedurally, it is completely unwrapped for you. (You can even explore the sub-object settings a bit to reveal many other options.) However, we’ll only be creating the walls and then setting a height and width here. By default, the drop-down list below the Geometry icon should read Standard Primitives. We want to open up that list and select AEC Extended. After selecting AEC Extended, you’ll see a few new options pop up, including Foliage, Wall, and Railing. Max has the unique ability to create many things on the fly. If you were using any other 3D package, you’d be manually creating these

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walls, railings, windows, and doors and then unwrapping them all piece by piece. By automating this process Max will save you quite a bit of time! Make sure that your 3D snaps are activated and set to Grid Points. Now maximize the Top viewport. This is the view where we’ll be creating our basic layout. Press the Wall button in the Object Type list to activate the wall generator. Before you actually start creating the wall, set your wall height and width. Since we are using generic Max units right now, just set Width to 3.5 and Height to 45.0.

. Note:

You can change your Max units to read Feet and Inches by selecting Units Setup from the Customize menu.

Now that we have our width and height set, we can create the outer walls. Using your grid snaps, recreate the outside lines of the shape that I have laid out in Figure 8-3.

Figure 8-3: The basic outline of our floor plan with interior walls

Don’t be too worried about getting the exact distances from one corner to another. Just recreate the shape as best you can. After you connect the last wall, Max will ask if you want to

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weld points. Click Yes. This will close off our wall. Then rightclick to stop using the Wall tool. Now that the outer wall is complete, we need to create our inner walls. Our inner walls will define the hall and rooms. Using the same technique, create the inner walls shown in Figure 8-3.

. Note:

The Wall tool remembers your last height and width settings, so your new walls will be created with the same settings as the outer walls.

You are completely done with the wall layout process at this point. Your Perspective viewport should look something like this:

Figure 8-4: The result

That’s all there is to it! This is so much better than the previous method of using splines, as now we can make modifications in real time and see our results. This is great when we want to make minor changes and don’t want to have to do a major amount of work.

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Adding Doorways and Windows Before we create any detail trim, we need to make sure we have all our doors and windows laid out. One of the greatest features of the Wall tool is that it works in conjunction with the Door and Window tools. It’s amazingly fast, although it has some quirks that you have to get used to. If you are having problems, read the Note below. Go to the Geometry section of the Create panel and click on the drop-down. In the list, choose Doors and then select the Pivot door. I usually go ahead and click the “Width/Height/ Depth” creation method in the command panel. Creating a door is similar to a box. Turn on your grid snaps and click and drag somewhere on the bottom of your wall. This creates the door and sets the width. You’re still in Create mode on the door so move your mouse to set the height of the door. Then, drag your mouse until you have the door thickness set to what you want, but don’t let the door penetrate the wall. Make a final click. Figure 8-5 shows what I ended up with, and Figure 8-6 shows the final settings in the Parameters and Leaf Parameters rollouts.

Figure 8-5: The door

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. Note:

There are some very strange quirks to adding doorways and windows with these tools. However, they will save you time. Quirk 1: Always click on an edge. For doors you need to click on the top or the bottom of the wall (typically the bottom). For windows you need to click on a vertical edge. Otherwise Max won’t know what wall you want to create this door or window on. Quirk 2: Always make the door or window less deep than the wall is. This will make the wall cutout. You can always change the trim depth to make the door look nicely trimmed up and fit into the wall. Quirk 3: Because of the precise placement required, it’s best if you use grid snaps to help you place your walls, doors, and windows.

So once you’re over the quirkiness, that’s all there is to it! You can move and scale your doors and windows, and they’ll make the appropriate cutouts in the wall they were created on. There are also plenty of other nice features like being able to use the options in the Leaf Parameters rollout. Just have fun with these settings and create the kind of door you like!

Figure 8-6: The door’s settings

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Here’s an explanation of all the different leaf parameters: n

Thickness: Sets the thickness of the door and the insets

n

Stiles/Top Rail: Scales insets horizontally and vertically

n

Bottom Rail: Sets the distance of the insets from the bottom of the door

n

# Panels Horiz: Sets the number of horizontal slats

n

# Panels Vert: Sets the number of vertical slats

n

Muntin: Sets the thickness of the slats

n

None: Turns off the inset completely

n

Glass: Turns on or off the glass within the inset

n

Thickness: Sets the thickness of the glass within the inset

n

Beveled: Turns on or off the beveled edges within the inset n

Bevel: Angle of the bevel

n

Thickness 1: Sets the outer thickness of the bevel

n

Thickness 2: Sets the inner thickness of the bevel

n

Middle Thick: Sets the size of the innermost flat panel

n

Width 1: Sets the outer width of the bevel

n

Width 2: Sets the inner width of the bevel

Now let’s create a window. Go to the Create panel’s Geometry section drop-down again and pick Windows this time. Go to your Front or Left viewport and click on the far edge of one of your walls. Like the door, we go through the clicking and creating, making sure the depth is set smaller than the wall. Move and scale your window into place. Remember, you don’t have to have the window in the exact location or orientation that you want in the end. You’re only clicking on the wall during creation to let Max know that you want to create the window on this particular wall object. I know it’s a little finicky, but it does save time. That’s it. Just play with the Parameters rollout settings until you get what you like. Figure 8-7 shows what my window

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looks like, and Figure 8-8 indicates the final settings in the Parameters rollout.

Figure 8-7: The window

Figure 8-8: The window’s settings

That’s all there is to adding windows and doors to walls.

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Creating Trim Detail Around the Bottom of the Walls Just to add a bit of detail, I want to create a basic floor trim that we can run along the bottom of our walls. There are two basic ways to create floor trim: You can create a loft, or you can outline a spline and extrude it upward. The only reason you would ever need to create a loft would be if you had a very detailed and specific shape for your trim. Since the point of this exercise is not to create the world’s greatest trim, we will use the spline technique (which will look fine).

. Note:

Make sure that all the walls you have created are flush with their connecting walls. Otherwise you could run into problems.

The first thing that we need to do is trace our entire interior using a spline. Adjust your snap settings so that they are set to snap on Endpoint as shown in Figure 8-9.

Figure 8-9: Snaps set to Endpoint

Because wall objects can add extra geometry that your snap setting will snap to, let’s create a duplicate of your wall by Shift-clicking on your wall, ensuring Copy is selected, and clicking OK. With our duplicated wall selected, right-click on

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your viewport and pick Hide All Unselected. Now right-click on your stack and pick Convert To: Editable Poly. This will give us just our template wall to work with.

Figure 8-10: Template wall shown

Using the Line tool (Create panel > Shapes > Line), snap a line around the entire interior. The goal is to trace the walls where trim would be. Obviously trim will not cross a door frame, so make sure your lines don’t cross door frames. You can create the trim in Perspective view if you want. If you do, however, you will most likely have to create a spline, then rotate around your view a bit, create another spline, rotate again, and so on. In the end you will end up with several splines that you will need to attach to each other and weld together. You can do this very quickly, of course, but I’ll use this as an opportunity to show you a neat trick using Max’s 2.5-dimensional snapping. Using this technique will make this process faster and also create a single spline from the beginning.

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To activate your 2.5-dimensional snapping, click and hold on the Snaps Toggle button to display a drop-down containing a few options.

Figure 8-11: Snap types

Select the button that says 2.5. You have now activated 2.5-D snapping. All 2.5 does is allow you to snap on the ground plane. It basically lets you use the full strength of your snaps without including the z-axis. Maximize the Top view and begin tracing the interior walls. After tracing all of the outer edges of the walls you want to have trim, you’ll have to attach all of the splines together. Pick any one of your splines and click Attach Multi. This will bring up a name selection box. Pick all of the splines you’ve created. Now we have one spline object. Next, pick the Vertex sub-object button and select all the vertices that make up your trim splines. Click the Weld button contained in the Geometry section of your Line object. Since you used snaps, all of your spline vertices should be on top of one another and close enough to be auto-welded. When you’re done, you’ll end up with something like Figure 8-12.

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Figure 8-12: The completed spline raised up a little for clarity

I also raised the final spline up off the ground a bit in the Perspective view just so you can see exactly what we have created, but yours should be flush with the bottom of the wall. Let’s create our spline outline now. Select the Spline sub-object button. Now select all spline segments within your Perspective viewport. Return to the Modify panel and scroll down until you find the Outline button. Be sure to check the Center check box just under the Outline spinner box. This makes the outline center on your spline to keep all of your splines consistent.

Figure 8-13: The Outline button

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. Note:

The Spline button is only available while in the Spline sub-object mode. While editing your spline you can hit 3 on your keyboard to access this mode.

Pressing the Outline button returns you to the Perspective viewport and manually outlines the spline. Considering how small and precise our outline will be, let’s just go ahead and type it in manually in the provided slot. The larger the number, the larger the outline. I used 4 for my outline. I tend to model fairly large. If you take a closer look now at your spline, you should notice that you’ve created a spline border around the areas you’ve traced! Exit your sub-object mode and apply an Extrude modifier on top of your spline. Applying an Extrude will raise the spline off the ground plane and transform it into geometry at the same time. After applying the Extrude, you need to set a height. I chose to go with a height of 6.0. You could make this higher or lower, of course. After applying these settings, your trim detail should look like the following:

Figure 8-14: The completed trim

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Select the Editable Poly version of the wall and delete it. You still have that original version of the wall object. Just do an Unhide All by right-clicking in your viewport and you’ll bring back all of your objects. Congratulations! You have successfully created the floor trim!

Creating the Floor and Ceiling Planes Because we made a simple room in a squared-off shape, you won’t have to worry about doing anything fancy for your floor or ceiling planes. We’ll just use a box. Set your snaps back to use the grid by right-clicking on the Snaps Toggle button, checking Grid Points, and unchecking Endpoint. Now, in your Top viewport create a box covering the entire area of your interior area. Set the height to –2. This will make the box go down into the grid instead of coming up into your room.

Figure 8-15: The simple floor plane

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That’s it! All you have to do to create the ceiling is duplicate the floor and set its height to 2 instead of –2. Move it up until it’s flush with the top of your wall.

Figure 8-16: The now enclosed room

Creating a Basic Floor Material with a Reflection Now it’s starting to look like a room! Let’s do some material tweaks to push it over the edge. Let’s give the floor a reflective material. You will be amazed at how quickly a scene like this can come to life, even without proper texturing. We are going to add a single color to the floor and apply a reflection. Open up the Material Editor and apply a simple gray texture to the entire interior. Let’s add just a bit of specular

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highlight and glossiness onto our gray texture just for good measure.

Figure 8-17: The Material Editor settings for the wall material

We want to add a little bit of specular to the surface because no surface fully absorbs light, so every surface will have a slight sheen when light hits it. Even the slightest amount of sheen makes a huge difference in the final image. Now let’s work on that floor texture. Select a new shader and adjust the color to a dark brownish color with RGB settings of 80, 40, 15. This gives the impression of a simple dark wood flooring.

Figure 8-18: The Material Editor settings for the floor material

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Now apply this new material to the floor. The scene should look like this:

Figure 8-19: The room with a couple of lights to brighten things up for clarity

All we have left to do is apply a simple reflection to our floor. Expand the Maps rollout in your Material Editor and select the Reflection slot. This will open up a new window with a large number of material options. In most cases, you would select Bitmap and choose the appropriate bitmap, but in this case, we want to use the Flat Mirror option. There are two options for reflection creation. Ray tracing traces the path of rays sampled from the light source. Reflections and refractions generated this way are physically accurate. Because we are only generating a reflection for a flat surface, we’ll be using Flat Mirror. The Flat Mirror option will create a perfect reflection for this surface in about half the time.

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. Note:

Flat Mirror only works on perfectly flat surfaces. Objects that have a curve to them should have a ray trace reflection material applied to them. Otherwise the reflections will be incorrect. However, ray-traced reflections take quite a bit longer to calculate due to their complexity.

After applying the Flat Mirror material to your Reflection channel, you will see a list of options.

Figure 8-20: Flat Mirror options

In order to make the Flat Mirror work, you have to tell your material which face you want to be reflective. If you don’t do this, you won’t see any reflection. Here, we don’t want the bottom and sides of our floor geometry to reflect, only the top polygon. To designate which polygon you want to reflect, check the Apply to Faces with ID check box. By default, the ID is 1. That means we need to make sure our top polygon is set to 1. To find out what our top polygon is, go into the sub-object mode of the floor and select the top polygon. Under Polygon Properties, you’ll see a material ID number.

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Figure 8-21: Polygon Properties rollout

It is most likely set to 1. If that is the case, then we are good to go! If not, be sure to change it to 1. In your free time, explore a few of the other Flat Mirror settings. The Blur setting is especially helpful when creating a slightly blurred reflection. For what we are doing, however, we will just stick with the default settings. Now let’s back out and go to the parent level of our new material. You can do this by either hitting the Go To Parent button until you get to all your available slots, or clicking the drop-down box and clicking on the top level of your material. This is likely to be named something like 01 – Default.

Figure 8-22: The Go To Parent button along with the parent drop-down box

By default, your Reflection setting is 100. That’s way too reflective for what we want. Let’s go ahead and set it at about 25 or so. All you need to do to see your reflection is do a quick render. So position your camera (if you want one) or your Perspective viewport and select Quick Render.

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Setting Up a Beauty Render The image in Figure 8-23 is what we are going to be creating in this section.

Figure 8-23: The final scene with lights and a nice Mental Ray render

In my industry it’s fairly standard practice to create a beauty render. This is a render where you’ve placed a camera and lit the scene, object, or whatever you’ve created. I really suggest doing this before showing anything you’ve worked on in forums or to other artists. Make any wireframe screen grab or anything else secondary to your beauty render. It’s good to show off a wireframe, but it’s even better if you can show off a good-looking render and the wireframe. Let’s start with the camera position. I created a camera in the upper-right corner of the room by what I took to be the front door. Only worry about placement and angle. Right-click on one of the viewports that you’re not using as much as the others. Select Camera01 from the list. You’re now seeing what

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the camera is seeing. Now you’ll need to adjust its FOV, or field of view. This gives the illusion that you are shrinking, making the room look larger. Ever been house shopping on the Internet? Those real estate agents sure do love to use a wide-angle lens! The rooms look huge until you get to the house and you can touch all four walls by spreading your arms!

Figure 8-24: Left, a low field of view showing a small area of focus; right, a high field of view showing a “fish-eye” view

All you are doing is allowing the camera to capture more of the room than you were before. A field of view setting of anything more than 140 starts to look like you are passing out, so try to stick to around 90 to 120. Another little trick is to set the camera lower than eye height and aim the target a little upward. Again, this gives the illusion of the room being bigger.

Figure 8-25: The camera placement along with the lights

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Now that we have a camera set up, we can focus on lighting. Since this book is printed in black and white, I’m not going to focus on color but brightness. To see my final color images or the actual scene, you can download them from http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008/. For quick light setups, most of the time I use omni lights. My logic is that all lights in real life are omni lights. The filament inside the bulb burns and gives off light in all directions. A spotlight, on the other hand, casts light on a specific spot, as it is constrained by the cylinder around it. Also, with omni lights, you can set attenuation. This gives the effect that the light is “falling off,” or getting dimmer as the light travels. For this example, we’ll use Mental Ray area omni lights. This is because they have a great way to set the amount of energy emitting from them so we can control how much light bounces off of surfaces they are hitting. Go to Create > Lights > mr Area Omni, and in your Top viewport place an mr area omni light somewhere to the left of your camera. Raise it up around eye height like a tall lamp. Because this light is an indoor light and I wanted to create a contrast with the outdoor lighting, I set it to a very light blue, almost completely desaturated. I also enabled shadows and used shadow mapping because this light would cast a shadow around the corner to the right as seen from the camera. Set its Multiplier to 1.3 because we want a nice-looking key light. Scroll down until you see Far Attenuation and check the Use box. Scrub up and down on the Start and End boxes until you get a Figure 8-26: One of the major similar falloff as in Figure 8-26. lights

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. Note:

The trick to far attenuation is that you want to create a nice gradient. Using this you can create a “wall washing” effect that can be seen in pretty much any externally lit building at night.

Now, I added a light in the room that is visible from the camera because I liked the effect it gave as it hit the door. This light was raised up to about door frame height and is also set to a very light cool color. This light’s Multiplier is 0.8 and it should also be a shadow casting light. Again, set the Far Attenuation as in the following figure.

Figure 8-27: The bedroom light

Let’s create a light that imitates sunlight. In your Top viewport, create an omni light just outside the two doors at the end of the room. Move this light up just past your ceiling so that when it casts through the door it will be casting its light downward. Now set its Multiplier to a whopping 5! This sun is bright after all. Set it to a warm tone. Mine is set to 255, 230, 210. This time don’t set any attenuation because we don’t need it on the sun. Set this light to shadow cast. Finally, scroll down to the Mental Ray specific area and set Energy to 25 and GI to 25. This boosts its power in Mental Ray and makes it very bright like the afternoon sun. It also allows it to

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bounce off the floor and illuminate the ceiling like the sun really would.

Figure 8-28: The sun

Another little thing you can do is to create a surface to actually bounce more light into the scene using a box with a gray material applied to it. Create a tall box near the outside of the doors at the end of our room as shown in Figure 8-29.

Figure 8-29: The bounce surface

This keeps you from seeing the black background of our render and throws more light in through our doors.

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That’s it! Be sure to tweak your Far Attenuation values to try and get a nice gradient and soften up the shadows. Remember the Final Gather option from Chapter 6? For an extra little kick you can turn that on! It takes much longer to render but looks much better with the light bounce simulation. While working on my lights I always leave Final Gather and Global Illumination off, as it takes a really long time to render since your light count goes up. Keep in mind this will allow you to preview your lights but it won’t be half as bright as your final scene. When you have your lights bouncing around with Mental Ray, the scene will brighten significantly, so you may want to play around going back and forth between Scanline and Mental Ray. When I’m doing a light preview, I also set my render size to very small. This will allow you to get a thumbnail sample at a shorter render time. Once you have your placement and light settings set up, then you can turn on Final Gather. For this render we’ll also need to enable Global Illumination. This can be found in the same tab as Final Gather. Just scroll down a bit.

Figure 8-30: The final scene with lights and a nice Mental Ray render

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Chapter 9

High-Poly Modeling Basics Understanding the Concept of Subdivisional Modeling So, what is this subdivisional, or “sub-d,” modeling you may have heard about? It’s a method of modeling that allows you to create a lower polygon model with edge loops that control smoothing over edges. To be more specific, take a look at a movie like Monsters, Inc. or Ratatouille — these movies have characters with millions of polygons making them up. However, the artists didn’t work on these characters point by painstaking point of the final on-screen render. They used sub-d modeling. Don’t get me wrong, though — these artists are extremely talented, and smart because they used the tools presented to them in the best ways possible. You may have to handcraft a 50,000-polygon model, but then you’ll use some sort of smoothing to give you that nice high-polygon look. This method of subdivisional modeling allows you to create high-poly models very quickly. Not only is the model easier to edit, it also allows 3ds Max to run at a reasonable rate without making you want to pull your hair out.

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Figure 9-1: Sub-d model compared to model with TurboSmooth applied

Computers and the modeling applications on them are getting more and more powerful every year. I think that goes without saying, but Autodesk made massive improvements to the viewport rendering pipeline in 3ds Max 9. What does this mean for you? Well, the good news is you won’t sit at your desk wanting to break something while you wait for what feels like 15 minutes to move a few vertices on a 500,000-polygon object. Now, you probably won’t be getting into these really high polycounts to begin with. In fact, I think it’s best if you tried to work in the lower range to start out with as many new artists like to TurboSmooth an object and call it done. Use your best judgment on how many polygons you need to make an object look good at the distance you’ll be seeing it. In modeling for games, a soda can on the street may only need to be 32 polygons or so because you’ll never see it up that close. However, in CG motion pictures, a silly little soda can may be 2 feet tall on the big screen.

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Working Under Your TurboSmooth Modifier The best way to use TurboSmooth is at the sub-object level. Create a sphere, make it an Edit Poly object, and apply a TurboSmooth modifier. Your stack should look like this:

Figure 9-2: An Editable Poly object with TurboSmooth

By default, Iterations is set to 1. The great thing about TurboSmooth is that you can really up the iteration level without slowing down your viewport too badly. In the past, keeping the iteration level at 3 or 4 would really hit your video card pretty hard. But with the improvements to the viewport rendering pipeline, you can work very quickly, even at high iteration levels. After applying TurboSmooth, go back down your stack and highlight the Editable Poly. Notice that when you highlight Editable Poly, your sphere pops back to its original shape before the TurboSmooth. That’s because you are viewing that part of the stack. Now if you want to view the top result of your stack, even while working at the bottom of the stack, you press the Show End Result button.

Figure 9-3: The Show End Result button

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This will allow you to work in Edit Poly mode while viewing your smoothed Edit Poly object! This is how I always work because it gives you the ability to see exactly what you’re going to end up with. To see just how this works, make sure you are at the bottom of your stack and select Vertex mode. You’ll notice an orange outline representing the bottom of your stack, even though you are viewing the top of it.

Figure 9-4: The orange wireframe representing the low-poly model

You also have the option of toggling the Show End Result button if you want to work without viewing the top of your stack all the time.

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Gaining Back Definition That You Have Lost You may have noticed that when you TurboSmooth an object you lose a massive amount of definition, especially in areas where you have 90-degree angles between polygons. This is because TurboSmooth is literally smoothing out the surface of your model. If you took some clay that was molded into a cube shape and started smoothing it out around the edges, what would you end up with? A sphere! Here’s an example of that in Max:

Figure 9-5: A cube and its counterpart with TurboSmooth applied and Iterations set to 3

See how the cube turns into a sphere shape? Well, that’s great and wonderful, but what if we don’t want a sphere shape? What if we just wanted a cube that had slightly rounded-off corners? This is where control loops come in! Create a cube and put a TurboSmooth on it. Go under the TurboSmooth as we talked about a little bit ago and make sure Show End Result is turned on.

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Click on an edge and select the ring of edges it’s connected to by clicking on the Ring button in Edit Poly. Then connect these edges by clicking the Connect button and drag the newly created edge loop upward until it’s near the edges that form the top of the cube. Repeat this process until you’ve created enough edge loops to control all of the corners of the cube. Some call these “holding loops” or “control loops.”

Figure 9-6: New low-poly cube vs. high-poly cube

As you can see, our control loops are doing their job. They keep the smoothing contained within the outer edge loops. Think of each loop you are adding as a loop that says, “The smoothing stops here.” Everything beyond your edge loop will look similar to your low-polygon model.

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Keeping an Even Polygon Flow Another thing to avoid is having a mesh with different polygon sizes. Some variation is normal and fine, but across a nice sweeping curve you want to keep your polygons evenly spaced; otherwise you’ll end up with pinching.

Figure 9-7: Left, incorrect polygon sizes; right, correct polygon sizes

See how this looks like a ripple in a car door after it’s been in an accident? By keeping your polygons flowing nice and even you avoid this nasty pinching and can achieve a nice smooth curve all the way around. The curve in Figure 9-7 is a good example of polygon size differences messing with your smoothing. These results come from the way TurboSmooth works. TurboSmooth is adding polygons based on your low-polygon model. The more polygons on your low-polygon model, the denser the polycount on the curve will be on these smaller polygons. This leads to pinching. Remember, you only need a few edge loops in your curve to get a nice smooth curve after you’ve used TurboSmooth.

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Figure 9-8 is a perfect example of this:

Figure 9-8: Left, low-poly inset; right, high-poly inset

The square became a circular shape! This is how few edge loops you really need to create a nice smooth curve. Keeping this in mind you can pretty much model with only a few polygons and still have a nice smooth model as long as you turn your iterations up to a reasonable level.

Chapter 10

Non-Organic Modeling Exercise: Creating a Dagger Alright! Now that we have talked on and on about the ins and outs of Max, it’s time to really get into the fun stuff! From now on, this book will focus almost entirely on modeling exercises. If you’ve skipped up to this chapter, you probably need to go back and read over the basics. Even if you’ve used Max for a while, you may want to read over the first chapters because I still find new things about Max to this day! Always try to keep learning and remember that no one knows everything, although some will assure you they really do!

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Figure 10-1: The completed dagger we are going to make

For this example we’re going to make a fantasy style dagger. It’s a fairly simple object but has plenty of surface area for detail, so we can cover a lot of interesting things in Max. I’ll provide more detail at the beginning of the process, but later in the chapter I’ll be giving you more freedom. Let’s get started!

Creating the Blade To start out, let’s make a box. I almost always start an object with a cylinder or a box. Using your snaps in the Top viewport, let’s make a box with these attributes: Length: 150 Width: 20 Height: 3

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Figure 10-2: The beginning of the blade

This is similar to what a blacksmith would start with, but instead of a rod we have a box. Now set Length Segs to 4 and convert the box to an Editable Poly object. Select all of the longest edges and connect them using the Connect tool.

Figure 10-3: A box cut into four sections

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. Note:

Please set up a shortcut key for Connect, as we’ll be using it a lot. It’s silly to punch that UI button every single time you want to connect edges.

Now that we have enough edge loops to have a fairly nice tip, go ahead and select the two edges that make up the end of the blade and collapse them.

Figure 10-4: The new tip of the blade

After that, slide all the edge loops that you’ve made down near the tip. This is so you have enough polygons around the tip of the blade to round it out. Begin to scale these edge loops on the x-axis until you get something similar to Figure 10-5.

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Figure 10-5: The now rounded tip

Grab the polygons that make up the top of the blade and scale and move them to create a bevel as seen below.

Figure 10-6: Beveling the edge

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In the Perspective view, rotate the camera so you can see the “bottom” polygon faces. Also, go to where the blade will be inserted into the hilt, or handle, of the dagger and delete this face. Figure 10-7 shows which faces I’m talking about.

Figure 10-7: Faces to remove

We delete these faces because we aren’t going to use them. The bottom face will be replaced when we mirror the top of the blade.

Figure 10-8: The blade starting to take shape

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We want to only model half of the blade so we don’t have to redo things we already did! To do this, just select the already modeled portion of the blade and click on the Mirror tool. Figure 10-9: The Mirror tool

Depending on the viewport in which you are currently viewing the dagger, you may have to pick the correct axis. For simplicity, select the dagger in the Perspective viewport and pick Z. Also, we’re going to want to replicate any changes we make to half of the blade to the other half of the blade. Selecting Instance will do this for you. Now, click OK and you’ll see you have two halves of a blade! From now on I’ll refer to the edges that make up the top flat part of the blade as the “inner edge” and the edges that make up the sharp part of the blade as the “outer edge.” So now it at least resembles a blade! However, this is only the low-poly form of the blade. We want to TurboSmooth this dagger blade and make it nice and smooth, so apply a TurboSmooth modifier. All of your nice hard edges have turned into mush. What happened?

Figure 10-10: Mushy edges

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The only edges that are hard now are the open ones. This is because TurboSmooth averages out the surface and makes them smooth. We want a smooth object, but we need to control this smoothing by adding some control loops. In the TurboSmooth settings, set Iterations to 2 and check Isoline. You’ll immediately see that Max knows to replicate this over to the other half of the blade. Go back under the TurboSmooth by clicking on Editable Poly and click the Show End Result button we discussed earlier.

Figure 10-11: The Show End Result button

Now you can select the Vertex sub-object mode. You’ll see an orange cage representing your low-poly model, but at the same time you can see your end result after your smooth. This is amazingly useful and how I always work. Now let’s bring back those details. Here’s a neat little trick I use to sharpen up edges of an object very quickly. Select the edges that make up the inner edge we were talking about before. Now click the Extrude dialog box button. You may think “We don’t want to extrude anything!” and you’re right. We do, however, want to create two edge loops around this one to control the smoothing.

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Figure 10-12: Getting closer

Set Extrusion Height to 0.0. Scrub up and down on the Extrusion Base Width spinner. We use this to control how sharp the edge is. The bigger the number, the farther away the edges go from your original edge. The farther away the edges move, the smoother the curve on the final model. I went with 0.75 — just enough to hint at a sharper edge while retaining the roundness. Depending on the scale of your model your number may be different. Just eyeball it and pick what you like.

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Figure 10-13: A sample of a 0 height extrusion

. Note:

Add this extrude trick to your arsenal of tricks. It will save you tons of time.

We still lack a true point on the tip of our blade, so let’s use the same trick again. This time, select the edge that runs from the very tip of the blade to the inner edge. Click the Extrude dialog box button again. This time let’s use a base value of 0.5. It gives the tip a mean “I’ll cut you!” look.

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Figure 10-14: Getting closer

Finally, we need to get both halves of our blade to be one object. Delete your TurboSmooth modifier by right-clicking on it and selecting Delete. It’s okay; we’ll add it back in a bit. Select the bottom half of the blade and right-click on the Editable Poly modifier in your stack. Pick the Make Unique option. Remember, this bottom object was an instance of the top half. Now it’s broken free into its own object and any change you make to the top half won’t replicate to the bottom. We do this because Max won’t allow you to attach an instance to another instance of itself or to its original object. Now with the top half selected, click on Attach in your Editable Poly modifier under Edit Geometry. Pick the bottom half of the blade to attach. We now have a single object making up the blade! We just have to weld those open edges. Select the Border sub-object button and click and drag-select over your entire model. This will show any open edges and non-connected vertices your model has. In our case, this will be the outer edge of our blade.

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Figure 10-15: Both halves now attached

Ctrl-click on the Vertex sub-object button. This converts your open edge selection to the vertices that make up that open edge. Now click Weld. We now have a nice solid blade!

Figure 10-16: The blade now looking quite dull

Put another TurboSmooth modifier on your object, set Iterations to 2, check Isoline again, and go back under your Editable Poly modifier. Be sure to click the Show End Result button.

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Here we go again! The outer edge of the blade has been smoothed out! You know what to do about that though. Let’s click on one of the edges that makes up the outer edge and either click the Loop button or use the shortcut key that you’ve assigned to it.

. Note:

Again, the Loop selection tool is another thing I use religiously. You’re going to want to assign Loop and Ring to keys so you can quickly and easily select them. It’s amazing how much it speeds up the selection process!

With the entire outer edge selected, click on your Extrude dialog box button again. I used a setting of 1 — it’s enough to make a smoothed edge visible, but sharp enough to keep it looking as if it could cut something.

Figure 10-17: The final blade

You may not see a major change from Figure 10-14 to Figure 10-17. In Figure 10-14 we have an open edge that prevents the smoothing around the sharp edge of the blade from occurring. Having an open edge is okay, but doesn’t look as nice as a

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slightly smoothed edge. Ultimately it’s up to you, the artist. I prefer the nice finished edge myself. That’s it! You’ve created your first high-poly blade. You’re well on your way to becoming a digital blacksmith. Let’s tackle the hilt now!

Creating the Hilt The hilt is a little more complex. Let’s just think about it for a second. Hilts are always symmetrical, so we can model half and mirror it. It’s always best to go through and rough out the shapes first, so let’s do just that. We’ll start by creating the part of the hilt that connects directly to the blade. For this we’ll turn on snaps and go to the Top view. Create a box where the blade ends. Set Width Segs to 6 and Height to around 4.5 units.

Figure 10-18: The hilt connection

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Make sure the blade is at least flush with this box, although it’s fine to have objects piercing other objects. As you can see in the Front viewport, the hilt connection was actually created on the grid but the blade is slightly lower than the grid. We can fix this by converting the box into an Editable Poly object. Once converted, select the vertices that make up the “bottom” of the box. Right-click on the Move tool to bring up the Move tool dialog box. Type –4.5 units in the Z box. This will allow us to move the vertices into the exact place we want them. Next let’s add a bit of shape to the box. Remember how we set the width segments to 6? These vertices will allow us to create some detail. In the Top view, drag the bottom middle vertex down. Now grab the vertices on each side of the middle vertex and pull these down a little. This will create a curve with a nice transition back into the box.

Figure 10-19: The new hilt connection

So now that we have the basic hilt connection, let’s move on to the hilt grip. In the Front viewport, or whatever viewport is pointing down the blade for you, create a cylinder that butts up against and is centered on the hilt connection piece we just

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made. (See Figure 10-20.) Here are the settings I ended up with for my cylinder: Radius: 9.3 Height: –73 Height Segments: 6 Sides: 12

. Note:

While creating a cylinder in any of the isometric views (Top, Right, Left, Front, Back, Bottom) you won’t be able to see the height of the cylinder. However, if you look at the Create panel, you’ll see the height changing as you move your mouse around. Click once more as you normally do to finally create the cylinder.

In the Top viewport, move the cylinder flush with the hilt connection on the side opposite the blade. Right-click on the Scale tool to bring up the Scale tool dialog. Type 45 into the Y slot to scale the cylinder on its y-axis 45%. This should make your cylinder fit within your hilt connection piece.

Figure 10-20: The rough hilt grip

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Let’s give the grip a little more form. Convert the cylinder to an Editable Poly object and in the Top viewport scale your edge loops as shown in Figure 10-21.

Figure 10-21: Scaled edge loops

This gives the grip a rounded form that looks like it would be comfortable to hold. For now let’s do a really simple pommel. A pommel is an adornment that balances the sword or dagger for use. Ours is going to be just a sphere for now. In the Top viewport create a sphere that overlaps the grip of the dagger. Keep the size within reason, and make sure that the flat end of the grip is fully inside the sphere. Figure 10-22 shows what I ended up with.

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Figure 10-22: Hilt pommel

Finally, we need the cross guard. This keeps the user’s hand from sliding down the dagger. In the Left viewport create a cylinder in the middle of the flat side on the hilt connection piece. My cylinder’s parameters were: Radius: 2.6 Height: 20 Segments: 6 Sides: 8 Now, take the cylinder and slide it on the x-axis in your Top viewport until the end of the cylinder is flush with the side of the hilt connection piece. Convert it to an Editable Poly object, and delete the polygon on the now exposed end of the cylinder.

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Figure 10-23: The beginnings of the cross guard with an open end

Select the Border sub-object button and then select the open end of the cylinder. Shift and drag away from the grip on the x-axis of your Perspective viewport. Voilà! You have just created polygons along the entire length that you dragged.

Figure 10-24: The new polygon strip

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This is what some call “strip modeling” due to your ability to model with strips of polygons. It’s an amazingly useful method to create characters or other flowing shapes. An interesting thing about strip modeling is that you can’t create polygons along a non-border edge. We’ll go into more detail about strip modeling later in the book. Now that you’ve created these polygons, we can move them just like any other polygons. Dragging the border makes the polygons a little longer than the original cylinder. While we still have this border selected, let’s go ahead and close it off. Click the Cap button located in your Editable Poly’s Edit Borders rollout. This creates a face and closes off this border. In this case, it created a nice round polygon to cap off the end of the cylinder.

Figure 10-25: The new end cap polygon

I think it would be nice to bend the section that we just created, but if we apply a Bend modifier to the whole object we’ll bend the original section. Select the entire new section of the cylinder we’ve just created and click the Detach button. This is located in your Editable Poly’s Edit Geometry rollout. Name

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the object whatever you like, and make sure the two check boxes are unchecked. Click OK. Select the new object we’ve created. As we’ve done before, create a few edge loops down the cylinder. I created five new edge loops.

Figure 10-26: The new edge loops

Make sure no sub-objects are selected and apply the Bend modifier to this new object. Set the Bend axis to Z and type in a value of 90 for the angle. Whoa! The Bend modifier got a little carried away there and entirely moved our object. However, we can still modify this effect. After all, we have the bend we were looking for; it’s just in the wrong place!

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Figure 10-27: The Bend modifier getting a little carried away

Click the + next to the Bend modifier in your stack and click Gizmo. In your Perspective view, grab the gizmo on its x-axis and pull it over until you’re at the end of the cylinder. The whole time you’re moving the gizmo you’ll see your new bent section coming back into alignment. The goal is to line this section up as best as possible.

Figure 10-28: The aligned section

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Almost there! I know it seems like a lot of steps right now, but you’ll gain speed with practice. Now we want to reattach our newly bent section to the original cylinder. Just click on your original cylinder, click Attach under Edit Geometry, and pick your bent piece. Select the Border sub-object button, and in your Perspective viewport click and drag over the edges where we detached the two objects.

Figure 10-29: The detached edges

With these edges selected, we can easily weld them back together. Shift-click the Edge sub-object button to select the edges that make up this border and then click the Weld button. If it doesn’t weld your edges together, you may have to tweak the weld values. Just open up the Weld dialog box and change the threshold. I don’t really like how skinny the bar is on my dagger so I applied a Push modifier of 0.4 to it to fatten it up a bit. After adding it, I collapsed my stack by right-clicking on the stack and clicking Collapse Stack. So that’s the rough shape of the

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cross guard. For a finishing touch, I attached a little 12-sided cylinder positioned on the end of the bent section.

Figure 10-30: The finishing touch

Make sure your cross guard section is selected and then click the Mirror button. Select Instance for your mirrored object and then drag it over to the other side of the hilt connection piece. Now you can really see our dagger taking shape!

Creating the Sheath Now that we have a dagger, we need a nice little sheath to put it in. This is pretty easy considering we have already modeled the shape of the blade, which we’ll use as a base. Select the blade and Shift-click on it to clone it. Be sure it’s set to Copy and not Instance; otherwise, we’ll be changing our blade and that’s not good. After hitting OK, Max automatically selects the new copy you’ve created. Right-click and select the Isolate Selection option. This hides everything else and allows us to come back to the scene state that we were in before we isolated the object. It comes with a handy little Exit button dialog that you can drag off to the side for now.

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Moving on, delete your TurboSmooth modifier by rightclicking and picking Delete. Now apply a Shell modifier to your cloned blade. This takes the faces and makes them into a solid negative shape to encase our blade. Don’t change the Inner Amount setting, as this would make the sheath penetrate into our blade. Change Outer Amount to something around 1.7. This gives our sheath a nice thickness. Set Segments to 5. This gives us some control loops to keep our smoothing under control later.

Figure 10-31: The beginnings of our sheath

Finally, add a TurboSmooth modifier on it! That was easy, wasn’t it? Just click that Exit Isolation Mode button on the window you moved off to the side.

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Figure 10-32: The simple sheath

. Note:

The Isolate tool is very cool if you have things hidden that you still want to be hidden when you come out of Isolation mode. However, it messes up your viewport’s pivot and rotation when you come out of it. To fix this, right after clicking the Exit button, press Shift+Z. Similar to Ctrl+Z (Undo), this undoes the last camera change. This will keep the original camera pivot you had before you exited Isolation mode.

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Adding Details Now, keeping in mind everything you’ve learned so far, this is where you can go crazy! Just add whatever you like, further refine the objects that we’ve roughed in, or just throw a TurboSmooth on the rough object shapes and add some control loops to keep that mushing under control. Don’t forget about your beauty render setup. Give it a good lighting pass. Sneaking this in a bit early is okay too. Sometimes I like to light my scene a little before I even show a screen capture of it. Figure 10-33 shows the final model I ended up with. I modeled one gem and reused it by copying and scaling it all over the place. I also used renderable splines and cleaned up some of the geometry around the cross guard. Just spend a little time thinking about what kind of details you could add, and go crazy. I highly suggest going to some image search engine like Google Images and searching for daggers to get inspired to create your own details.

Figure 10-33: The final dagger

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Chapter 11

Organic Modeling Exercise: Roughing Out a Character Now that you’ve experienced a little modeling with mainly modified primitives, let’s delve a little deeper. Starting with a primitive and blocking out with primitives is a fast way to get your shapes down, similar to gesture drawing. Keep in mind there really is no wrong method for modeling a character as long as your edge loops are correct. Some like to model a solid form (like me), and some like to model each piece of the body and add them together later. A key to modeling the human form is reference images! Unless you are a hard-core veteran, you’re going to need reference to look at while you model. Those who have modeled characters for years may not need reference. I started out using front/side/back reference images for the human form, and I really suggest this method to new modelers. You’ll eventually get to where you don’t need the side/front view references and can model purely off of a couple of reference pictures of someone in any pose. You can go to a good number of web sites for these types of images, but if you

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have the money I can’t stress how cool www.3d.sk is. It has some of the best isometric reference pictures of any web site. For now, I’ve sketched an extremely simple generic human form for you to model with.

Figure 11-1: The quick and dirty reference

This isn’t the best reference in the world, but it will work for the basic form. You can grab the image from the downloadable file at www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008. I’ve also included the Max scene of my isometric view reference scene setup. If you don’t feel like using a front/side reference for this chapter or don’t have access to the Internet at the moment, you can still just eyeball it, although it will be harder. If this is the case, just skip the next section.

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Setting Up the Isometric View Reference Get your picture and take it into your favorite image editing software such as Photoshop. Crop the area you want to use and then set your image’s width to a power of 2 (128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048…). You may also do image sizes that are non-square like 1024 x 2048.

. Note:

The reason we do this is because Max likes images that are a power of 2, just like most game engines. If you don’t make the image a power of 2, it will almost surely come in very blurred and muddy. Not a very pretty image to work off of!

After you have your image all set up, go into Max and create a new scene. Create a rectangle spline using snaps in your Front viewport. Make it a perfect square if your image is a perfect square. Otherwise, make it non-square just like your image looks. Typically I use a width and length of 200 x 200. This is the dark grid square around the center of the grid in the Front view. After you’ve got your rectangle, right-click on its stack and convert it to an Editable Poly.

Figure 11-2: The beginnings of our image plane

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Now you’ve got a single polygon plane that we can apply our image to. Apply an Unwrap UVW modifier to it and collapse the stack.

. Note:

We’ll talk about the Unwrap UVW modifier in Chapter 17. Basically this modifier allows us to apply an image to the geometry and that image will show up correctly on that surface.

Open the Material Editor and open the Maps rollout. Click on the Diffuse slot and pick Bitmap. Now find your image file through the Open File dialog box. Find the Self-Illumination numeric box and set it to 100. Drag and drop this material onto the plane you’ve created in your viewport. Clone the image and rotate it 90 degrees so you can see it in your Left viewport. With the plane that is visible in your Front viewport, right-click on the Move tool and in the Absolute: World section under Y, give it a value of 500. This moves our plane out of the way so we can model in the middle of the scene. Now in the Left viewport, select the plane you see here and move this one 500 units on its x-axis.

Figure 11-3: The positions of our image planes in the Perspective view

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Almost done — I promise! Now pick the Front view plane again and clone it. Using the Mirror tool, mirror it on its y-axis and move it to –500 on its y-axis. This will be our back plane. Now all that’s left is to center this image on the x, y, and z axes. Make the y-axis pass straight through the middle of the front of the character depicted in the image. Do the same with the back and side views.

Figure 11-4: The front image plane centered on the x-axis

Figure 11-5: The side image plane centered on the y-axis

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Finally, select all three of your image planes and right-click. Open up their properties and check the Backface Cull option if it isn’t checked already. This will allow you to see through the back of the image plane so you can model without your side/front/back views being obstructed!

Figure 11-6: The Backface Cull option in the object properties

The final step is to freeze the image planes so you can’t select them when you didn’t mean to. However, by default Max applies a very matte gray material to any frozen object. This would prevent us from being able to see our reference. To turn off the freezing in gray, go back into your image plane’s properties and uncheck the Show Frozen in Gray check box. Click OK.

Figure 11-7: The Show Frozen in Gray option in the object properties

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Now all you have to do is right-click on your selected image planes to access your quad menus and click Freeze Selection. By default this is located in the upper-right quad menu. Now your image planes will be unselectable. This is great while you’re trying to model over them so you don’t ever accidentally select them. To unfreeze the object, just go back to the quad menu where you found Freeze Selection and this time choose Unfreeze All. Whew! That’s how you set up a reference scene.

Torso In the following sections I’ll show you my method of modeling. It’s kind of an adaptation of strip modeling and box modeling. As you practice, you’ll come up with your own methods of creating shapes. During this process you may get frustrated, but keep at it. It will take some time to get used to working in this much detail with polygons. Keep in mind that I want you to follow me as best you can without adding your own edge loops. We want to create the human form with only a handful of edges and polygons. The more edges we have, the more of a headache we’ll have if we want to make changes. To start out, let’s create a box in the Front viewport that is vaguely the size of the chest. I start with a box for nearly all my organic shapes.

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Figure 11-8: The box over the chest area. Left, Front view; right, Left view.

Set Length to 2, Width to 4, and Height Segments to 3 to give us enough edges to add form to this box. To make sure the box is centered on the x-axis, right-click on the Move tool and set its X location to 0. Turn this box into an Editable Poly, and in the Front view, delete the right half of the box.

Figure 11-9: The box cut in half

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. Note:

Want to see through your object to anything behind it but still be able to edit it and see the edges? Hit Alt+X to enter X-Ray mode. This is per object and is a huge help while modeling! You can even select a group of objects and turn X-Ray mode on and off. This is another tool I use every single day.

Click the Mirror button and be sure it is set to Instance. Again, this keeps us from having to redo work we do on one side of the model.

. Note:

Although mirroring on the x-axis is a very quick way to model, you need to keep the vertices that make up that open border down the middle in the exact middle. If they are off-center, they’ll show a gap or an overlap. Moving these vertices to the middle is pretty easy. Most of the time you can just click one of the edges, select the loop, and scale on the x-axis. This gets all of the vertices into a straight row. Then right-click on your Move tool and zero out the X coordinate box. This will place all of those vertices where they should be again.

In the Front and Side views, move the vertices to match the lines of the torso. Let’s round it out and make it a little less boxy.

Figure 11-10

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In the Top view, grab the corners of the box and pull them in to round the corners. I went ahead and pulled the inner faces out a little more to give it a rounder, fuller look. I also gave the upper area a downward slope to represent the chest/neck area.

Figure 11-11: Left, before; right, after

. Note:

Remember, using isometric pictures can speed things along, but sometimes you have to be able to break away from the pictures and look at just your model in the Perspective view to make sure everything is looking as it should. Using only isometric pictures will sometimes give you a very boxy-looking character.

Now that we have a good base pec and ribs area, we can pretty much drag down and create the rest of the torso with ease. Delete all of the faces that make up the bottom of the current torso.

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Figure 11-12: The bottom faces to be deleted

This leaves us with a nice open border to extrude out and quickly create the abs area. Remember those handy tools I talked about? Now it’s time to really use them. Especially the Loop and Ring tools. Click on one of the bottom edges of the torso and use the Loop button or the key you’ve assigned to it. You’ll see that Max selected all of the edges that are on the bottom of your torso. This is a huge time-saver! We don’t have to manually select all of those edges by hand. Use the Loop tool religiously! In the Front viewport, hold Shift, grab the y-axis of the gizmo, and drag down. This will create faces based on the selected edges. Move this edge loop to around where a belt would be. Give it a nice slant toward the front to make it look nice and organic.

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Figure 11-13: The new polygons to represent the stomach and back

Now select one of the vertical edges of the new faces and hit the Ring button or the key you’ve assigned to it. Connect these edges. Now you’ll have an edge loop through the middle of these edges. Select the two vertical edge sections that made up that original edge we just divided and hit Ring again. Connect these edges. This divided our original edge into four sections. If you assign the Ring and Connect functionality to shortcut keys, this only takes about two or three seconds!

Figure 11-14: The new edge loops around the stomach

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Add one more edge loop about the belt line so we can taper the waist smoothly. Now all that’s left to do is tweak these edge loops. Grab the edges and pull them in around the waist to give it a natural taper.

. Note:

If you need to move any edge loops up or down the torso without affecting the shape too much, turn on edge constraints just under the Edit Geometry rollout of Editable Poly. This is an amazing little helper. Select an edge loop and drag it up and down. You’ll see that it stays in line with the edges that are perpendicular to your selected edge. This is a massive help if you just need to change some of the polygon flow without affecting your shape too much.

Figure 11-15 A natural waist taper

That’s all there is to creating the torso shape!

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Pelvis Alright, the pelvis is a tricky section. Imagine you are creating brief-style underwear. This is the best way to start the pelvis area. Start out by selecting the bottom of our torso section. Shift-drag this edge loop down again a little bit to give us the top elastic band of the “underwear.” Now grab the middle edge, about where the lower abs would be, and Shift-drag this down into the bottom of the pelvis region.

Figure 11-16: The beginnings of the pelvis

Add another edge loop using our Ring and Connect trick. Pull this edge loop out in the Side view to round out the front of the pelvis area. Grab the edge that is around the bottom of the pelvis region and Shift-drag this back to create the pelvis floor.

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Figure 11-17: The rounded pelvis area

Select the two innermost edges that would be just above the buttocks. Shift-drag these downward just a little. This time create the shape in stages. Pull the edge over to the rounded edge of the buttock. Shift-drag again and move this edge a little farther down the buttock. Do it once more and you should end up about where our pelvis floor ended up.

Figure 11-18: The buttocks region

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Let’s connect these two shapes to finalize the pelvis shape. Add an edge loop in the innermost polygon. This will form the round shape just before the crease where the buttocks meet. This also allows welding the edge from the pelvis floor to these new polygons that make up the buttocks.

Figure 11-19: The final pelvis

Weld the edge from the pelvis floor to the closest edge from the buttock polygons. That’s it! Go in and make little tweaks, moving the edges and polygons to round out the shapes. There shouldn’t be any harsh corners on the human body at this point.

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Legs Now let’s turn to the legs. In the Perspective viewport, grab the two bottom edges that are in the hip area.

Figure 11-20

Shift-drag these downward until you reach the knee.

Figure 11-21: The start of the leg

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Go back and add enough edge loops to give it the proper form in the Front view. Return to the Side view and make sure the new edges line up with the leg there too.

Figure 11-22: New edge loops to round out the outside of the leg

In the crotch area, grab the edge where the leg would connect to the pelvis. Again, Shift-drag this edge down to the knee, adding the same number of edge loops you added to the other side of the leg. This will allow us to keep a nice even edge loop around the entire leg later.

Figure 11-23: The inner leg with a matching number of edge loops

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Select the edges that make up the front border of each side of the legs that we’ve created. Click Bridge and you’ll see Max create polygons between the edges that we had selected!

Figure 11-24: Left, the borders selected; right, after the Bridge operation

Select the newly created horizontal edge loops and use Connect on them. Drag this edge forward to round out the front of the leg.

Figure 11-25: The rounded front of the leg

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Select the edges that make up the back border of the sides of the leg strips we have created and repeat the Bridge and Connect operations. Pull this new edge out to round out the back of the leg also.

Figure 11-26: The rounded back of the leg

Use the Chamfer tool on this edge to split it into two and round out the back of the leg a little more.

Figure 11-27

Using the Border sub-object selection method, select the hole that is separating the upper leg from the buttock section. Convert this selection to edges and click the Weld dialog box

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button. Scrub the value up until the two sections weld to each other.

Figure 11-28: The completed buttocks region

Here comes the easy part! Select the open border that is around the knee area. Shift-drag this down to the ankle and scale it down in size to match the reference. Remember to check your Front and Side views!

Figure 11-29: The start of the lower legs

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Now add four edge loops around the newly created edges.

Figure 11-30: The new edge loops

Using a combination of Move, Rotate, and Scale, place these edge loops to make up the calf muscle. Rotating them forward slightly also gives them an organic flow.

Figure 11-31: The newly created lower legs (Perspective, Front, and Side views)

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I’m not going to have you model out a detailed foot, as it’s just too advanced at this stage. Feet still give me a hard time as they are a combination of many shapes. For now, let’s just model a sock shape. Shift-drag downward with the open border selected until you get to about the middle of the heel. In the Side view, rotate this edge loop until one side is at the bottom of the heel and the other is in the crease of the ankle on the top of the foot.

Figure 11-32: The start of a simple foot

In the Left view, with the open border selected, Shift-drag to the end of the toes. This loop will be a little strangely shaped due to the rotation of the loop we just dragged it off of. Not to worry — just scale it horizontally and vertically in the Side view until you’ve reined it back into shape.

Figure 11-33: Continuing the simple foot

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Add more edge loops to round out the shape, scaling them and rotating them into place.

Figure 11-34: Rounding out the foot a little more

Finally, select the open border once again and Shift-drag it out slightly. Scale it inward a little to hint at the toe shape. Hit Cap to add geometry to the tip of the foot so there aren’t any more open borders.

Figure 11-35: The capped toe area

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Arms In this section, I’m going to leave a little more up to your imagination. Just look at the pictures of my model if you’re having trouble. Let’s go back up to the shoulder area. The first step is to take the polygons in this area and create a round shape for the shoulder to come out of. Tweak the vertices until you have a relatively round area to create the shoulder.

Figure 11-36: Where the arm is going to connect

Extrude these polygons a little to give us some more polygons to form the shoulder.

Figure 11-37: The start of the shoulder

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Tweak the new vertices until you have a nice rounded shoulder similar to Figure 11-38.

Figure 11-38: The rounded shoulder

Delete the polygons that will make up the edges where we want the arm to connect and Shift-drag down to continue the arm.

Figure 11-39: Faces to delete to continue the arm

I made some additional tweaks to my shoulder to round it out a tiny bit more. With a little forethought you’ll see that you’re going to need more edges to make the shape of a round arm.

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Figure 11-40: Additional shoulder tweaks

Now that we have the shoulder out of the way, the hard stuff is done! Select that open border and Shift-drag downward until you reach where the wrist would be. Remember to scale and rotate the border appropriately.

Figure 11-41: The beginnings of the arm (Perspective, Front, and Back views)

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Go back and add a few more edge loops, scaling and rotating them into place.

Figure 11-42: The arms with added loops

This is where the reference image comes in handy. Remember, the bicep bulges out forward and then tapers in near the inside of the elbow. On the back of the upper arm, the deltoid bulges outward and back and the elbow comes to a little point. The forearm widens a little bit as it leaves the elbow. Finally, the arm tapers as it comes to the wrist.

Figure 11-43: The arm from the Side isometric view

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There are literally hundreds of subtle things about the arm that you’ll learn as you go. I still to this day use reference for arms because I honestly don’t know them all either. Let’s do some very basic hands. I’m not going to cover detailed hands here as they are very complex. Start off by selecting the wrist edges and Shift-drag them down to where the tips of the fingers would be. Then scale them a bit.

Figure 11-44: Dragging down to the tips of the fingers

Add a few edge loops to round the back of the hand.

Figure 11-45: Rounding out the back of the hand

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Select the side edges of the new polygons and Shift-drag them inward toward the body a little to give the hands some thickness.

Figure 11-46: Giving the hand a little thickness

With all but the top new edges selected, click the Bridge button. With this section closed off, select the open border that forms the tips of the fingers and hit Cap.

Figure 11-47: The newly created polygons

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With the edge near the palm selected, Shift-drag downward to start forming the palm and back of the thumb area. Finally, weld the vertex near the back of the hand.

Figure 11-48: The start of the thumb and palm

Grab the far left edge where the thumb would be and Shift-drag this out to the end of the thumb. This forms the back of the thumb. Add more edge loops to smooth it out.

Figure 11-49: The back of the thumb

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The thumb creation process is very much like the hand and fingers. Grab the edges of the strip that forms the back of the thumb and Shift-drag them toward the hand.

Figure 11-50: Adding thickness to the thumb

Select the now open back edges of the thumb and bridge them. Then select the open border end of the thumb and cap it.

Figure 11-51: The capped and bridged thumb from the back

That’s it! You have yourself a simple arm!

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Head To create the head, select the polygon that makes up the area where the neck would be and delete it. Now select the three edges that are left and Shift-drag them upward until you have the length you want. Add another edge loop in the middle and move this inward to round it out.

Figure 11-52: The modified neck area

Here’s a little trick to creating a base head shape. Create a box that’s about the size of the head. Apply a TurboSmooth modifier and set its iterations to 1. This will give the box a round shape that we can easily tweak. Next, tweak the vertices until you get the base shape of a head.

Figure 11-53: Basic head shape

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Delete the bottom faces of the head where the neck would connect. Also delete the right half of the head. Select the left half of the body and attach the left half of the head. Weld the neck to the bottom of the head. Feel free to add a couple of edge loops around the head and round out the head a little more.

Figure 11-54: The final basic head

That’s the basic shape of the head.

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Final Tweaks

Figure 11-55: What we have so far

Remember to go back over the model and tweak your poly flow. Make sure that your polygons for the most part accurately portray the shape that you want them to from all angles. Also remember that over a curved surface all of your polygons should be, for the most part, the same distance apart; the only exception is when you need to add more detail to a joint. We’ll talk about this in depth later. Figure 11-56 shows what I ended up with after tweaking the topology and adding some detail to the pectoral area.

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Figure 11-56: Nearly finished

Finally, after you’re happy with your character, select the object that makes up the right half of the character. Click on this half’s stack and select Make Unique. This breaks the “Instance” connection to the object that makes up the other half. Now, with the right half still selected, scroll down to the Edit Geometry rollout, click the Attach button, and immediately click on the left half. This will merge the two objects together into a single object. Now we have a single object, but we still have that pesky open edge. In Border sub-object mode, click and drag-select the entire character. This will select any open edge on the character. (We’re mainly worried about the big seam down the middle here.) Convert the selection to edges by holding Ctrl and clicking on the Edge sub-object mode button. Using the Weld dialog box option, drag up and down on the threshold until the entire seam is welded together. Be sure you don’t set your threshold too high; you don’t want to accidentally grab vertices that you don’t want to weld together.

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Figure 11-57: The final simple male base

Congratulations! You’ve just created your first human character.

Figure 11-58: Isometric views of the final male base

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Chapter 12

Advanced Modeling Exercise: Creating a Suit of Fantasy Armor Starting Out Fantasy has always been a favorite genre of mine, especially the armor and weapons! Starting such a suit of armor can be quite daunting, as you might not know where to start. I’ll walk you through the process step by step as I figure out where I want to take this suit of armor. Using this technique you can create a suit of armor or clothing for any character very quickly. Once you have your base character, it’s extremely easy to add things to it this way. We won’t be modeling off of any concept or reference this time, so I’m Figure 12-1: The finished suit of armor

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going to use the male that we completed in Chapter 11 as a base.

Figure 12-2: The male base from Chapter 11

I want to give our character a little more bulk and style. To do this, select the entire male base and apply a Push modifier on him. Based on my scale, I added a push value of 1.0, but you may need to adjust this value if you modeled on a different scale than I did. I also grabbed the shoulder vertices and scaled them a little bit to make his shoulders slightly larger, as shown in Figure 12-3. Next I chopped the base in half and made a mirrored instance. I then turned his arms outward a little to give me a better angle to model the armor on the character. Figure 12-3: The adjusted base male

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Figure 12-4: The modified base

The Roughout Now let’s get started on the armor! Select the highlighted polygons on the shoulder and duplicate them by Shift-clicking and dragging a little. Clone this to a separate object.

Figure 12-5: The shoulder polygons selected in front and in back

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Now that we have our extra shoulder polygons, we’ll use them to create our shoulder armor. Use the Push modifier to modify the polygons a little and then scale them to a position and size you’re happy with.

Figure 12-6: The beginning of the shoulder armor

Let’s make the shoulder armor almost plate-like. Select all of the shoulder armor polygons we’ve created so far. Rotate them downward to give the shoulder another plate going downward toward the bicep.

Figure 12-7: Adding another plate to the shoulder armor

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Now we have a simple roughout of our shoulder armor. Let’s move on to the neck armor. Select the highlighted polygons.

Figure 12-8: The polygons to select for the neck armor in front and in back

Shift-click and drag these polygons a little to clone them to their own object as we did with the shoulder polygons. Then scale the neck polygons to a size that you’re happy with.

Figure 12-9: The new neck armor

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Next let’s create a belt. Select and clone the two rows of polygons around the waist, and modify the polygons as shown in Figure 12-10.

Figure 12-10: An armored belt (Front and Back views)

Now that we have the belt, we can make the armor that extends downward off of it. Just grab the lower polygons of the belt and Shift-drag them downward, flaring them out a little. I added a few edge loops to smooth it out.

Figure 12-11: The skirt-like leg armor

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We’ll make this work! It looks a little stupid right now, but we’ll fix that. With the skirt-like leg armor out of the way, let’s go back up and do the breastplate. Just select the polygons that make up the chest area and Shift-click and drag a little to create a breastplate. Scale and modify these polygons as you see fit.

Figure 12-12: The breastplate

Almost done with the roughout! Let’s add a little more detail to the shoulders. First, add a couple of edge loops to give the shoulder plate a little more style.

Figure 12-13: The new shoulder

Next, add another couple of plates of armor to the legs.

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Figure 12-14: Another couple of plates of armor around the legs

Add another couple of plates under the belt to give the belt a heavily armored look.

Figure 12-15: More armor around the belt

Finally, add a single accent sash coming down from the belt.

Figure 12-16: A single sash (of red) coming from the belt to add color

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That’s it for the roughout! We now know the general appearance of our model. Let’s add more detail.

Making the High-Poly Armor This is the easy, fun stuff! Start out by adding a Shell modifier to your belt, neck, and shoulder armor pieces. Just give them enough thickness to really seem like a heavy suit of armor.

Figure 12-17: Adding a Shell modifier

Select the polygons that make up the shoulder armor and use the Inset tool on them to give them a nice little polygon strip border. Then use the Extrude tool on the same polygons to add a little depth.

Figure 12-18: Inset and extrude inward.

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Figure 12-19: The final shoulder piece (with Shell and TurboSmooth applied)

Using the Shell modifier’s Segments feature, located just under Inner Amount and Outer Amount, add edge loops between the inner and outer amounts of the Shell modifier. This is hard to explain, but it will become apparent when you toy with the Segments setting. Apply a TurboSmooth and you’ll see how our segment edges will sharpen up these corners.

Figure 12-20: The objects with Shell and TurboSmooth

Now that we’ve used Shell and TurboSmooth on our base armor, let’s add a ring to hold these pieces together. Add a fairly good-sized ring to the middle of the back. I gave mine 16 segments. Collapse it into an Editable Polygon object.

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Figure 12-21: The ring

Now that we’ve got the ring, we need the leather straps connecting the ring to other objects to hold them together. Select the polygon loops highlighted in Figure 12-22 and Shift-click and drag to clone them into their own object. These will represent where the straps connect to the ring.

Figure 12-22: The polygon loops

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Select these polygons and delete them:

Figure 12-23: The polygons to delete

Once you have deleted these polygons, you can select the outer edge and then click and drag to create the strap itself.

Figure 12-24: The newly created straps

As we’ve done before, apply a Shell modifier and TurboSmooth to the straps to give them thickness.

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Figure 12-25: The straps

I wasn’t quite happy with the connection between the neck armor and the back armor, so I selected the following edges and used the Split feature in the Edit Edges rollout of Editable Poly.

Figure 12-26: The edges to split

Once you’ve split these edges, you can immediately see the difference if you go back to the top of your stack. It’s like making another plate. The Shell modifier is a beautiful thing if you work below it in your stack. It takes all of these simple little low-detail polygons and turns them into nice high-poly sheets of metal with thickness.

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Figure 12-27: The new plate of armor between the neck armor and back armor

I also wasn’t happy with the shape of the neck armor, so I’ve added some points to it by scaling the top edge.

Figure 12-28: The sub-d version of the neck armor

Moving down to the extra leg armor, scale the middle edges inward to form a sharper point and pull it outward.

Figure 12-29: The leg armor

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Select the horizontal edges of the leg armor and split them.

Figure 12-30: The edges to split

Now that the edges are split, we have the three plates of armor that we need to add shape to. Here I’ve added some bevels and loops to control the smoothing.

Figure 12-31: Left, the sub-d leg armor; right, the armor with Shell and TurboSmooth

Let’s jump back up to the shoulders. I wasn’t quite happy with the way they looked. I like the sharpness in the leg armor, so let’s add some of that to the shoulders now. First of all, I took the top plate and pulled the point way up, and then pulled the horizontal point outward. Then I added two edge loops down the middle of the shoulder armor to sharpen up the point.

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Figure 12-32: New pointed shoulder top plate

I like what we ended up with, but I think it needs a few more points. I cloned the bottom plate and moved/rotated it around until I had a couple of new nicely placed shoulder plates.

Figure 12-33: The final shoulder piece

Now that the shoulder piece is sharp, I think we should add that element to the neck armor too. All we need to do is extrude the top edge by Shift-dragging it upward. Collapse the selected edge in Figure 12-34 and pull the remaining vertex back a little bit.

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Figure 12-34: The new polygons on the neck piece

Figure 12-35: The final neck piece

Go back to the top of your stack and look at the results. Now let’s add the Shell and TurboSmooth modifiers to the plates that cover the buttock and groin areas. I sharpened the armor that covers the buttocks.

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Figure 12-36: The buttocks armor

Going back to the groin area, I decided to go with a more plated look. I also went ahead and added a leather strap around the armored belt to hold it together.

Figure 12-37: Groin armor and new belt strap

Add the Shell and TurboSmooth modifiers to the cloth hanging from the belt to give it some depth. For clarity I’ve had the skirt-looking armor hidden for a while. Unhide that if you hid yours too. I wanted to give it some kind of pattern, so I gave it a look similar to what Roman armor had, which was leather straps covering the legs. This removes that silly skirt look but still pulls off the coverage that we want.

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Figure 12-38: Left, the sub-d armor; right, the armor with Shell and TurboSmooth

That’s it! We’ve completed the base high-poly armor! Now all we have to do is add trim details. This allows your eye to read the difference between each piece of armor and makes the final armor really pop.

Final Details Let’s start by adding some trim on the shoulder pieces. Select the border of the shoulder armor with the Border sub-object button. Ctrl-click the Polygon sub-object button to convert this selection to polygons. This will select all of the polygons along the edge of the shoulder armor.

Figure 12-39: The outer rim selected

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Now clone these pieces as we’ve done before and set them to their own object. Apply a Shell modifier to the polygons and set the value so that those polygons stand up off of the shoulder piece just a little.

Figure 12-40: The trim with Shell applied

Now apply a TurboSmooth to the trim and you’ll see your new trim!

Figure 12-41: The final trim on the shoulder piece

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All we have to do is repeat this process on each of the pieces.

Figure 12-42: Each piece of armor that has trim on it

I also finished off the armor by adding a little decoration to the neck armor and a final ring around the belt line.

Figure 12-43: The final decorations

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That’s it! You’ve just created your first suit of fantasy armor. Go out and create lots of cool fantasy armor with this Shell and TurboSmooth trick!

Figure 12-44: The final suit of armor

Chapter 13

Advanced Organic Modeling Exercise: Creating a Human Head Now that we’ve gotten most of the basics of using the software out of the way, we can proceed to create a more detailed human face. A lot of people think, “I want to create a huge ape of a man who looks like he collects skulls to make into ashtrays.” That’s well and good, but let’s try a woman this time around. Starting out with women is, I think, a little more interesting — mostly because anyone can create an ape-man by going wild with his brow, nose, and lower jaw, but mastering the female face is an art form. I’m not saying I’m a master of the female form, and I’m definitely not saying that anyone can become one overnight. Keep practicing, and I’ll promise to do the same! Now, because I come from the game art field I have formed some habits that may seem odd. For instance, if I create a triangular face it’s most likely not going to stay that way. 297

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I do a lot of blocking in and cleaning up later! Let’s get started.

Getting Proper Reference Having good reference when you are starting out is absolutely imperative. You don’t have to model on top of it in the isometric views, but you do have to look at it and rotate around your model saying, “Does mine look like that?” Your model has to look good from the front, but if you turn it 45 degrees to the right does it look like a mutant? If so, you need to do some tweaking from that vantage point. We’ll talk about this more in depth in this chapter, but just keep in mind you’re not always going to have the luxury of looking at the model from straight on. In production you usually know exactly what you want when you start. If this is the case, you most likely have a drawing or photo as a reference. For this character, let’s just use my final render as our reference. After you get some good reference material, it is important to set it up in a way that will improve your workflow the most. When you are done with this chapter, your model should look something like this:

Figure 13-1: The final head with some sample hair planes

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Figure 13-2: Our final head isometric views

. Note:

For this chapter we won’t bother with hair, but I added some for Figure 13-1 to give you an idea of what it would look like with hair. Females do look a little strange without hair at first if you haven’t seen that before. After doing female models for a while, you’ll get over that initial shock.

If you have Internet access, you can grab the companion files at http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008/. You can then apply the reference images to a plane as we talked about in Chapter 11 and model with them behind your model. This will help you start out, but eventually you’ll want to find some other good reference. Mug shots are perfect reference for people. Other art web pages like www.3d.sk have great reference for human faces but require membership.

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The Eye Now that everything is set up, we can get started modeling! I like to use the strip modeling method for characters’ faces. Just “trace” over my final render and you can follow the process that I used to create her. Please note that I am going to show you only the major steps. I’ll leave it up to you to use what we have learned so far to read between the lines. (I do have a full-time job and a wife who likes to see me from time to time, or so I like to tell myself.) Let’s start off by creating the eye and the area around it. First create the bottom lid. Just follow the contour of her bottom eyelid down to the very beginning of her cheekbone. Remember to also make tweaks in the Side view to round out the eyelid and keep it from being flat!

Figure 13-3: The bottom eyelid

. Note:

You need to give the corners of the eyes a full edge, not just a single vertex. If you give the eyes a single vertex, we’ll end up with a very pinchy corner that looks unnatural. This is a common first-timer’s mistake.

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Next we need to go around the top eyelid.

Figure 13-4: The full loop of polygons around the eye

Now we need an extra edge loop to show where the eyelid creases. Also, let’s go ahead and add another edge loop on the border of the inside of the eye to give ourselves more eyelid polygons.

Figure 13-5: Rounding out the eyelid

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Figure 13-6: Perspective view of the eye area

Figure 13-7: Side view of the eye area

Go ahead and add another row of polygons around the outer edge of what we have done that go all the way up to the eyebrow and out to the cheekbone.

Figure 13-8: The new ring of polygons

Good stuff so far! Let’s continue by moving down to the mouth. By moving around, we take other things into account. For example, let’s say we have a number of edge loops in the mouth that we need to account for up in the nose or cheeks. By modeling them separately you’re not locking yourself into something bad down the road. Basically, if you model each piece of the face as you want it to look and then figure out how to connect the edge loops together, you’re better off.

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The Mouth Start by modeling just the pink area of the lips. Keep in mind that, like the eye corners, we need to give the mouth a full edge in the corners so as not to pinch them and make them look unnatural.

Figure 13-9: The beginning of the mouth

Use the Ring tool to select all of the edges and add one more edge loop to the lower lip to give the lips fullness.

Figure 13-10: The extra loop gives fullness to the lips.

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Add a couple of loops to make the lips flow into the face a little better.

Figure 13-11: New edge loops around the lips

Create another edge ring around the mouth, but this time exclude the polygons where the nose would be. Also, bring this new edge ring to the crease that is created when the model is smiling.

Figure 13-12: Another loop around the lips, and removed polygons where the nose will be

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. Note:

Using the proper edge loops allows for animators to actually make the character smile. Without these “smile lines,” you absolutely could not get the right deformation and therefore the expression wouldn’t read as a smile.

Add another edge ring for more smoothness.

Figure 13-13: Another edge loop added to smooth out and add laugh lines

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The Nose That’s enough time spent on the mouth. Let’s do the nose. I like to start the nose by creating a plane along the top of the nose and bringing it down around the tip and under so I get the basic idea of how it will look from the side and in the Perspective view. Pay close attention to how it looks in the Side view for now.

Figure 13-14: The beginning of the nose (Perspective view)

Figure 13-15: The beginning of the nose (Front view)

Figure 13-16: The beginning of the nose (Side view)

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Add the edges of the nostrils, basically matching up the vertices from the mouth portion.

Figure 13-17: The new outer edge of the nostril (Perspective view)

Figure 13-18: The new outer edge of the nostril (Side view)

Model the bottom of the nose, making sure to keep your quads intact.

Figure 13-19: The bottom of the nose

Select the faces highlighted in Figure 13-19 and use Inset on them. Then extrude and scale them until you have a decentlooking nasal cavity. Keep in mind you don’t have to go all the

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way to the sinuses; just enough to make it look as if it’s a nose!

Figure 13-20: The completed bottom of the nose

Let’s continue up the sides of the nose until we reach the brow line and then curl it outward along that line.

Figure 13-21: The completed nose

There! We ended up with a fine nose, if I do say so myself!

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Completing the Facial Area Let’s connect all our pieces and weld our vertices to make it one nice element. To tie up some loose ends, let’s complete our brow line by Shift-dragging the rest of the edges, and then complete the side of the nose by adding one more polygon row. Be sure to weld the vertices along the brow line too!

Figure 13-22: Now the nose is attached to the face.

Continue on with the cheek area.

Figure 13-23: Polygons added to form the cheek area

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Add another ring around the edges of the face. I also added some spheres here to show the eyeballs themselves. This helps to get a better idea of what the character will really look like. It does help, but it’s not required.

Figure 13-24: Added ring of polygons and spheres for eyes

At this point you can really see our face taking shape! Let’s move on to completing the rest of the head.

Completing the Head Here comes the easy part! Just extrude the faces along the top and sides of your facial area back along the profile of the Side view to get the rest of the head. Be sure to check your Perspective viewport to see if it’s got the proper flow to make the facial shape correct.

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Figure 13-25: Added polygons to the top of the face

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Figure 13-26: Side view

Continue adding more polygons to form the sides and top of the head. Add a ridge where the jawline is, and continue down the neck.

Figure 13-27: Continuing on…

Figure 13-28: Side view

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Simply finish off the back of the head by giving it that round shape that a head has.

Figure 13-29: Perspective view

Go ahead and weld the pieces together. You can still make tweaks to both sides of the head by selecting vertices in the Side view and moving them in the Perspective view. Finally, throw a TurboSmooth on her and look at the results.

Figure 13-30: Old man lady! Oh no!

To be honest, mine ended up looking a little old-mannish. This is just part of the process! It doesn’t mean you need to start over; it just means you need to tweak things around and get

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that look that you’re aiming for — in this case, some sort of beauty. I like to look up pictures of actresses or models and try to capture features that I think makes them look pretty or unique. At this point I also like to at least get some form of sample lighting instead of using Max’s default light setup. This will soften how the creases appear in your female face. Even a pretty woman in the wrong lighting can look bad.

Figure 13-31: Lit and with TurboSmooth applied

Here is the tweaking process I go through as I try to decide what I like and dislike about the head. I want to explain this because a lot of authors just show you a model in the process of being made that they’ve made over and over! This just isn’t realistic. They didn’t make that model the way they are showing you the first time. So why show you how to do it as if you knew exactly how to do it in the first place? Unfortunately, I can’t just tell you how to do this. It’s really training your eye to recognize what’s wrong with a specific shape and how to get it to where you want it to be. It may not be something I can tell you how to do, but I can show you the steps I took to get to my final head. These tweaks are purely Soft Selection tweaks and not changes in the flow of the polygons. I just select a vertex that is in the area I want to move, tweak the threshold on Soft Selection, and pull the area around until I’m happy with it in all viewports.

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Figure 13-32: Side view

Figure 13-33: Tweak…

Figure 13-34: And tweak…

Figure 13-35: And tweak again…

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Figure 13-36: The final head model

Figure 13-37: The final head model (Front and Side views)

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Chapter 14

Spline Modeling Understanding How Spline Modeling Works We have focused a lot on poly modeling up to this point, and I will continue to focus on it in later chapters as well. Poly modeling is probably the most common form of modeling in today’s major 3D packages. There are many ways to make things, however, and being familiar with just one way will limit your abilities and speed as a 3D artist. The way spline modeling works is that you create a “cage” and then apply a surface to that cage. Think of it like shaping digital chicken wire. Once you have your spline cage complete, you apply a surface to that cage. Now what is really nice is that you can go down in your layer stack and continue to modify your surface using the original splines. That means you can adjust your surface using the Bezier handles provided on the original splines, which actually gives you a lot more control than traditional polygon modeling.

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Creating the Spline Cage Let’s use the Spline tool to create a spline cage in the Perspective viewport. I don’t want to make anything specific right now; I just want to show you two different ways to create the cage. Start off by creating a generic shape in your Front viewport. Try not to make it too complicated. Let’s use only four or five vertices. The more you create, the longer it will take to create the cage, so don’t go too crazy. Also, you don’t have to do it all in one spline. You can make multiple lines as long as your vertex count matches up with the lines and it resembles the surface of a model.

Figure 14-1: A single line

The next thing I want to do is adjust the handles. By default they are probably set to Corner. Let’s just make them all Smooth instead for right now. Go into Vertex mode, highlight all the vertices, and right-click. In the upper-left quad, select Smooth. Your spline will smooth out, getting rid of all your edges.

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Figure 14-2: The smooth line

All we want to do now is copy this spline. Do a Shift-drag to the left and make sure you set it to Copy. You should have two identical shapes now in your Perspective viewport. I then dragged one of the vertices up a little bit to give one side a little variation.

Figure 14-3: Two lines

Now it’s time to begin creating the actual cage. The goal is to connect these two splines with segments, similar to edges and polygons. Activate the Snaps Toggle button and set it to Endpoint. This will snap your cursor to the vertices in your spline. What we need to do is just create individual splines between these two lines. Using the Line tool, snap a new spline vertex to vertex (like connect-the-dots).

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Figure 14-4: The now connected top and bottom end points

. Note:

Left-click to start your connecting spline, and left-click to snap it to its corresponding vertex, then right-click to finish.

Go ahead and attach all of your line objects together now for simplicity. Keep in mind you don’t have to actually weld anything here. The Surface modifier will do all of that for us! Keep your vertices broken in the corners for now. This will make your life somewhat easier. This is why I used the Endpoint snap. It will create all of your vertices exactly on top of one another. They don’t have to be perfectly on one another, but the closer the better. To add a little dip in the middle, we’ll add two more lines. First you need a place for the lines to connect to. Select your spline and find the Refine button. Click this button to go into Refine mode. This will allow you to add vertices anywhere you click along your line without changing its shape. It just works it in on the flow of the line. Figure 14-5 shows that I’ve added a few vertices near the middle of each line segment we’ve created.

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Figure 14-5: The new middle points of each attached line segment

Using the same technique as before with the Endpoint Snaps tool, create a couple of lines crossing each other. I also added a middle vertex to these lines and pulled them inward to give the surface an inward slope. I also went ahead and attached these to our collection of lines.

Figure 14-6: The final collection of lines that will make up our surface

This is our cage in all its glory!

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Applying a Surface to the Spline Cage Now that our spline is finished and is a single object, we want to apply a Surface modifier to our cage. Select Surface in the Modify panel. Immediately after you do that, your cage should have a surface applied to it. If it does not, then that means you simply need to check the Flip Normals check box in the Surface modifier’s Parameters rollout. Max doesn’t really know if you want the surface to point up or down, so it may choose wrong. If it does, just check the box and you’re good to go.

Figure 14-7: The cage now has a surface.

At the bottom of the Parameters rollout, you’ll notice the Patch Topology area. The Steps setting will dictate how smooth or detailed you want your surface. Let’s just make it 5.0 for right now; that’s pretty smooth. We have successfully created a surface with a spline cage!

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Adjusting the Splines I know the spline surface doesn’t look like much right now, but that’s because we haven’t moved anything yet. Right now you’re probably thinking, “Hang on! I could have done that in three seconds with a sub-d cage!” And you would be right, but spline surfaces are good for creating cloth surfaces. Let’s go to the bottom of our layer stack and select Line again to take us to the original spline cage. Also make sure that the Show End Result button is pressed. (This allows us to see how our modifications to the cage affect the end result.) Now go into Vertex mode and start moving some of the vertices around. Note that you’ll have to draw a selection box around any vertices you want to select. Why? Because we didn’t weld those vertices together. If you just click on one, you’ll leave the others behind, and that will destroy the surface. The surface is held together based on the fact that the vertices are close to each other. I’m going to move just the middle vertices around a bit to show you how a surface can quickly go from an inset to a bulge.

Figure 14-8: A bulge using the same edges but modified

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Figure 14-9: A fairly smooth surface using the same edges but modified

As I said before, the Surface modifier is just one more way to create a shape. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to work it into the set of tools you use. But one day you may come across a project where you need to create an object and you’ll remember back to the Surface modifier and say, “Boy, am I glad I know about this tool!” I would encourage you to go back to your vertices and adjust your vertex settings from Smooth to Corner, Bezier, Bezier Corner, etc., and practice adjusting your splines using the handles provided. Good luck!

Chapter 15

Spline Modeling Exercise: Creating the Hull of a Boat In the previous chapter we talked about how to use Max’s spline tools to make a very basic spline surface. In this chapter we’ll use those techniques to create the basic outline of a boat hull. This is actually a perfect example of when to use spline tools. You’ll also use the spline tools if you are doing certain types of architectural modeling, such as making a complex roof shape. It’s great to spline out the shapes you need from the top and side views and then apply your surface. Trying to do something similar using polygons can be brutal. Unfortunately, most people (even seasoned professionals) live and die using box and strip modeling as their only techniques. I’m not going to use any reference this time around, but if you need to use some form of reference, then by all means go get some! The very first thing that I want to do is create the side profile of our boat.

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Figure 15-1: The side profile of the boat

. Note:

When you make your initial shape, make something very basic. Don’t go too wild with the number of vertices you are using to make up the shape!

Next, we grab the area that would be the top edge of the boat and pull it outward a little.

Figure 15-2: Pulling the top edge outward (Perspective view)

. Note:

Figure 15-3: The Front view

You can adjust the smoothness of your splines by adjusting the spline interpolation in the Interpolation rollout of your Line modifier. I kept mine at 6.0. You should also know that a higher interpolation may result in a higher polygon count.

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With our basic boat shape complete, let’s start making the connecting edges. These are the edges that go inside the outline we created. This is what will give our boat its rounded shape. It will really help you to turn on snaps and set the snaps to use end points. This will make you snap to the vertices on the boat hull that have already been created. You can then go back and add extra vertices later to round out the details.

Figure 15-4: Connecting edges

We need to select the inner vertex and pull these outward to give the boat that nice rounded bottom effect, as shown below.

Figure 15-5: Front and Perspective views

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We have enough to create our surface now. Let’s go ahead and apply the Surface modifier to see where we stand.

Figure 15-6: The Surface modifier applied

It’s looking pretty good! This is a perfect starting point for our basic hull. Remember that we are using the splines to create a basic shape, not to create the boat from start to finish. Since we are happy with this shape, we are ready to collapse it to polygons.

. Note:

The number of surface steps determines how many polygons you will have when you collapse it. I don’t recommend having any steps when you collapse your surface, so set Steps to 0. You can always TurboSmooth the shape if you want to add more polygons.

Set Steps to 0 and collapse your new surface. With our final polygon layout completed and collapsed, the next step is to mirror the hull. Make sure when you mirror it you have selected Copy, not Instance. Check and see if you’re happy with the result.

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Figure 15-7: The mirrored boat hull

If you’re happy with the results, attach the mirrored copy to your original boat hull half. After looking at the hull, I wasn’t happy with how narrow it was so I scaled it a little to make it wider. Don’t forget to weld your vertices! This should leave only the top rim as an open edge.

. Note:

The Border sub-object button (number key 3 on the keyboard) is a great way to find any pesky open edges you might have!

Obviously we can’t sail away in our boat if it doesn’t have any thickness to it. Right now it’s paper-thin and has no interior. Fortunately Max includes that wonderful modifier that I love so much — the Shell modifier!

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Apply the Shell modifier and adjust the Inner Amount and Outer Amount settings to your liking. You should have something like this:

Figure 15-8: The Shell modified hull

Now that we have added thickness to our geometry, we need to up the polycount to smooth out our boat. Add the TurboSmooth modifier now to the top of your stack and up your iteration count to 3.0. That will give you a nice smooth result.

Figure 15-9: The smoothed boat

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When using TurboSmooth in conjunction with the Shell modifier, you can easily adjust the sharpness of the polygon loop created by the Shell modifier. Just raise and lower the Segments number and you’ll see how that round edge goes flat once again. Typically I’ll use a value of about 5 unless the inner and outer values are rather large.

Now you can add your own details. I’ve turned the shape into a canoe by adding a couple of seats and a support beam underneath it. Try that out if you like.

Figure 15-10: The final boat with added details

That’s it for our spline modeling exercise. Go make your daddy proud!

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Chapter 16

Becoming an Advanced Modeler/Artist Don’t Make Common Industry Mistakes There is a huge difference between those who model well and those who work well on an art team. Here are some tips to keep your fellow artists from going insane and wanting to duct-tape you to the breakroom wall. n

Try your best to take critiques well. If you are looking to get into the 3D art industry, you’re without a doubt going to work in a team setting. You’re also going to have other artists coming over and looking at what you’ve been working on. Unless you work with a bunch of mutant artists who don’t share their opinions, you’re going to get a few critiques — and when I say a few, I mean hundreds per character. Listening to these critiques is crucial. You’ve likely been looking at the model for hours upon end and have lost sight of some of the smaller issues you may be having. Don’t be offended if 333

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someone throws out an opinion; they are simply trying to help you out. Even if they are driving you insane with “Can you move that bag over about half a unit?” Listen and take in all this information, and then go back in and re-evaluate some of these areas. Some ideas may be good, some may not, but at least be willing to explore different options. n

Devise a naming convention and stick to it. If you are sharing files with another artist, please, for the love of God and all that is holy, keep the naming conventions in place that the team has been using. And if you’re tasked with creating the naming convention, label your files with something like “Female_Head_34,” rather than “H34fdas.”

n

Always keep your polygon flow clean. This will make your life a whole lot easier. By keeping your polygon flow clean you’ll be saving yourself time everywhere down the line from high-poly modeling to texturing. Also, if another artist needs to come behind you and either use something from your original model or make a tweak, he won’t make fun of you for being a wall-eyed artist who models with his feet.

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Give the poor animators a break! Keep in mind that your model is not a statue! Unless it literally is a statue… then you can ignore me. If the character you are modeling is a real, honest-to-god character that will be animated, add some extra edge loops for the animators, won’t ya? By adding edge loops to areas of the model such as the neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, back, stomach, knees, and ankles you’ll be saving the animator from wanting to twist your neck because he can’t make the character bend forward 20 degrees or look left or right 20+ degrees. This won’t just keep his blood pressure down, but will also make your character look much better in the end.

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Don’t grow an ego. This is my biggest pet peeve of any of the issues listed here. So, you made it into the industry? That’s great! Don’t forget who got you there, buddy. The people who were growing with you and helped you out will (hopefully) make it themselves. Guess who will be working with you down the road? Yeah, that guy from the forums who you told, “That model sucks and you’ll never be a professional.” The industry is pretty small, and burning bridges is not smart. So many people I know from forums or through other artists have gotten into the industry since I got in. Please be courteous to your fellow artists. Give back if you can! Write tutorials, help a guy out by painting over an area of a model that you think would look better a different way, or just be supportive of someone. Who wants to work with the guy who thinks he’s God’s gift to man? That sucks.

Understand How Animation Will Affect Your Geometry If you are creating geometry that will eventually be animated, then you have to model it properly. A lot of beginners worry about creating a model that looks good in the pose that they are modeling in, but they don’t think past their own task. You should understand at least the basics of anatomy and where to create proper edge loops in order for your character to deform properly.

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Figure 16-1: A simple shoulder

Figure 16-1 is how most beginners would start out and that’s fine. It’s a learning step. This look is created by extruding the arms straight out of an “armhole.” It’s not very aesthetically pleasing. If you look at your chest and hold out your arms, you’ll notice that a very distinct line is drawn from the bottom of your pectoral muscles, and it flows up the front of your armpit and all the way around your deltoid, or shoulder muscle.

Figure 16-2: Our base male with a nice shoulder connection

You can see this very clearly when looking at bodybuilders. In fact, due to their extremely low body fat during competitions, they make great reference if you are unsure exactly how muscles are laid out under the skin.

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If you create proper edges that follow the flow from the chest to the shoulder, you will get very realistic and proper deformation in your character. In Figure 16-2, our male model has the correct edge loops showing the pectoral-deltoid connection. If you lift the arm, you can see how the bottom of the chest flows up into the shoulder intentionally. You can also see how accurately it deforms when moved. If you tried to do the same rotations with the extruded arm character in Figure 16-1, it would never deform properly and would not look at all natural.

Figure 16-3: The shoulder in various positions

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Likewise, when dealing with the face you need to use similar rules. You can’t simply create the profile of a face and assume it will deform properly. There are many things to consider, which we touched on in Chapter 13. When the character smiles, will his cheeks be able to rise properly? Will your character have appropriate laugh lines? What about the eyes? Will an animator be able to easily create expressions and actions like blinking with them?

Figure 16-4: The female face smiling

Figure 16-5: The female face frowning

Figure 16-6: The female face winking

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Reusing Models with Proper Edge Loops Reuse is another trick you will learn when creating things in production. You do not need to reinvent the wheel every single day. Why start a new head from scratch 184,734,728 times? Create a good topology on your base character and then modify it to suit your needs. This will increase your workflow and ease the monotony of having to do the same thing over and over again. I work on teams all the time and my workflow is always faster than those around me. That is because I set up my workflow before I create anything. If that means reusing things or modifying existing art, then that’s what you need to do. That’s what the artists did when making the characters for The Incredibles. Most of the secondary superheroes as well as the background characters were just modifications of an original character. And from that one character they were able to move the polys around a bit and create men, women, children, tall characters, short characters, wide characters, and so on. This is a smart way to work. Start off smart and save time in the long term, not only for yourself, but for the others who may have to unwrap, paint, animate, or modify your model in the future. Using the same edge loops removes any guesswork down the line so anyone who will be working with you knows exactly what that edge loop does.

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The Realities of High-Poly Modeling Here are some things I’d like to say about high-polygon modeling. First and foremost, do not throw a TurboSmooth on an object and call it a high-polygon model. It’s not high-poly unless you made the proper edge loops. Take time to look at the model. Compare it to those in other games or movies. If you can look at a game cinematic or high-polygon source asset and say, “Hey, my character doesn’t look so bad next to that guy,” then you’ve got something. However, if you smooth a model and it’s a big blob of polygons, then you need to go back and refine all of your details. Remember, it’s good to rough things out. What does this mean? Make a lower-polygon counterpart of each piece that you don’t TurboSmooth at first. Make all of the pieces that go on the character and then take a step back and look at the whole thing. This will save you so much time if you need to make some overall changes to the character. Now you won’t have to change hundreds of small details if you just need to change how the torso and the legs meet up. Work low-poly to high-poly — not just in one area but the whole model. Make refining passes on the whole character. Finally, remember that even a square can be nearly turned into a sphere, so you don’t need hundreds of loops to get a rounded shape. In fact, it’s easier to get a round shape out of fewer edge loops than too many. Hyperfocusing, or going insane with surface details, is a production speed killer. Don’t get hung up on the small stuff! Most of the time the camera isn’t going to be on the character’s belt looking at all the pretty little details you’ve added to some 1 inch by 1 inch section of the model, so quit adding tiny details like that! If the camera is going to be close to a portion of the model at some point, then add the appropriate amount of detail there, but don’t make more work for yourself than there needs to be. Also, for you game development folks, details in games tend

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to be a good bit bigger than they would be in real life. This is so you can see them from a farther distance. Even a character with some great big arms looks just average in the game world. Finally, remember that you live in a world of backdrops. As with a set in Hollywood, don’t add details that won’t truly need to function. Every little clip on the character doesn’t have to work. It just has to look like it would work.

Setting Up Your Character Pose Properly You may already be familiar with base poses as you’ve probably seen them in digital art forums. The bind, reference, or T pose (the name I hear most often) is the pose in which the character is modeled originally. This can vary from something very outstretched, non-organic, and silly-looking to a moderately relaxed guy standing with his arms outstretched and forward a little. Some artists will fight to the death about proper posing. I, however, think that you should model the character in the pose that most accurately resembles what he will be doing most of the time. If his arms will be down by his sides, don’t model him in a perfect T pose! Model him with his arms down at least at a 45-degree angle. Even bend his elbows a little to give him that natural relaxed look. Turn the tips of his toes out a little. Who stands with their feet pointed straight forward? I suggest grabbing the companion files at http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008/. I’ve quickly rigged the base character for you to play with and see each of the following poses in 3D.

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Figure 16-7: The base male model in a perfect T pose

Figure 16-9: The base male in a relaxed T pose

Figure 16-8: The base male in a 45-degree T pose

Figure 16-10: The base male model in a relaxed pose

The four figures above show pretty much all of the base poses I’ve seen. I’ve used all of these poses at one point or another and each has a benefit. At the studio where I currently work we use the relaxed T pose.

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The true T pose, with arms straight out perpendicular to the body, is good for beginners in particular so they are able to see all the details in the isometric views. However, if you work in Perspective view this isn’t a problem, so you won’t have to worry about the arms overlapping the character’s sides at all. In the end, I think it comes down to what the character will be doing most of the time. If you model him in a similar position to what he’s in when he’s animated, then you’ll have the least distortion possible. The more distortion that happens in an area, the more attention will be drawn to this area, which can break the effect of the character.

Think in Pieces and Parts It’s completely understandable to be daunted by the task of learning how to model a character. It will be an easier process if you break him down piece by piece and take things a step at a time — modeling this finger, this glove, this arm, this upper body. Keep going and eventually you’ll have the whole character. In sketch books you don’t see someone drawing full characters all the time. You’ll often see drawings of just noses, eyes, ears, or mouths. Do the same and model just eyes for a day. Keep doing this and you’ll be a master of the face in no time. It’s understandable if you find that creating a character’s face is awfully complicated. It just means that we need to take a step back and look at the face in pieces. Don’t overwhelm yourself by looking at the head as a whole. Break the face into parts and model them separately. Get good at modeling the nose. Open a scene and model a nose, next model an eye, then try a mouth, and so on. Get good at modeling all the things that make up a face. You can then merge all those pieces together in a final file to create a face.

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How Does Customizing Help Me? You should absolutely, positively, 100% modify your key assignments, quad menus, and button selections of the command panel. By doing so, you’re familiarizing yourself with the user interface even more. You’re a hundred times more likely to remember and use a feature that is extremely helpful if you’ve assigned it to a key yourself. By using all the tools at your disposal you’ll be saving tons of time every single day. This will not only keep you from doing really boring things over and over, but will also improve your production time. It feels great to be able to create something in record time and be able to go back to add more detail because you’re ahead of schedule! This will yield better-looking art from you and make you a happy little artist!

What about MaxScript? Besides just using the tools you are given in Max, you can actually create more tools with MaxScript. If you have a little bit of a background in scripting and/or writing code, MaxScript is a blast. In Max 2008 Autodesk has painstakingly and completely overhauled the user interface for creating Max scripts. It’s quite an amazing improvement and one of the most exciting changes in Max 2008. Because MaxScript is a fairly massive scripting language in its own right, I don’t have space in this book to go into details. Max ships with some wonderful references and tutorials on how to get started; just open the help files. If you aren’t into creating tools and just want to see what others have created, there are some great web sites. My favorite is http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max-scripts. You’ll have hundreds of user-created tools, most free of charge, that will literally shave hours off of creation time!

Chapter 17

Using UVW Map and Unwrap UVW What Does Unwrapping Mean? Ahhh, unwrapping. Most new artists hate this. I personally like unwrapping. It’s a nice straightforward process that everybody must go through on the way to creating a completed model. This chapter may be a little confusing to some. It’s a strange way of thinking, but you’ll get it in no time! Unwrapping is a term used to describe the process in which you lay out texture coordinates. Not clear enough? Okay, think back to when we were applying texture maps to our objects through the Material Editor. Those texture maps used the texture coordinates to display the image on the 3D object. It’s best if I explain with a picture.

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Figure 17-1: A simple box

Imagine for a second that this box is made up of cardboard and it could be “broken down” into a flat piece of cardboard like most boxes can be.

Figure 17-2: A box broken down at the corners

Figure 17-3: An unfolded box

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This would allow us to apply a two-dimensional image to this object from the top down. For example, if we made an image that had all the information to make this box look like it was cardboard with “Fragile” and “This End Up” on the sides, we could now apply it as a flat image on the broken-down box and it would look correct. However, we’d have to fold it back up if we wanted it to be that solid box once more.

Figure 17-4: The quick texture

Figure 17-5: The folded box with a simple texture applied

This is the best way to explain how a two-dimensional image can be applied to a three-dimensional object and look as if it were painted directly onto the object. The program needs to know where to put all those pixels stored in your image map. You’ve also just learned the extremely old and dirty method to unwrapping your objects! Fortunately, after Unwrap UVW came along we no longer had to rip up our models and put them back together. Be thankful because this was a very annoying and time-consuming process! Even using the new methods it’s going to take some getting used to though. Making your brain think about unwrapping complex organic shapes is an interesting process.

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The texture coordinates, or UVWs, are a separate storage location on a two-dimensional plane. These values typically range from 0,0 to 1,1, which are the upper-left and lower-right corners of the image. These UVWs do not affect the location stored in the XYZ coordinates. It also works the other way around, as the XYZ coordinates do not affect the placement of the UVWs.

Using the UVW Map Modifier A UVW map is nothing more than a gizmo that will unwrap your object for you. How it unwraps your object is based on the gizmo of your choosing. You get seven basic presets when choosing your UVW map: Planar, Cylindrical, Spherical, Shrink Wrap, Box, Face, and XYZ to UVW. If you wish to unwrap a box, then of course you would want to choose Box mapping. If you have a cylinder you wish you unwrap, then you would choose Cylindrical mapping. To demonstrate quickly just how the UVW Map modifier works, let’s create a cube within our Perspective viewport. The next thing we need is a material that will allow us to see how our unwrap is working. Open up your Material Editor and open the Maps rollout. The Maps rollout has several empty slots available, the second of which is called the Diffuse Color channel. Diffuse Color is simply our texture color. You can load many different things into this slot, such as images, video, procedural textures, and so on. Click on the empty slot to bring up a very long list of options. Choose Checker. Figure 17-6: The Maps rollout with Diffuse Color checked and Checker in the Map slot

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Checker is a procedural texture that is nothing more than a repeating checker pattern. Since it is procedural we can go in and change things numerically to fit our needs. Go into the Tiling boxes and set both to 10.

Figure 17-7: Changing the tiling on our Checker texture

This gives us 10 checker tiles and allows us to more accurately see the UVWs on the surface of our model. This is a great use of the Checker texture. I guess you could use it to make the floor of a ’50s burgers and shakes restaurant, but for now let’s just use it to check our unwrap. Drag and drop your new material onto your cube and click the Show Map in Viewport button. The checker material we are using Figure 17-8: The Show should now be displayed. Map in Viewport button

Figure 17-9: The box with the Checker texture on it

Applying a checker pattern to your objects when you are unwrapping them provides you with a visual aid to keep your

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UVWs straight and even. If your UVWs are laid out improperly, then the checker pattern will be flawed, as shown in Figure 17-10.

Figure 17-10: Serious stretching in the UVWs

Our checker pattern looks good, but what if we wanted to modify our cube a bit? Let’s adjust the width of the cube.

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Any standard primitive will automatically generate its own UV coordinates if you have the Generate Mapping Coords box checked when you create it. That is why our checker material is showing up properly. Of course, if we were to modify the cube, then it would start to break down our UVWs.

Scale the cube roughly 500% on the x-axis in your Perspective view. As you can see, the Checker texture starts to stretch out. If we were using a texture like cardboard, this would completely break the illusion of the box being made of cardboard.

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Figure 17-11: The horribly stretched checker pattern on our long polygons

It’s the proper shape, but the UVWs are obviously horribly stretched. This is where the UVW Map modifier comes in. Select your cube and apply the UVW Map modifier from your Modify panel. This will display a set of presets and options. This is a pretty simple modifier that gives you a list of mapping options to choose from.

Figure 17-12: The Parameters rollout of the UVW Map modifier (the checker pattern has been enlarged for clarity)

Sometimes these options will create a really good starting point, and sometimes they will totally solve your unwrap for you. In this case, we have a rectangle that we want to

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unwrap. A rectangle is basically a box, so let’s choose the Box setting. Now all that is necessary is to adjust the Width setting in the UVW Map modifier. Adjust the Width setting manually until you get the look you want. In this case, we want the checker pattern to be even. When you’re done, the rectangle should look like this:

Figure 17-13: The now repeating checker pattern

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What is creating this new UV layout is the Box gizmo. That gizmo is accessible on the sub-object level of your UVW Map modifier. Like many other modifiers, notice that there is a “+” symbol next to the UVW Map modifier. If you open it up, you’ll be able to access the Box gizmo.

Once you highlight the Gizmo option, you’ll notice a yellow box appear in your Perspective viewport. This is your actual gizmo. Now that you have access to the gizmo, take a minute to see how it works. You can move, scale, and rotate the gizmo to create different results. Nice job! You’ve just created your first checkered box. Now you can make checkered racing flags all day long! Okay, so it’s not spectacular, but it is a good starting point. Now let’s dive into the real good stuff — Unwrap UVW!

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What Is the Difference between UVW Map and Unwrap UVW? There are two different modifiers to do your unwrapping. UVW Map and Unwrap UVW have two distinct uses, but you can also use them together if you like. UVW Map is great for either getting a starting point for your Unwrap UVW or just quickly getting some UVWs so you can preview a texture on your model quickly. Unwrap UVW is the modifier you use to manually create UVWs. It’s got tons of functionality now with extremely useful tools. If you need to very quickly preview a texture on your model, go with UVW Map. However, once you learn Unwrap UVW I doubt you’ll be going back to using UVW Map much. To each his own, though! I don’t ever use UVW Map; as a character artist, I don’t have much use for it.

Introduction to Unwrap UVW We took the unwrapping process as far as we could using the UVW Map modifier. If we wanted to up the level of control, the next step would be to apply the Unwrap UVW modifier. Something to keep in mind is that all 3D objects inherently have UVWs. The only way to actually see them, however, is to apply the UVW Map modifier. Without UVs, there would be no way to apply textures to your object, and without the UVW Map modifier, you cannot see or manually edit UVWs. The Unwrap UVW modifier was heavily updated a few revisions of Max back. It got some great features like pelt mapping (pretty awesome for unwrapping organic objects), and much of the functionality of UVW Map was added to Unwrap UVW. Technically you don’t even need to use the UVW Map modifier anymore if you’re actually going to go through the process of making some quality UVWs for your

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model. Once you’ve read through this section, take the time to play around and mess with the new tools. There are some extremely useful ones. Let’s select our handy checkered box and collapse it to an Editable Poly object. As we no longer need anything in the stack, let’s clear it so we can start clean. After you apply the modifier, you’ll get a new list of options.

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Keep in mind that Max always stores your UVWs, even if you collapse the model back into an Editable Poly object. However, don’t delete your Unwrap UVW modifier! This will get rid of your changes. Just remember to collapse it! This will keep your UVWs if you just need to make a geometry tweak while you’re unwrapping. Just add an Unwrap UVW modifier again and you’ll see your changes were kept.

The bulk of your time will be spent using the options in the Parameters rollout of the modifier. Here you can do several things, including edit, save, and load a set of UVWs. Let’s focus on the big one: editing UVWs! Press the Edit button to get a whole new window with its own options.

Figure 17-14: The Edit UVWs window

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I know that this window looks a bit complicated, but we’ll go through the basics pretty easily. First of all, let’s get rid of that blue grid. I find that it just gets in the way. I’m sure someone needed it at one point, probably for a very specific job. So, choose the Options menu from the menu bar, select Advanced Options, and then uncheck the box labeled Show Grid.

Figure 17-15: The Edit UVWs Advanced Options dialog

You can keep the grid if you want, of course. You can even change the color so that you don’t get a migraine. The dialog contains a number of other custom options for your Unwrap UVW modifier. Customize these settings to your liking. Once you have created a custom setup that you like, press the OK button at the bottom.

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By default Max discards any changes you made to the Edit UVWs window when you close it. To have these settings applied every time you load the Edit UVWs window, just go to the Options menu and pick Save Current Settings as Default. Now whenever you open and close the window, you won’t lose your personal settings.

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If you’re a little familiar with Max’s UVW editor and you’re wondering why the Line Color feature isn’t working as it used to, read the “Max 2008 Changes to Unwrap UVW” section near the end of this chapter.

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Take a look at the interface once more and notice you have the same familiar tools you have in your geometry editing windows. However, a new one is the Freeform Mode tool.

Figure 17-16: The Freeform Mode tool

This tool allows you to modify any selected UVWs using a box with control handles. Grabbing each handle will perform a specific action based on which handle you grab and which key is being held (Alt, Shift, or Ctrl). As cool as the control handles may look, I really don’t end up using them much. Try them out but don’t feel the need to force them into your workflow if you don’t like the way it feels. To the right of the Mirror tool is a tool similar to the checkered cube that you have in the Material Editor. It serves the same purpose as the one in the Material Editor. Toggling this cube on and off will either display or turn off the texture you are using. This one, however, will not affect what is happening in your viewports; it only toggles the texture background within your Edit UVWs window.

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You also have right-click capabilities within your editing viewport to access tools such as Move, Rotate, and Scale. The right-click menu access can be quicker than going to the top of the editing window to access these options each time.

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At the bottom of the Edit UVWs window you’ll notice another row of options. At the left are the Translation boxes. These represent the U, V, and W positions. They are just like the X, Y, and Z positions in your 3D viewport. You can use these to type in exact positions for your UVWs if necessary.

Figure 17-17: The Translation type-in boxes at the bottom of the Edit UVWs window

To the right of the Translation type-in boxes are the Lock Selected Vertices and Filter Selected Faces buttons. Figure 17-18: The Lock Selected Vertices and Filter Selected Faces buttons

The Lock Selected Vertices button will do just that. You may not select any more vertices or deselect any vertices. You may only move, rotate, or scale the ones selected before you locked your selection. Next we have the Filter Selected Faces button. This can be useful if you have a very complex object with lots of sub-objects and you don’t want to view the entire model. This will quickly hide the selected faces and allow you to see only what you need to. After selecting the faces you want to view, you can go into Vertex or Edge mode, and it will keep your faces unhidden so you can work on just what you had selected. To the right are the navigation tools, which are pretty self-explanatory because they work exactly as they do in the regular viewports. I recommend just using the mouse for all your navigation anyway; you can use the mouse wheel to move and zoom much faster. At the bottom of the Edit UVWs window are a number of additional options. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory since we’ve been using them a little while modeling. At the left, you have Soft Selection options that work much the same as the Soft Selection options when editing polygon objects.

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Figure 17-19: The Soft Selection area

You also have different selection modes. By default, this is set to select UVW vertices. You can also use the 1-3 keys to select your sub-object types like you can in your Editable Poly object.

Figure 17-20: The Selection Modes area

The Selection Modes area includes the Grow and Shrink selection options. Again, this works just like the Grow and Shrink for your polygon objects. For some reason the Select Element check box is checked by default. For the most part you’ll want to turn this off, but it’s like using the Element sub-object type in Editable Poly. Pretty useful if you need to drag, rotate, or scale a full sub-object without hand-selecting vertices. At the bottom right of the window is the Options button. Pressing this button reveals more options.

Figure 17-21: Hidden options

These options are hidden because they are typically used less than the options described above. With the bitmap and viewport options you can adjust the aspect ratio of your image, tile the image, adjust the brightness of the image, etc. Nothing too super special hidden here though.

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The last thing that I want to touch on is the Map Parameters rollout on your Modify panel.

Figure 17-22: The Map Parameters rollout in the Modify panel

If you have used versions of Max before Max 8 you should notice that there have been some massive improvements here. For starters, you can now do planar, cylindrical, spherical, and box mapping all within the Unwrap UVW modifier instead of having to use the UVW Map modifier at all. You can also access the new pelt unwrap (which is a massive upgrade). Let’s talk briefly about how all these new features work. First, let’s note that the Map Parameters options work entirely at the sub-object level. Therefore, the rollout will be grayed out until you activate one of the sub-object modes of your Unwrap UVW modifier. If we wanted to unwrap our trusty cube within the Map Parameters rollout, we would simply grab all the faces via our sub-object selection. Next, press the Box button in the Map

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Parameters rollout. Done! Using the box unwrap you’ve done what the UVW Map modifier does. The difference is we don’t have to jump back and forth and collapse things. We can go straight into the UVW editor and look at the results. Just as before, if you want to see the unwrap or edit the vertices, you will have to open up the Edit UVWs window by pressing the Edit button in the Parameters rollout. This will also work with the cylindrical, spherical, and planar unwrap. Note that you can adjust the alignment of your unwrap to the x-, y-, or z-axis. You can also align to view, fit, center, and best align your unwrap. Use these options on your own to see how they work. Practice unwrapping cylinders, boxes, and spheres using these new tools. Now let’s go back into the Edit UVWs window. Some other little features that are slightly tucked away are Flatten Mapping, Normal Mapping, and Unfold Mapping. Flatten Mapping basically Figure 17-23: The Mapping works like this: It finds faces that menu share a similar facing (based on the threshold you give it) and breaks that off, then makes it flat on your UVWs. It does this over all of the polygons you have selected. You can then take these pieces and put them back together to quickly form a nice, fairly undistorted UVW layout. It’s nice, but I like to do it by hand. It takes a little more time, but it comes out better I think.

Figure 17-24: A box using Flatten Mapping

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Unfold Mapping can be extremely useful for automatically unwrapping simple objects, but gets hung up on more complex objects. Keeping the default setting of Walk to Closest Face will yield the best results. On simple objects it basically does your job for you, laying out the polygons in the best possible layout with minimal seams. For things like boxes, this works perfectly! You may have to break off a polygon and move it to get the UVW seam where you want it, but we’ll talk about seams in a second.

Figure 17-25: An unfolded box using Unfold Mapping

I’ve honestly never used Normal Mapping because most of the time you’ll just use the above tools to get the right orientation. If you go ahead and try this out on your box, you’ll see it yields the same results. This is misleading actually because the Flatten Mapping option often uses the surface normals of your geometry. This modifier uses the world normals of X, Y, and Z. The quickest way I can explain this is to rotate your box at a random rotation and reset your XForms. This will reset your pivot to more accurately represent a realistic scenario. This simulates your pivot never being right for every sub-object rotation. You can do this by going to the Utilities panel, clicking on Reset XForm, and then clicking Reset Selected down below.

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Figure 17-26: Resetting your XForms

Use Normal Mapping again. You’ll see it came up as a few broken up shapes. This is because it’s like looking at your object from the side, top, and bottom. Most of the time you’re going to want to have a nice flat UV surface to texture on, so normal mapping really does fit most people’s needs.

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The term “normal mapping” for UVWs is not the same as “normal mapping” for rendered textures that you would see in games like Doom 3. This actually refers to breaking the faces apart and laying them out based on a “normal” type that you give it, the most useful of which is the Box setting. This will break your objects into groups that are closest to the normals facing +/– X, Y, and Z. Try it out!

Quickly run your Unfold Mapping tool once more and go into your UVW editor. Just like the UVW Map modifier, the Unwrap UVW modifier has a sub-object level too. Now that we have some UVWs to look at, go back to the Unwrap UVW modifier and access its Face sub-object mode; you’ll notice you can select the faces of the object in your scene. This is awesome and essential because you don’t always know what you’re looking at as UVWs have the tendency to get pretty crazy, especially when you’ve got overlapping UVWs. Take a second to select some faces and look back at your Edit UVWs window. You’ll notice that the selected polygons will be selected over here in the editor too! If you’re ever lost and looking for a UVW element, just grab it in your viewport. This will quickly help you locate it in the editor.

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Look at your Perspective view after you’ve run the Unfold Mapping tool. At this point you may have noticed some green lines over the edge of your model. These are UVW seams. The best way to think of this is like the final clothing and the pattern used to make that clothing. The pieces in this pattern could be sewn together to make a shirt. The edge that has to be sewn would be your UVW seam, and this seam would appear to be a straight line on your final shirt. Typically, Figure 17-27: A shirt having as few UVW seams as possible is pattern common practice. Matching up a texture across these seams perfectly is nearly impossible without spending some serious time on it. Another technique that is used is placing the seams where actual clothing seams would be placed. This gives a valid reason why a seam is there in the texture too, not to mention that clothing seams are typically put in places that are out of the way. The Pelt Map modifier was a huge hit when it first came out. The idea of clicking a button and having something unwrapped for you made many modelers giggle like little schoolgirls. I was one of those, but after using pelt for a while I realized that it had its ups and downs. This is an awesome tool for unwrapping clothing or anything you’ll be unwrapping that won’t have specific detail in the texture. Why only non-specific detail areas? you may ask. Well, the pelt modifier has a horrible habit of destroying any resemblance to your actual model. Sure, it gives a nice minimally stretched UVW layout, but if you can’t tell what you’re texturing, what’s the point? If you were to paint a circle on the texture, it would come out all warped. That’s no good!

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Figure 17-28: What the heck is that thing? It’s the face model pelt mapped.

Figure 17-29: The model that the UVWs in Figure 17-28 go to, believe it or not!

So, what is pelt mapping? It’s a mapping that stretches out all your UVWs into a flat, unified surface, almost like it’s a piece of cloth or an animal pelt. To use the pelt unwrap, you designate a series of seams by using either the Point To Point Seam tool or Edge Sel (selection) To Pelt Seams tool. Max will then unfold it for you, trying to create as little distortion as possible. This is intended to work on organic objects that would normally be very tedious or difficult to do. So, what’s great about it? You can literally unwrap objects in only minutes that would otherwise take you a couple of hours to do. With only a few button clicks, you can have something looking pretty great in no time flat.

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Figure 17-30: A shirt soon to be pelt mapped

To use the Pelt Map modifier, we just need to designate the seams. First, we need to select all the faces on our object so we can see the seams, which should be highlighted in blue. Max designates any open edge as a pelt seam by default, but we’ll need to create the seams for under the arms manually. To do this, select the edges that you want to be seams and click the Edge Sel To Pelt Seams button. This will turn these edges blue to indicate that they’ll be used as a pelt seam. If you accidentally make a seam somewhere and want to remove it, hold Alt and reselect the seam.

Figure 17-31: The pelt seams under the arms of the shirt

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Now press the Pelt button located in the Map Parameters rollout.

Figure 17-32: The Pelt button

Just as before when we used the Map Parameters options, we now have to select an axis to perform our pelt unwrap on. Most of the time, Best Align will work the best so choose that option here. Now that the axis is selected, all that is left to do is perform the Pelt action. Select Edit Pelt Map located at the bottom of your Map Parameters rollout.

Figure 17-33: The Edit Pelt Map button only appears after you’ve clicked the Pelt button.

This opens the Pelt Map Parameters dialog and a modified UVW editing window. I’ll just explain briefly what is going on here. Here you have your unwrap. The circle with the lines is your “stretcher.” The stretcher pulls and stretches your UVs flat like a piece of animal hide, similar to how Native Americans stretched hides. To the right is the Pelt Map Parameters dialog box. The only two buttons we will use for this map are the Simulate Pelt Pulling and the Relax (Light) buttons. So even though it looks like a lot, we’re really only doing a couple of things.

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Figure 17-34: The Pelt Map stretcher

Now we need to give our stretcher room to operate, so activate your Scale tool and scale up the stretcher.

Figure 17-35: The scaled stretcher

This will give our stretcher a little more room to work. Now press the Simulate Pelt Pulling button.

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Your UVWs should get pulled out like this:

Figure 17-36: The pelt map after one pelt pull

You can still see that it’s a little too “busy” in the middle, so let’s use Simulate Pelt Pulling once more. I usually run it a couple of times until I don’t see a whole lot of change. Now it’s looking pretty good. If you are looking at your model with the checker pattern at this point you may be able to see a little distortion under the arms, but that’s okay. To fix this, just press the Relax (Light) button several times until you get the results you want. It may take several clicks, but when you are done it should look pretty nice and you should have even polygons.

Figure 17-37: The final UVW result

Figure 17-38: Our shirt with a checker pattern applied to it

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The Relax button is a wonderful thing. It’s by default assigned to your “A” key in the Edit UVWs window. You can also get to it under Tools in your Edit UVWs window and in the Pelt Map Parameters dialog box. Try using it when you’re just unwrapping something normally without pelt map. I commonly refer to it as the “Make my UVWs look good” button. It’s amazing what kind of distortion it can get rid of!

When you are done, make sure you’re still in Face sub-object mode, go back up to the Map Parameters rollout, and press the Pelt button. Now you will be able to manually edit any remaining UVWs that you are unhappy with.

Max 2008 Changes to Unwrap UVW Something that has really bothered me in the past is that I couldn’t unwrap multiple objects on one UVW sheet. I had to attach all of the objects, unwrap them, and break them apart again. This was especially annoying when I had to recreate my pivots if the pieces of my model needed to rotate a specific way. Well, you no longer have to attach all your pieces together! Go ahead; I’ll give you a minute to rejoice. Time’s up! I don’t expect everyone to be as happy as I am about this, but it’s the truth! You can now select multiple objects and then assign the Unwrap UVW modifier to them. They will all share the same UVW space and show up in the editor. This will keep you from having to do unnecessary work. This feature makes it necessary to be able to tell which UVW piece is from what object. Not being able to tell which piece goes to what object would result in pandemonium. Because of this, Autodesk decided to make the default line color the color of the objects you’re unwrapping. If your object’s color is pink, your lines will be pink. If your object is white, your lines will be white. This, however, can pose a problem. If your object color is a dark gray, you may not be able to see the lines at all because they blend into the

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background! Just keep in mind that if you can’t see your lines you can just change your object color to something else. Because of this, the Line Color feature in the options of the UVW editor doesn’t really color your lines correctly anymore; it does, however, tint your line color a little toward the color you pick in the options. Another great little feature in this version is the ability to view the amount of distortion on a specific edge or vertex. Max shows the distortion by coloring your UVW’s wireframe. The closer to red, the more distortion you have. This allows you to focus on an area and try to clean it up if possible. You can find this new feature in the Display menu of your Edit UVWs window.

Figure 17-39: Location of the new Show Edge Distortion feature

Figure 17-40: A sample of edges marked as distorting

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Unwrapping Your Model Unwrapping is almost an art form in itself and something that you just have to get used to doing. I’ll quickly go over my process to unwrap a head model the correct way. Starting out with the female head model we completed, delete the TurboSmooth so we just have the raw sub-d polygons. Also delete the right half of the face, as we’ll start by unwrapping only one side of the head.

Figure 17-41: Our female head without a TurboSmooth

Apply a checker material to the model as we talked about before and set its tiling to 0.1. I’ll explain this in a second. Open up your Unwrap UVW modifier by clicking on the + next to its name in your stack and click on Face. Continue by selecting all of the polygons on the head and clicking Planar. This should give you something like Figure 17-42. Now go into the Map Parameters rollout and uncheck Normalize Map. This feature keeps your polygons inside that little blue box on the Edit UVWs window. This is actually bad though, because it’s rescaling the pieces and not

Figure 17-42: The head with a massive checker pattern on it

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taking into account the rest of our head so we would have to scale everything to size — and that’s just unnecessary. So make sure it’s turned off from now on. With Normalize Map turned off, we start selecting the groups of polygons that pretty much face the same direction, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 17-43: The UVWs broken up

These groups are the polygons that are close to flat compared to one another, like the bridge of the nose, the side of the cheek, and the forehead. As you start selecting these groups, you’ll see a yellow gizmo come up that is a flat plane. You want this to lay as flat as possible on the polygons you’ve selected. If the angle of the faces is too much for the flat plane, you’ll get quite a bit of stretching and distortion in your UVWs. Figure 17-45 is a good example of faces that lay fairly flat compared to one another.

Figure 17-44: The planar gizmo. It represents where your polygons are going to be projected from.

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Figure 17-45: The camera lined up with the gizmo

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Figure 17-46: The UVWs of that same piece

Once you have a nice little chunk of the model selected, go into the UVW editor by clicking Edit. Now click the Quick Planar Map button located in the Map Parameters rollout of your Unwrap UVW modifier.

Figure 17-47: The Quick Planar Map button

The Quick Planar Map feature is awesome, and the ability to bind this to a shortcut key makes it even more so. I can quickly select the groups of polygons I want and hit my shortcut key. Continue this process until you have all of the separate pieces organized in your Edit UVWs window. It shouldn’t take long if you make the Quick Planar Map feature a hotkey!

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Figure 17-48: The organized UVWs

Now that we have all of our pieces planar mapped and organized, we can start putting them together by grabbing one edge that would connect to another. Here I’ve started by selecting one of the forehead edges that would connect with the side of the head.

Figure 17-49: The edges that we’ll be stitching

A nice little Max feature marks a connecting edge by turning it blue. Any selected edge will also show its connecting edge. Go up to the File menu and select Tools > Stitch Selected. Stitching is a way to quickly weld UVW edges. This is another option I have hotkeyed and use religiously.

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Figure 17-50: The welded piece

Continue with the rest of the pieces until you’ve welded all of them together.

Figure 17-51: The pieces welded together

You may run into some places where the connections get a little nasty and don’t match up. After completing all of your stitching, select all of your UVWs and go to Tools > Relax. Click Apply a couple of times until you can visually see all the bunched-up UVWs smoothing out.

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Figure 17-52: The relaxed UVWs

That’s it! We’re done with this half of the head. Now, collapse the stack back into an Editable Poly and mirror the head. Attach the pieces and select the vertices down the middle of the head. These vertices are broken apart so we need to weld them. Tweak the Weld threshold until you have your vertices welded together. Apply another Unwrap UVW modifier to the head with Select Element turned on, then click on what appears to be half of your head. Select Element acts just as Element subobject mode does within objects.

Figure 17-53: The Select Element check box

With one half selected, drag it off to the side a little. You’ll see the other half is left behind. Now click Mirror in the Edit UVWs window.

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Figure 17-54: Two halves of the head not welded together

Now we have to put them together, so select the edges that make up the forehead down to the chin.

Figure 17-55: The center edge down the face

Stitch these edges as we did with the rest of the pieces. The nose will look pretty funky.

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Figure 17-56: The pieces welded together but not quite stretch free

Now all we have to do is run another Relax on the entire head to smooth out any stretching, of which there is a lot in the nose area. That’s it! The final step is to scale the UVWs down until they fit in that little blue box.

Figure 17-57: The final UVWs

It seems like a lot at first, but after doing a few unwraps you’ll get the hang of it! Just remember to make hotkeys of your commonly used tools. These results are a hundred times better than the pelt mapping results. Most of the time a pelt map will leave a head unrecognizable and very goofy-looking!

Chapter 18

Advanced Modeling Exercise: The Human Ear So now that we’ve explored a few organic modeling techniques, let’s really delve into strip modeling. This technique is wonderful for modeling objects that flow organically. A perfect example is the ear. The ear is a very complex shape, but it actually becomes quite simple if we break it down into one big flowing object. Also, if the point of your modeling practice isn’t to become a master ear crafter, just reuse the ear that you’ll make the first go-around. This will save a lot of time and allow you to focus more clearly on one objective. Later, if you’re not happy with your ear modeling abilities, just come back and model a few more ears. Before we dive in, let’s look at how the ear is made up.

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Figure 18-1: The ear we are going to model

This is always a good thing to do. Just take a step back and look at what you’re going to model for a second. Think about how your polygons are going to flow. Don’t stress over it — just think in terms of flow.

Figure 18-2: The basic flow of the ear

The ear is made up of several pretty basic shapes. Worry about the flow first and everything else will fall into place. The tragus is that little bit of cartilage that sticks out next to the hole leading to your inner ear. This is where the whole outer shape starts. From here we flow up around the helix and down into the earlobe. This is the easiest way to start the ear because it sets up the flow for the rest of the ear. This way we can work outward and move inward.

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Again, I heavily recommend that you grab the downloadable content from www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008. It will help quite a bit. You can also apply the sample ear image to a plane in Max so you can easily model over the image. If you can’t grab this file, try freehanding it, although this will make things a little more challenging. So let’s get started. First, create a polygon where the helix curves down and meets the side of the head near the tragus.

Figure 18-3: The starting polygon of the ear

This is the perfect place to start. From here we can start extruding this edge around, matching the simple flow of the ear.

Figure 18-4: Edge extruded around the helix

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Okay, so now we’ve got the outline, but it’s flat since so far we’ve only been working in one viewport. Look at some ear reference. You’ll notice that the tragus is more inset than the helix and lobe. This is to funnel sound into the inner ear. Grab the tragus area and pull it inward, and then round out the helix polygons. Figure 18-5 is an image from the front as if you were looking at someone’s face.

Figure 18-5: The ear from the front

Now that we have a little shape to the ear, let’s round out that big flat surface. Select one of the edges that make up the polygon strip, select the Ring button, and click Connect. Then select the inner edge and hit Loop. With this open edge selected, Shift-drag inward toward the head to create polygons that will give the ear some thickness. Figure 18-6 shows the polygons we’ve created.

Figure 18-6: The smoothed ear with a little more depth

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Let’s continue around the ear beginning with the earlobe. Grab the edge loop that is at the end of the helix near the earlobe. Shift-drag this to create the earlobe. Continue on up from there to start forming the connection between the earlobe and the tragus.

Figure 18-7: Added polygons to represent the earlobe

At this point it may look a little strange. Don’t worry, though! We’re not far off from it resembling an ear. From here we need to connect the new polygons coming up from the earlobe to the tragus area. To do this, we can use Target Weld. Just grab the polygons coming up from the lobe and weld them to the closest vertices. I also added another polygon strip where the helix fades into the ear. This is selected in Figure 18-8.

Figure 18-8: Attached polygons

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Now take the edges around the outer part of the ear and Shift-drag them toward where the head would be to give the ear some thickness. Then select the inner open edge and scale it inward a little bit to give it a smooth taper instead of a harsh drop-off. This edge is selected in Figure 18-9.

Figure 18-9: New thickness and tweaks

Next we want to give the back of the ear a little bit of roundness. Grab the polygon loop that makes up the outer rim of the ear and Shift-drag with the Scale tool inward. I’ve added another loop to round it off some more.

Figure 18-10: Back of the ear

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Now add polygons to the inner part of the ear by using the Bridge tool. Try to keep the edge flow like mine.

Figure 18-11: New polygons finishing off the inner part of the ear

On these new edges, add new edge loops as shown in Figure 18-12. If you look at your reference, you can see these edges were added along the ridges that follow the helix. Pull these edges outward to give these ridges some height.

Figure 18-12: Left, new edges to represent ridges on the ear; right, Perspective view for clarity

Grab the top polygon shown in Figure 18-13 and drag it upward and to the left. This will give the ear a little inset.

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Figure 18-13: Left, grab this polygon; right, move it to form a slight inset at the top of the ear

Chamfer the edge that makes up the ridge closest to the helix, and round out the ridge with an extra edge loop.

Figure 18-14: Left, selecting the edge; right, chamfering the first ridge

Figure 18-15: The height of the ridges

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Now select the polygon in Figure 18-16 and extrude it inward to form the entrance to the inner ear. With the same polygon selected, scale it down a little bit to taper the entrance.

Figure 18-16: Left, select this polygon; right, extrude the edge inward and scale

Now it’s looking like an ear! At this point I applied a TurboSmooth and made some overall Soft Selection tweaks to adjust the shape. Be sure to look at the ear from all angles to make sure it has the appropriate amount of depth and thickness. Figure 18-17 shows what I ended up with.

Figure 18-17: The final ear

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Chapter 19

Normal Maps What Normal Maps Do Pretty much everyone in our industry has heard the buzzwords “normal mapping.” This technology has actually been around for quite a while, but it is just now making it into the real-time rendering scene. By now most digital artists and gamers have seen the results of normal mapping in real time, such as in the real-time rendering engine used by Doom 3, one of the first big titles to use this technique. A normal map is a separate texture from all of your other textures. This “map,” or texture, captures detail from a much higher detail model and saves it. Using this technique we can create environments and characters that are hugely detailed yet appear no different than their higher polycount counterparts. This is all for the purpose of rendering much faster than you ultimately could with the high-detail version of your model.

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Figure 19-1: A normal mapped plane

The surface in Figure 19-1 is exactly one polygon (or two triangles). This surface is the most simple square surface you could render in a real-time renderer. In the real-time rendering world, the more polygons on an object, the longer it takes to render that object. As the polycount rises, the frames per second, or scene renders per second, drop until you are practically looking at a slide show. However, by using just a simple 256 x 256 pixel texture we can generate a look that seems nearly identical to the high-poly, sub-d model and avoid this low frame rate altogether.

A Brief Overview of Creating Normal Maps Creating a normal map these days is quite simple. Ever since Max 7, a feature called Render to Texture has given us the ability to easily generate these textures. Render to Texture is an amazingly powerful tool that can be used not only for normal mapping, but also for creating diffuse and global illumination maps. This tool renders onto the UV coordinates the detail that shares the surface, hence its name. To create a normal mapped model you first create a highpoly model. In this model you can just go absolutely crazy with the polycount. The number of polygons is only limited by the RAM installed on the computer you are using.

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Figure 19-2: A high-poly asset ready to be projected

After creating a high-poly model, next you create a low-poly model that represents the shape of the original high-poly model. At this stage you only want to create enough detail in your low-poly model to capture the silhouette of the model. This can easily be done if you are modeling on top of the high-poly model. After accurately portraying the high-poly model with significantly fewer polygons, you unwrap the model as you would if you were preparing to texture it.

Figure 19-3: A simple version of the high-poly model

Finally, after creating your high- and low-poly models, you use the Render to Texture tool. Using either the default or the projection cage method, Render to Texture casts rays onto the high-poly model from the low-poly model and renders this detail onto the UV template.

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Figure 19-4: The final result after projecting the detail

This is the entire process for generating normal maps from modeled geometry. It does have its quirks, but once you learn those, the process is amazingly simple. With a little practice, generating normal maps will become second nature to you. To truly understand normal map creation, however, you need to understand how they work.

How Normal Maps Fake Detail Before we talk about normal maps specifically, we first must talk about surface normals. A surface normal is the vector, or ray, that represents which direction the polygon is facing. This normal adjusts how light “bounces” off of that surface. Every vertex stores the normal information for all of its neighboring polygons. When a polygon shares a smoothing group with a neighboring polygon, the normals on the shared vertex are averaged together. This gives the surface a smooth look as it transitions between the different surface normals.

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Figure 19-5: No smoothing groups vs. smoothing groups with normals shown

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If you want to look at the normals of the surfaces in the models you’ve created, just apply the Edit Normals modifier. This modifier not only allows you to look at them, but also to average any normal you like. It’s not a tool you’ll use every day, but you may find a use that many have not thought of.

The key to how a normal map accomplishes this effect is in its name. In the most common use of normal maps, called “tangent space normal maps,” the texture map literally modifies the surface normal on a per-pixel basis. That is, each pixel on the texture stores a value to adjust how the light reacts to it. That sounds like it would take a long time to render, does it not? Well, not nearly as long as rendering and tracking a model with 3 or 4 million polygons! Here’s how the normal map itself stores that data. Figure 19-6 shows what you get when you render out a normal map. (To see the following images in color, go to http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008 and download the companion files.)

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Figure 19-6: The normal map used above

This normal map is pretty standard. Overall it’s a purplishblue color with some bits of red and green in it. All of these colors actually are normal vector information stored in red, green, and blue (RGB) format. Let’s break it down a bit more. An image is made up of multiple channels of red, green, blue, and an extra alpha layer that represents transparency most of the time. Each of these channels is like a black and white image. Put them all together and you get your final image. However, in a normal map these channels store data. The red channel represents the details captured on the x-axis.

Figure 19-7: The red channel singled out

As you can see, the red channel appears to be the high-poly model lit from the right. All of the surface’s polygons that are

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straight up like the low-poly surface will appear as a 50% gray. The surfaces facing 90 degrees to the right in relation to the low-poly surface will be white, and surfaces facing 90 degrees to the left will be black. If it looks like the image is lit from the left, your eyes are playing tricks on you. Imagine that the image is actually 3D. Anything sticking out of the image is going to be lit on the right-hand side. Anything sinking into the image is going to appear to be lit from the left (however, this is just because it’s sinking in instead of jutting out). Some of this is caused by there not being any shadows cast on the image. Traditionally you would have a shadow where the surface sinks in and your brain would tell you “Hey, that’s going in, not out.” This isn’t the case with normal maps, however, because they aren’t there to cast shadows. Similar to the red channel, the green channel is storing all the data in the y-axis. It appears as if it’s lit from the bottom.

Figure 19-8: The green channel singled out

Finally, we have the blue channel. So many people are confused by the blue channel and some are under the impression that it does nothing. This is simply not true! The blue channel represents the surface facing the same direction as the low-poly model. It appears as if you are looking at the surface while lighting it from straight on. This gives the effect of anything flat being white and any surface starting to face farther

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and farther away from straight on getting darker and darker. This is much like a Fresnel effect if you are familiar with that.

Figure 19-9: The blue channel singled out

As you become more and more comfortable with the techniques behind normal mapping, you will inevitably start modifying and even painting things in and out of your normal maps in programs such as Photoshop. Normal mapping is an amazingly nifty technique, and understanding how it works is crucial when working with normal maps.

Chapter 20

Advanced Modeling Exercise: Generating a Normal Map So, now that you know what normal maps are, let’s talk about how to generate one. It’s really not much different from generating a high-poly model. You just have to keep a few things in mind. The following surface is two triangles, or one polygon. It’s a perfectly flat surface with four textures on it. These are diffuse, specular, emissive, and of course, normal map.

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Figure 20-1: A high-resolution model with textures applied

Figure 20-2: The same surface with only the normal map applied

Setting Up For this example, let’s begin by resetting Max and starting fresh. We are going to create a simple horizontally tiling texture to use in a sci-fi environment. Go to your Front viewport and draw a box that is exactly 100 x 100 Max units. By default this is the size of the darker lines in the grid that don’t represent the origin. The height of the box really doesn’t matter much, but I set mine to 10. This is the area where we can model the detail for our normal map texture. From this stage you can pretty much go crazy and model whatever you want within the constraints of the rectangle. There is no limit to what you can do at this stage — just keep in mind that when we “project” the normal map onto a flat surface it’s going to be as if we are looking straight at the high-poly model.

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Modeling the Sci-Fi Wall Panel Since we’ve covered most of my modeling techniques, I’ll simply walk you through the stages I went through to add detail to the wall panel. Starting with a 100 x 100 unit box in the Front viewport, you can start adding details like some vertical paneling.

Figure 20-3

Then I started adding more detail and angles to the edges of the panels so they’ll show up on the normal map. After all, what you see in a normal map is actually the change in angle. It’s not depth!

Figure 20-4

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Figure 20-5 shows that I added control loops and turned on TurboSmooth. Note the use of broad curves so that they are picked up in the normal map and can be read from a distance. Another technique I like to use is repeating shapes. This gives a nice echo effect and also makes your life easier as a modeler. You can literally reuse pieces without doing much editing. As you can see, I also started adding spline details. Finally, near the bottom, I added one of my favorite primitives called the OilTank. It’s listed in the Extended Primitives section.

Figure 20-5

I then added more splines a little deeper into the gap I made between the background plane and the front panels. I also added some cylinder-shaped elements. Finally, on the right you can see I added more OilTank primitives, only this time I inverted them by using the Normal modifier to give them an inset look.

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Figure 20-6

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Since normal maps don’t capture back faces, you invert a shape and it will show up in the normal map as an indentation without you having to worry about all the edges you’d have to add to support an inset surface. This is possibly the biggest time-saver of my day. This is strictly used in game art though; it absolutely would not fly at a film studio.

I added a little more detail to the cylinder element at the top of the panel. I also reused this element in the lower part by creating three instances, scaling them down, and putting them in a triangle formation. I also added more detail in the background with some flowing lines in the gaps where you could see the flat and boring background. Finally, I added an inverted shape that echoed the shape of the lower panel.

Figure 20-7

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Here I’ve added a few bolts in the corners of the panels. This time I used a spline to create an inset groove along the second tier panel. I achieved this look by, again, using the Normal modifier. The final step was adding some little half hemisphere light fixtures to the left and right panels.

Figure 20-8

Render to Texture — Normal Maps Since for this example I’ve chosen to show you how to create a flat texture for a surface, you’ll only learn the basics of Render to Texture. In character modeling you would actually remodel all of the parts in low poly while still trying to capture the basic shape of the objects. Since we’re doing a wall texture we’ll just use a rectangle, so draw another spline rectangle of 100 x 100 and convert to an Editable Poly. Place this new object behind all of the other objects as seen from the Front viewport. With this new object selected, hit the zero key on the keyboard (not the one on the num pad). This opens up the Render To Texture dialog.

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Figure 20-9: The Render To Texture dialog

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You can also access the Render To Texture dialog by going to Rendering > Render to Texture.

I know… so many more options! Max is a maze of check and edit boxes. Don’t worry too much about learning what every single box does right now. We’ll just deal with the basics for now, which are indicated by the outlined items in Figure 20-9. Padding will add pixel density around the edges of your rendered texture. We do this because when the texture starts to mipmap (or drop in quality as we move away from it), you may get some nasty little black edges. Having extra texture beyond the area of your UVs avoids this problem for the most part. Check the Enabled check box to tell Max you want to project a high-poly object onto your low-poly object and then use the drop-down box to pick that object or objects. To speed up your render times, you can turn off supersampling. This basically renders the texture at four times

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what you asked Max to output and then resizes it. The final result is a much cleaner and nicely anti-aliased texture map at the cost of lots more time. I almost always turn this off during development because I do little test renders to make sure things are right and don’t want to wait all that time. When I’m happy, I’ll render at four times the resolution and then resize in Photoshop myself. To turn this off, click the Options button next to the Pick button in the Render To Texture dialog. Click the Setup button next to Global Supersampler. Now you’ll see a check box to enable supersampling. It’s your call, but I usually turn this feature off for a render to texture.

Figure 20-10: The Render to Texture options

Scroll down a bit in the Render To Texture dialog to the Output rollout.

Figure 20-11: Revisiting the Render To Texture dialog

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First we have to add the map type we want to render. Click the Add button and pick NormalsMap. Pick a place you want to save the file to with the … button next to File Name and Type. Finally, pick a texture size. For this sample, I just used a huge 2048 x 2048. I like to work large! At this point we can hit the Render button. In the Scanline Renderer window, you’ll see what appears to be a lit flat version of your model. If you have NormalsMap selected, a normal map will be rendered in the specified location. After the image is done rendering, open it in any image editing software and you’ll see the typical purplish-blue normal map.

Figure 20-12: Final normal map

Using the Projection Modifier You may have noticed that after you picked the high-poly object, your low-poly object had a Projection modifier applied to it. This is what Max uses to grab detail from the high-poly model and apply it to the low-poly model. Most of the time by default the projection cage that appears blue in your viewport will be crumpled and pretty nasty-looking. About 99.9% of the time I start off by clicking the Reset button. This resets the cage and places all of the vertices back on top of the low-poly’s vertices. Scroll down and check the box labeled Shaded under the Cage section.

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Now that we’ve turned on our projection cage, I’ll explain what this “cage” does. Since we are trying to grab details off of our high-polygon model and put them into our low-polygon model, Max needs to know how far out and at what angle to grab the details. If the high-polygon model passes through this shaded cage, we know that we’re not going to get that portion of the high-polygon model in the normal map. This is why I like the shaded cage—you can easily see when things pass through it. Expand the Projection modifier and click on Cage. With the Vertices sub-object button clicked, select all of the vertices that make up the cage. Pull them forward until none of the high-poly details pass through the shaded cage.

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While editing the cage you may only move vertices. Polygons and elements may be converted into vertices to be moved but may not be moved themselves.

That’s all there is to using the Projection modifier on a simple rectangle. On a more complex model you could use the Push setting. This works just like the Push modifier but on the cage alone. Autodesk has added importing and exporting cages in Max 2008. This is an excellent feature. While there isn’t any reason you would want to use this on our simple plane, you could export the cage if you were working on a complex object like a character. This basically clones your low-poly cage and makes it physical geometry. At this point you can modify your cage using the modeling tools, which is handy because you’ll have access to all of the Loop, Ring, and other selection tools! You may not change the number of vertices, cut edges, or connected edges, as this will change the topology of the cage, and you won’t be able to re-import the cage. After you’re done making changes, click Import… and then click on your cage geometry. This will copy the vertex positions of your cage geometry and make them your cage. An excellent little speed booster for adjusting cages.

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Render to Texture — Light Bakes Some game engines will allow you to use a texture that is not “lit” by the game engine, giving it the effect of it actually giving off light when it’s not. This can be referred to as an illumination map or an emissive map. Either way it achieves the same effect. By using this type of texture map we can actually bake lighting into our texture directly from Max! In Figure 20-13 I lit the panel in Max with some omni and spot lights. I also toyed with the attenuation settings to give a nice gradient effect.

Figure 20-13: Lights setup

Once you get the effect you’re happy with, go into the Render To Texture dialog. Repeat the same steps you went through to create a normal map. You’ll even be using the same projection setup. The difference comes when we choose what kind of map we want to render. After you click Add, choose LightingMap this time around. This will tell Max you only want to capture the light cast on the surface and ignore the surface normal and even the material that is applied to the objects.

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Figure 20-14: Setting up a lighting map in the Render To Texture dialog

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Your low-poly plane will cast shadows! This will probably get in the way of your lighting. To turn shadowing off on your low-poly model, right-click on the plane that you are rendering and choose Properties. Uncheck Cast Shadows. This will prevent the object from casting any nasty unwanted shadows.

Figure 20-15: The final emissive map

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Render to Texture — Ambient Occlusion/Global Illumination Whatever you like to call this, it’s another amazing tool. This is a type of light bake that uses a skylight, so we achieve that same effect of deeper crevices getting darker. What this does in a normal mapped model will give you an excellent base to start making your diffuse texture. One really cool thing you can do with an ambient occlusion map is take it into photo editing software such as Photoshop and set its layer to the Multiply blend mode. This allows us to darken the image in the places where we have shadows from the ambient occlusion. Finally, the AO/GI texture should be heavily multiplied over the specular texture to crush the deeper areas to black. This gives the effect that the deep areas receive no light. This is extremely important to how your eye will read the texture. It gives the illusion of depth, which is lacking in a normal map. You can create an AO or GI map quite easily. Open the scene where you created your light bake and save it with another file name. Delete all of the lights in the scene until you get back to your default Max lighting. This will tell you that you have no lights in the scene anymore. Add a skylight to the scene. Figure 20-16 shows the settings I typically use. The default setting for Multiply is fine. Be sure to set your color to pure white and check the Cast Shadows box.

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Figure 20-16: The skylight settings

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Don’t forget to turn off shadow casting on your low-poly plane object if you haven’t already!

Be sure to name the file that you are rendering something other than what you named your light bake. Click Render and be prepared to wait. The wait is worth it, so get up, get a sandwich, watch some TV, or just stretch your legs. That’s all there is to creating AO/GI texture maps! It’s an amazing starting point for texture creation.

Figure 20-17: The final diffuse

Figure 20-18: The final specular

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The textures in Figures 20-17 and 20-18 were created using GI renders. Because this book is strictly about Max I won’t go into details about texture creation. Texture creation is an art form of its own that I really love. If you are interested in texture creation, take a look at some of the great books that are available on this topic.

Using DirectX and Normal Maps in the Viewport This step is easy considering you should be pretty familiar with the basic usage of the Material Editor. Load it up and go down to the Bump channel. Turn on the Bump channel, set it to 100, and click the None button. Pick Normal Bump. In the Normal slot, click None and pick Bitmap. Load your normal map image in here.

Figure 20-19: The Material Editor with a Normal Bump

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By default Max is set to a Tangent type normal map. This is the type of normal map most engines will use. If for some reason Tangent isn’t the type that is selected, make sure you change it back.

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At this point, we can render the object and it will show up with our normal map applied in the render. We want to see the effects in real time though, don’t we? After all, we’re doing this whole normal mapping process to create an effect for a real-time rendering engine! Go back up to your base material. Remember when we enabled textures such as the checker pattern in the viewport? Click and hold the Show Standard Map in Viewport button. This will expand the button and show you a pink checkered box button, which is the Show Hardware Map in Viewport button and enables normal maps in your viewport. Make sure the button is in the clicked position after you pick it, and you should see your normal map on your object with this material applied.

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For some reason Max has quite a lengthy pause when you undo with hardware maps enabled. This is why I usually only preview in a viewport after I’ve made my changes. To turn off the normal map in the viewport, simply click the Show Hardware Map in Viewport button again.

Figure 20-20: Click and hold the Show Standard Map in Viewport button to expand its options.

You’ll notice that the Show Map in Viewport button turns into a pink checker pattern. This is a quick way to see if the material is using a DirectX shader or not.

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As of this writing, DirectX shaders in the viewport cause severe lag when performing the undo function, even if you don’t have the map shown in the viewport. If you’re going to be modeling, disable the DirectX check box completely. You should only enable DirectX when you want to preview something.

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That’s it! Apply the material to your model and you should see the model with normal maps applied rendered in real time. Put a few lights in your scene and move them around to really see your normal map effect.

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You can, as you may already know, apply multiple materials to a single object in Max. However, if you have a DirectX material applied to an object with a standard material also applied, the object will show up as a red wireframe. Currently Max does not support DirectX and non-DirectX shaders applied to the same object.

Exporting to Other Software Packages You may eventually want to explore other options to literally paint in the geometry detail. Both Mudbox and ZBrush are amazing applications in their own right and are great for painting geometry details like flesh and other organic shapes. Both Autodesk’s Mudbox and ZBrush import OBJ format files. All you have to do is select the objects you want to export and click on File > Export Selected. When the OBJ property box comes up, plug in the settings shown in Figure 20-21. For more information on Mudbox, see http://www.autodesk.com/mudbox. See http://www.pixologic.com for information on ZBrush.

Figure 20-21: OBJ file type settings

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Chapter 21

Animation Basics Animation is a special skill that I can barely begin to describe in this book. I am not an animator, and I offer that information without hesitation. I also hold the animators I work with in high regard because I’ve tried my hand at animation. It’s a rough path but extremely rewarding. Animators spend day after day tweaking key frames and changing motion curves with a keen eye for secondary motion and realistic balance and transition. It’s a totally different ball game than modeling. I’m completely amazed when I hand off a character and they bring it to life from a simple reference pose. Let me start off by explaining how animation works in today’s 3D programs. You start off by placing the character in a pose. You then, as in illustrative animation, start going down your timeline and blocking in key poses or points in time. Max then “interpolates” between the key frames. That is, it transitions the character over how many frames you gave Max until it reaches the final value on the frame you gave it. This is called key framing. After you set up your key frames and have the basic motion that you were trying to capture, you then start adding smaller detail motion to things that move with a character such as hair, clothes, or a backpack. As with modeling, it’s best to work with broad strokes and then sharpen up the details as you make passes on whatever you are working on. So, with that said, on with the basic introduction to animation. 415

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Creating and Deleting Keys As just mentioned, animation is created by setting keys. A key is simply a point in time that retains specific information. It can store time data, rotation values, position information, and so on. Let’s do something simple to start off with. We’ll make a bouncing ball. But before we get started, let’s set how many frames we want this animation to last. Click the Time Configuration button down near the lower right of the Max interface to bring up the Time Configuration dialog. Figure 21-1: The Time Configuration button

Figure 21-2: The Time Configuration dialog

Most of the options in this dialog are pretty self-explanatory. You can adjust your frame rate in the Frame Rate options area in the upper-left corner. You can choose from NTSC, which is

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the default 30 FPS setting; Film, which is 24 frames per second; or PAL, which runs at 25 frames per second. You can also choose a custom number of frames per second. You’ll pretty much never want to change this from its default setting unless you are doing film. You can adjust your playback speed very quickly with the Playback settings. There are five options: 1/4x, 1/2x, 1x, 2x, and 4x. You can also choose whether or not to have your animations loop. By default, Loop is checked. That means when your time slider gets to the end of the active time segment, it will start over at frame 0 and play again. The settings you’ll use the most, however, are the Animation settings. Here you can adjust your time segment’s start time and end time. By default, the length of your active time segment is 100 frames. You won’t always want an animation that is 100 frames long, so you can adjust that here. Back to animating. Create a sphere anywhere in your viewport. Don’t worry about any of the settings — the defaults are fine. Imagine the grid is the surface you’re going to be bouncing the ball off of, so let’s raise the ball upward until we’ve gotten a good distance away from the grid.

Figure 21-3: The ball raised up off the grid

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To start off we need to make sure Max knows we want to set this position as a key frame. Go down to the time slider and make sure it is still on frame 0. Click the large button with a key icon on it (confusingly named Set Keys). You’ll see a little notch on the time slider at frame 0. This stores the information of the sphere in its current state. Figure 21-4: The key frame buttons

Now, we want the ball to move downward as if it’s falling and hit the floor. The easiest way to do this is to turn on Auto Key. The button is right next to the Set Keys button. This allows you to scrub, or drag the slider, to a different frame number and move the ball. After you’re done moving the ball, Max automatically sets the key for you. This is handy so you don’t have to remember to click the Set Keys button every single time you make a tweak. Scrub to frame 20 and move the ball downward until it goes a little through the surface of the grid. Congrats! You’ve just made your very first animation! Click the Play button to see. After reviewing the motion in real time, you’ll notice the ball falls too slowly. One really cool thing about animating is that you can move key frames to different times. Just click and drag on the new key frame. Let’s move it to frame 10. Click Play again and you’ll see the ball fall much faster now. Okay, so the ball falls but it’s very “blah.” Let’s spice it up a little bit and add a couple of recoil bounces. Just scrub a little farther down the timeline and add a few more bounces. Make each bounce about half of the last bounce height.

Figure 21-5: The time slider with key frames

The following images correspond to the key frames indicated on the time slider (0, 10, 18, 28, 34, 41, 46, 52).

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Figure 21-6: Key frame sequence of each bounce apex and impact

As you can see after setting these key frames, this animation is seriously lacking something. Let’s give the ball an almost cartoon-like appearance. We can do this by exaggerating the motion that the ball has.

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With Auto Key still on, go to frame 9. This is the frame just before impact. Using the Select and Squash tool, grab the z-axis of the ball and pull upward a little. This will stretch the ball out, giving it the appearance of falling at a high rate of speed toward the ground.

Figure 21-7: The stretched ball

The very next frame let’s allow the impact of the ball to be seen. Scrub over to frame 10 and squash the ball down this time. This really shows the contrast between the falling and the impact.

Figure 21-8: The squashed ball

Now that we have the impact, the ball will be bouncing back upward. Scrub over to frame 12 and again let’s show how fast the ball is bouncing upward by stretching it out a little.

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Figure 21-9: The ball leaving the ground again

As the ball nears the apex (or top) of its bounce, let’s allow it to return to its normal ball shape. This really allows your eye to see the ball zeroing out its velocity for a second.

Figure 21-10: The ball at its apex

Finally, we can repeat these steps by squashing the ball as it falls again. I’ll leave it up to your discretion where you put your key frames, but remember that each time the ball bounces it’s losing its force, so the squashing and stretching should reflect that also!

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My final animation file can be downloaded with the rest of the companion files from www.wordware.com/files/ 3dsmax2008.

The Curve Editor One amazingly cool little tool is the Curve Editor, available by clicking the Curve Editor button on the right of the toolbar. This allows you to modify the curve Max uses to interpolate between key frames. It also can be used to visualize the change in position, rotation, scale, and pretty much any other value you can possibly think of in Max.

Figure 21-11: The Curve Editor button

The Curve Editor is a huge tool that I unfortunately can’t go into specifics about here, but check out the curve created for you while we were animating the ball and toy around with the Curve Editor. I’m sure you’ll catch on fast! On the left side under Objects, find the sphere that we animated (probably called Sphere01). If you click on the box icon next to your object’s name, Max auto-selects all of the types of key frames you’ve made. If you like, you can see transforms, rotations, and scales by themselves by clicking on the appropriate section.

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Figure 21-12: The Curve Editor

Chapter 22

Creating a Basic Composite over a Background Plate For this final chapter we’re going to create a composite. I’m also going to show you how to create a matte so that your two-dimensional image can receive shadows as if it’s a real three-dimensional world. Figure 22-1 is an example of a composite image created from a picture taken outside my office. Everything in these shots was modeled, lit, and composited inside 3ds Max.

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Figure 22-1: The final image

Image compositing is an insanely complex process, so we’re only going to cover the basics! We are going to load up a background plate, use the Camera Match tool, and place a standard primitive within the scene. Then I’ll show you how to create a matte on the ground so the object can cast a shadow onto the 2D image.

Loading Your Background Image Before we begin, you’ll need to load up the background image that we’ll be using. There are two things you must take into consideration when setting this up. You want to make sure that when you render the scene Max will render the background image we assign as the background. Also, you will want to make sure that you can see the background image inside your viewport. First, we’ll make sure our background is renderable, and then we’ll load it into our viewport.

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From the main menu, select Rendering > Environment. This will open the Environment and Effects dialog box, which has several options.

Figure 22-2: The Environment and Effects dialog

The only portion of this dialog that we will need to worry about is the Environment Map setting. You’ll notice an empty slot just below, labeled None. This is where we will load our background image from the companion files: Ch22_Sample.jpg. When you are done, your Environment Map slot should look like this:

Figure 22-3: The Environment Map slot

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Don’t forget to check the Use Map check box. This check box acts as a toggle button. There may be times when you don’t want to see the background image when you render. If you don’t, then simply uncheck this box. Now that we have the Environment and Effects settings correctly configured, our background will show up when we render. We just need to view this background in our viewport. From the main menu, choose Views > Viewport Background (or hit Alt+B) to open the Viewport Background dialog. In the Background Source area, choose the Files button to load the same background image that we loaded before. You can also just check the Use Environment Background check box. That tells Max that we want to use the same image as in the rendered background we set up just a second ago. Either way is fine.

Figure 22-4: The Viewport Background dialog’s Background Source area

Once you are done, you should see a glorious background appear in your Perspective viewport. The background image may be a bit blurry, depending on your personal settings. By default, Max will use a slightly compressed version of the image in order to save video memory. Our scene is not very big, so you may want to adjust those settings, which are located in Customize > Preferences… > Viewports > Configure Driver. Just check the box labeled Match Bitmap as Closely as Possible to tell Max to use the same size image as the original photograph.

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To see the actual clipping planes within your viewport, you need to right-click on the word Perspective in your viewport and check Show Safe Frame. This will border your shot for you.

Figure 22-5: The background image with Show Safe Frame enabled

You can see how Max has pulled in the image horizontally. It’s now being displayed properly in your viewport. It was actually stretching to fit the viewport before.

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Using Camera Match and CamPoint Helpers Max has some nifty little tools to match any camera angle if you just have to have some point of reference. If you look at the photograph we applied to the background you may have noticed the white square in the image. This is a perfectly square piece of paper I placed on the asphalt as a reference for the camera angle. First, go to the Create panel and click on the Helpers button. Then click the drop-down box and select Camera Match.

Figure 22-6: Choose Camera Match from the Create panel drop-down.

This will allow you to create a CamPoint object. Create four CamPoint objects in a perfect square. You’ll end up with the following:

Figure 22-7: The four points from the top

Now, these four points aren’t enough for Max to calculate a camera angle. However, if we select all four and duplicate them, making eight points as if it were a cube, this will give Max enough points to calculate with. At this point it would helpful to rotate the camera around to roughly match the scene. This will allow you to easily visualize which point should be which. Once the

Figure 22-8: Eight points for Max to calculate the camera angle

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angle is roughly correct, pan the camera off a little so your points aren’t covering your square reference in the photograph’s background.

Figure 22-9: The points offset from the actual reference

Now, load up the Utilities panel. This is the one with the icon that looks like a hammer. By default Camera Match is the second button down, but if you’ve reassigned it you can always click the More… button and select it there. In the list you can see all of the eight points we’ve created in the scene. Start off by selecting one of the bottom points in your scene. You’ll notice that Max automatically selects the same point in your CamPoint Info box. Then, click on the Assign Position button. After doing this, the next click assigns a part of the photograph in your Perspective viewport to your selected CamPoint.

Figure 22-10: An assigned position and the corresponding CamPoint

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Continue by selecting each of your bottom points and marking these on each corner of your square scene reference by clicking the Assign Position button. After all four of the bottom points are placed on the scene background, select each of the top four points. Each of these should be placed straight up from the point below it.

Figure 22-11: All of the points assigned

At this point, we can click the Create Camera button and Max will create a camera for us that figures out the camera angle automatically! Right-click on the text that says Perspective in your viewport and select Camera01 from the list. This changes your viewport to your newly created camera based on your scene. You’ll see your viewport snap to the view angle that is in the original photograph! All of the points should be directly over the square scene reference.

Figure 22-12: The new camera angle applied

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Congratulations! You’ve just matched your first camera angle and position!

Adding a Ground Plane with a Matte Material to Match the Environment Now that we have our background loaded up and our camera angle matched, we need to add a three-dimensional ground plane and line it up with our scene. This ground plane will serve a couple of purposes. It will give us a guide to line up our perspective from the 2D photo to the 3D object, and it will also receive the shadow when we light our scene. This is very important because the shadow is what will actually put the object within the photograph. If you had a more complex scene that had several objects that the shadow was casting on, you would need to model all of these details. However, I’ve picked a fairly simple flat surface for our shadow to cast on. Create a plane in your Top viewport while watching your Perspective viewport. Be sure to cover the entire ground area.

Figure 22-13: The ground plane

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Since we’ve already matched our camera angle, this ground plane should look as if it’s at the same angle as the ground in our image. It won’t be the same shape, but it should be the same angle. Now that we have our ground plane lined up, we’ll need to apply a matte material to it. The matte material is a material that will render invisible except for things cast onto it or bouncing off of it (shadows or reflections). Open up your Material Editor and press the Standard button. This will open up your Material/Map Browser. The Material/Map Browser has several default materials. We want to select the Matte/ Shadow material.

Figure 22-14: Matte/Shadow material selected

After you load the Matte/Shadow material, you’ll notice your Material Editor shows several new options. By default you should not need to do anything. The matte should be set to receive shadows and also affect the alpha. If the Receive Shadows and Affect Alpha boxes are not already checked, then make sure they are checked. Don’t forget to assign this new material to your plane!

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Lighting and Rendering Your Scene Now that we have our matte shadow, we need to create some kind of lighting for our scene. But before we do that, we need to place an object onto our ground plane. This will give our lights something to hit, and therefore cast shadows. I’m going to use the silly teapot, which you can find in the Standard Primitives rollout. Just place it in your scene however you like. I made mine super sized! The only constraint is you need to make sure it’s small enough so that the shadow it casts won’t extend past the edge of the matte material plane. If the shadow falls past the plane, you’ll see the shadow up until the plane edge and then the shadow will just cut off at a hard edge. That’s not exactly realistic! Because this is an outdoor shot, it’s easiest if you use a two-light setup. You definitely need a direct light source (the sun), and then an ambient light source to prevent the areas in shadow from being completely black. Let’s create the ambient light source first. You can do this manually or you can use Max’s skylight. The skylight is a wonderful tool and it’s worth using whenever you need to create nice smooth ambient lighting. Just don’t use it as your only means of lighting. Create a skylight in your scene. Figure 22-15 shows the settings I’m using for my skylight.

Figure 22-15: Skylight settings

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Set the sky color by clicking on the box next to Sky Color and enter these values in the color picker dialog: 165, 165, 180. Make sure the skylight is turned on. You may also want to adjust your light color to match your scene. You can even get very crazy with this thing and load HDR lights and other stuff to match your lighting via the photo, but we’re keeping this simple for now. I am going to use a blue color for the ambient lighting in this case. By default, your shadow sample is 20. I lower mine to 10 or 15 just to speed up render tests. When you finalize your shot, you’ll reset the shadow sample to the desired number. The Multiplier setting is how intense your light is. We may adjust this up or down depending on how this scene starts turning out. Let’s go ahead and do a test render with these settings.

Figure 22-16: Our test render

Not bad! Oh, and before I forget, I need to mention something about the render size. You don’t need to render the original size of the image, but you do need to maintain the aspect ratio. To lock down this aspect ratio, simply press the Lock icon in your render settings. You can now change the size of your

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render to your heart’s content, and Max will maintain this aspect ratio for you. That way you can lower your render size to something realistic and not kill your render times. Okay, with that said, let’s create our sunlight. Normally I’d tell you to use a light with a ray trace shadow. Oftentimes sunlight is a very direct source and casts a pretty crisp shadow. But in this shot you have to use your shadows as a reference and try to match them. The shadows we have in front of the teapot are pretty blurry actually. They are also a bit blue. And they are not just solid black shadows. These are things to keep in mind when matching the lighting by hand. Let’s just use a basic omni light. In this case, it’s coming from the front left of our scene and behind me, the picture taker. The location of the omni light is the most important thing at this point.

Figure 22-17: The scene from the top

Mess around with the omni light yourself to see what you can come up with. I kept most of the light’s defaults actually, but I did make a few minor adjustments. I have Multiplier set to 1.18 and my shadow density set to 0.85 instead of the default 1.0. If you render your scene with similar settings, you should get something similar to Figure 22-18.

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Figure 22-18: The final image

You can go as far with compositing as your imagination can take you. If we were doing this for real, you might start thinking about the teapot reflecting things in its environment. You may want to cast a fake shadow across the teapot, as if the tree next to it is putting it partly in shadow because of its leaves. You can even start playing around with HDR lighting at this point and create your own HDR images. We are literally at the most basic stages here, but you should have the “essentials” at this point!

Index 2.5-dimensional snapping, 184-185 2D objects, creating, 24-26 3D space, 2-3 3ds Max, main toolbar, 26 renderers, 124 resetting, 80 user interface, 12 A Advanced Effects rollout, 140-141 Align tool, 41-42 ambient color, 112 ambient occlusion map, creating, 409-411 animation, 415 effect on geometry, 335-339 armor, adding detail to, 293-296 creating, 275-296 creating belt, 280, 282 creating for chest, 281 creating for legs, 280, 281-282, 288-289 creating for neck, 279, 288, 290-291 creating for shoulder, 277-278, 281, 283-284, 290 making high-poly, 283-293 roughing out, 277-283 Assign Renderer rollout, 129 Attach button, 103-104 attenuation, 137-138 AutoGrid option, 20 axes, moving objects along multiple, 31 setting, 34-35 axis gizmo, 29 B Backface Cull option, 242 background, adding default, 115 background image, loading, 426-429 base poses, 341-342

basic character, adding detail to, 271-272 creating arms, 261-265 creating feet, 259-260 creating hands, 265-268 creating head, 269-270 creating legs, 253-258 creating pelvis, 250-252 creating torso, 243-249 Bend modifier, using, 49-51, 154-155 Bevel tool, using, 82-83 bind pose, 341 Bitmap Parameters rollout, 120 Blinn Basic Parameters rollout, 190 blue channel, 395-396 boat hull, creating, 325-331 Border button, 74 box, creating, 20-21 box modeling, 210-213, 222-223, 243-246 Bridge tool, using, 96-97 bump, 109 bump map, adding to material, 117-119 Button mode, 70-71 C camera, 8 camera angle, matching, 430-433 CamPoint objects, creating, 430 using, 431-432 ceiling plane, creating, 189 Chamfer tool, using, 87 character pose, setting up, 341-343 clipping planes, viewing, 429 Clone Options dialog, 38-40 Collapse tool, using, 86 colors, adjusting for shadow, 142 changing for material, 112 customizing in user interface, 59 command panel, expanding, 56

439

Index

Common Parameters rollout, 125-127 composite image, creating, 425-438 compositing, 426 Configure Modifier Sets dialog, 61-62 Connect tool, using, 88 control loops, see edge loops coordinates, 3 Create panel, 4-5, 18-19 Cameras section, 8 Geometry section, 4-5 Lights section, 6 Shapes section, 24 Create tool, 97-98 Curve Editor, 423-424 customization, importance of, 344 Customize User Interface dialog, 57-60 Cut tool, using, 89-90 D dagger, adding detail to, 235 creating blade, 210-222 creating hilt, 222-232 creating sheath, 232-234 density, adjusting for shadow, 142 details, storing in normal map, 393-396 diffuse, 109 diffuse channel, 112 DirectX shaders, using with 3ds Max, 412-413 displacement, 109 distortion, viewing, 370 door primitives, 5 doorways, adding to floor plan, 179-181 E ear, anatomy of, 380 modeling, 381-387 Edge button, 73-74 edge loops, 206, 334, 339 growing, 79 selecting, 78 edge rings, 78 growing, 79 selecting, 78

440

edges, chamfering, 87 collapsing, 86 connecting, 88 creating, 97 cutting, 89-90 removing, 86 selecting, 74 Edit Mesh, 68 Edit Poly, 68 Edit Poly objects, creating from standard primitives, 68 selecting, 77-80 Edit Tri button, 101 Edit UVWs window, 354-358 editable object, making primitive into, 68 Element button, 75-76 emissive map, 407 Environment and Effects dialog, 427-428 Expert mode, 65 extended primitives, 5, 23-24 Extrude tool, using, 81-82 F face, modeling in parts, 343 faces, collapsing, 86 faceted, 109 falloff, 139 see also attenuation Falloff setting, 79-80 FFD(box) modifier, using, 155-156 files, exporting, 413 fill light, creating, 146-147 Final Gather option, 144-145 Flat Mirror option, using to create reflections, 191-193 Flat Mirror Parameters rollout, 192-193 Flatten Mapping option, 360 floor plan, adding doorways to, 179-181 adding floor trim to, 183-188 adding windows to, 181-182 creating, 175-178 creating floor and ceiling for, 188-189 creating floor texture for, 189-193 floor plane, applying reflection to, 191-193 creating, 188

Index

creating floor texture for, 189-191 free direct light, 134 free spot light, 133 Freeform Mode tool, 356 G General Parameters rollout, 136 geometry, effect of animation on, 335-339 gizmos, resizing, 62 global illumination map, creating, 409-411 glossiness, 110 adjusting, 113 green channel, 395 Grid and Snap Settings dialog, 37-38, 176, 183 ground plane, applying material to, 434 creating, 433 lighting, 435-438 placing object on, 435 group, including instance in, 43 Grow button, 77-78 H head, adding detail to, 313-315 completing, 310-312 completing face for, 309-310 creating eyelids, 300-302 creating mouth, 303-305 creating nose, 306-308 getting reference for, 298-299 high-poly modeling, 340-341 Hinge from Edge tool, using, 83-84 hotkeys, creating, 59-60 hotspot, 139 I illumination map, 407 image, projecting, 140-142 setting up as reference, 239-243 Inset tool, using, 84-85 instance, 39 including in group, 43 Intensity/Color/Attenuation rollout, 137-138

interior, creating, 175-199 Isolate tool, 234 K key, 416 key frames, 415 adjusting, 418-423 setting, 416-418 key framing, 415 key light, creating, 146-147 L Lathe modifier, using, 156-159 Layer dialog, 44-46 Layers button, 44 Leaf Parameters rollout, 180-181 light type, selecting, 136 lighting, baking into texture, 407-408 importance of, 6-8, 131 lights, adjusting contrast of, 140 changing shape of, 139 creating, 134-135 setting, 435-438 standard, 133-134 using as projector, 140-142 lofting, 170-173 Loop button, 78-79 loops, removing, 92 M Make Planar tool, using, 102-103 map channels, 116-117 loading textures into, 119-120 Map Parameters rollout, 359-360 Mapping options, 360-362 Maps rollout, 116 Material Editor, 108-109 accessing, 108 materials, 109 see also textures applying to ground plane, 434 applying to object, 111, 348-350 changing color of, 112 creating bump map for, 117-119 selecting, 111 Maximize Viewport tool, 14

441

Index

MaxScript, 344 Melt modifier, using, 159-160 Mental Ray renderer, 124 using, 144-149 MeshSmooth modifier, 167 Mirror dialog, 40 Mirror tool, 40-41 mirroring, 245 model, unwrapping, 371-378 modeling, box, see box modeling high-poly, see high-poly modeling organic, see organic modeling poly, see poly modeling spline, see spline modeling strip, see strip modeling sub-d, see sub-d modeling Modifier List, 49-50 adding buttons to, 61-62 modifier stack, 50 modifiers, adding to custom toolbar, 58 creating button set for, 61-62 layering, 51-52 listing, 49 viewing in stack, 50 Modify panel, 48-52, 69-70 mouse wheel, using, 16 Move tool, 29-30 Multi mode, 72

applying modifier to, 49-51 attaching, 103-104 bringing into view, 17 collapsing to polygons, 328 copying, 38-40 creating, 18-21 freezing, 48, 242-243 grouping, 42-43 hiding, 46-47 layering, 44-45 lighting, 145-149, 435-438 moving, 29-30 moving on multiple axes, 31 placing on ground plane, 435 rotating, 31-33 scaling, 33-34 selecting, 27, 30, 75-76 selecting Edit Poly, 77-80 slicing, 90-91 splitting, 95 omni light, 133 creating, 148 opacity, 110 setting, 114 open edges, connecting, 96-97 selecting, 74-75 organic modeling, creating a basic character, 243-273 creating a head, 297-315

N Named Selection Sets dialog, 43-44 naming conventions, 334 Noise modifier, using, 160-161 normal mapping, 362 Normal Mapping option, 361-362 normal maps, 389 creating, 390-392 faking detail with, 393-396 loading, 411-413 rendering, 402-405

P Pan View tool, 15 Parameters rollout, 180 Pelt Map modifier, 363 using, 365-369 pelt mapping, 364 pivot, 3, 53 poly modeling, 68 Polygon button, 74-75 polygon flow, 334 proper, 207-208 polygons, 2 beveling, 82-83 collapsing object to, 328 connecting edges of, 88 connecting vertices of, 88

O object selection filter, 26-27 objects, applying material to, 111, 348-350

442

Index

creating, 98 extruding, 81-82 extruding from edge, 83-84 flattening, 102-103 insetting, 84-85 selecting, 74-75 primitives, see extended primitives and standard primitives Projection modifier, using, 405-406 Projector Map option, 140-142 Push modifier, using, 161-162 Q quad menu, 64 Quick Slice option, using, 90-91 R ray tracing, 191 real-time shadows, 150-152 red channel, 394-395 Redo tool, 26 reference, 39, 237-238 setting up, 239-243 using, 298-299 reference pose, 341 reflections, creating, 191-193 Relax button, 368-369 Remove tool, using, 86-87 render, setting up, 194-199 Render Scene dialog box, 124-127 Render To Texture dialog, 402-405, 407-408 Render to Texture tool, 390-392 renderers, in 3ds Max, 124 switching between, 129 rendering, 123 right-click feature, 63-65 Ring button, 78 Rotate tool, 31-33 Rotate View tool, 15 S safe frame, 128 setting, 429 Scale tool, 33-34

Scanline renderer, 124 using, 124-127 sci-fi wall, creating, 399-402 Select from Scene dialog, 26-27 Select from Scene tool, 27 Select tool, 27 selection, converting, 79 selection sets, 43-44 Selection Shape tool, 28-29 self-illumination, 110 setting, 114 shader, 109, 110 Shader Basic Parameters rollout, 115 shader type, changing, 115-116 Shadow Map Parameters rollout, 142-143 Shadow Parameters rollout, 142 shadows, adjusting color of, 142 adjusting density of, 142 adjusting edge softness of, 140 enabling, 136 real-time, 150-152 selecting type, 136 setting bias for, 142 setting sample range of, 143 setting size of, 143 Shell modifier, using, 162-164, 283-284, 292, 330 Show End Result button, 52 Show Frozen in Gray option, 242 Show Safe Frame option, 128 Shrink button, 77-78 skylight, 134 creating, 145-146 Skylight Parameters rollout, 435-436 Slice Plane tool, using, 90-91 snap options, 176 Snaps toggles, 36-38 Soft Selection rollout, 79-80 specular color, 110 specular level, 110 adjusting, 113 Specular option, 140 specularity, 110 sphere, creating, 18-20 spline cage, 317 applying surface to, 322

443

Index

creating, 318-321 spline modeling, 317 creating boat hull, 325-331 splines, 24 adjusting, 323-324 adjusting smoothness of, 326 creating, 24-25 using renderable, 173 using to trace interior, 183-188 Split tool, using, 95 Spotlight Parameters rollout, 139 standard primitives, 4-5, 18, 67 creating, 18-22 making into editable objects, 68 strip modeling, 300, 379 sub-d modeling, 201-202 subdivisional modeling, see sub-d modeling SubObject mode, 72 sub-objects, 69 converting types of, 79 selecting, 72-77 supersampling, 403-404 surface, applying to spline cage, 322 Surface modifier, using, 328 surface normal, 392-393 T T pose, 341 Taper modifier, using, 165 target direct light, 133 target spot light, 133 settings for, 136-143 Target Weld tool, using, 91-92 text, creating, 25-26 texture coordinates, see UVWs texture map, 110 creating, 117-119 loading into channels, 119-120 textures, see also materials baking lighting into, 407-408 creating for floor plane, 189-193 three-point light setup, 149 Time Configuration dialog, 416-417 time slider, 63 using, 418-420 toolbars, creating, 57-58

444

docking, 57 triangles, avoiding, 78 triangulation, 99-102 TurboSmooth modifier, using, 167-170, 203-204, 284, 292, 330-331 Turn button, 100-101 Twist modifier, using, 166 U Undo tool, 26 Unfold Mapping option, 361 Unwrap UVW modifier, 353 default line color in, 369-370 Line Color feature in, 370 Map Parameters rollout, 359-360 using, 354-369 viewing distortion in, 370 vs. UVW Map modifier, 353 unwrapping, 345-347, 371-378 user interface, customizing, 56-59 loading custom layout, 58 saving custom layout, 58 tearing off parts of, 56-57 UVW map, 348 UVW Map modifier, 353 Maps rollout, 348-349 Parameters rollout, 351-352 using, 348-352 vs. Unwrap UVW modifier, 353 UVW seams, 363 UVWs, 348 V Vertex button, 72-73 vertices, 2 changing corner types for, 157-158 connecting, 88 creating, 98 lining up, 245 removing, 86 selecting, 72-73 types of corners for, 157 welding, 91-94 view, bringing object into, 17 viewport navigation tools, 13

Index

viewports, 12-13 adjusting, 16 maximizing, 14 modifying layout of, 54-55 panning in, 15 rotating in, 15 undoing changes to, 17 zooming in, 13-14 W walls, adding detail to, 183-188 creating, 176-178 Weld tool, using, 92-94 Window Crossing tool, 28-29 window primitives, 5

windows, adding to floor plan, 181-182 Wire option, 110 working pivot, 53-54 X x-axis, 31 X-Ray mode, 245 Y y-axis, 31 Z z-axis, 31 Zoom Extents tool, 17 Zoom tool, 13-14

445