Christmas Animation

Hi all,

Thought I'd quickly post up a link to an animated Christmas Card I did for my company. I did it in just over a week and spent most of the time getting the snow to fall how I wanted to.

Any ways I hope you like it and hope everyone has a great Christmas and prosperous New Year!!

Creating Holes While Keeping a Clean Mesh

Can't believe it's been over a month since my last post so thought I'd better put something up here. As I mentioned before I have been modelling some interesting props so thought I'd base a small tutorial on one of the aspects I come across multiple times, creating a hole within a mesh which is going to get a Turbosmooth modifier added so the need to keep the mesh clean is very important.

So we start off with a square box like this with 2 length and 2 width segments.

Next we add an Edit Poly modifier and select the center vertices in the middle (make sure you get both the top and bottom ones).

Then click on the Chamfer settings ensuring the Open Chamfer option is ticked and put in the value you wish to make the hole.

After this the mesh will be open on the sides of the hole so select the top 4 edges and shift click them down to create new faces and close the mesh.

If you now add the Turbosmooth modifier on and set iterations to 2 or 3 you can see the cut in the mesh which is nice and clean but the Turbosmooth has now smoothed the Box as well.

To get round this if you add another Edit Poly modifier before the Turbosmooth and chamfer the edges highlighted it will sharpen up the Box.

If you need the hole (in this case a circle) to be an exact size and perfect (the above will give a slightly square circle), then before you chamfer the edges and add the Turbosmooth modifier you need to make the below cuts in the mesh. I also use a circle with a step of 1. I then use this as the template where to move the newly cut vertices to (circle is scaled slightly smaller to show in illustration).

Now this technique can be used on a larger scale, multiple times and with different shapes as these below images of a drip grid show.

Helpful Bits and Bobs

So I have been modelling some interesting props at work, well interesting in the sense of the geometry and challenges they have presented to me, after all how interesting is a Coffee Maker or Toaster ;o) What got me thinking is that when I first started out, these kind of tasks massively intimidated me. Lots of curves with holes cut  into them, strange shaped parts, lots of components, basically many challenges. So I thought I'd share some general tips that will hopefully help you through these sorts of models. I also hope to do some more detailed examples in the near future.

1: When faced with what seems to be a daunting item to work on, stop, look at the item and you'll see it's made out of lots of parts, so instead of trying to build the whole model from one mesh, break it into it's component pieces. This not only helps you focus on small, manageable chunks but also allows you to keep your workspace fast and clean instead of a huge mesh.

2: This is linked to number 1 but again when I first start out I block out the model using basic primitives to the correct dimensions and then clone these to work on the detailed work.

3: When modelling try to work out how many segments you will need at the start especially for shapes like cylinders as this can be a pain adding more further down the process.

4: If you're modelling things that have symmetry then the Symmetry modifier is your friend and will save you plenty of time. Once your all done and are happy you can the collapse the stack (although only do this once your completely happy as this can't be undone).

5: If part of the model is at an awkward angle and extruding etc is a pain due to this, then do an instanced clone of this. Then rotate it so it's at a much more manageable angle, and work on this instead whilst the other model gets updated with your changes.

6: Keep the mesh as clean as possible (stick to quads) this way it'll cause you fewer problems, especially when making changes and using modifiers such as Turbosmooth. I also try to avoid using Boolean or ProBoolean unless I really need to and normally only at the end of the modelling process.

7: When I'm working on meshes that have lots of curves, I find that using a circle spline as a guide with a very low step interpolation (normally 1 or 2) to snap my extruded mesh to very helpful and allows you to keep the correct shape.

Hopefully these will help someone out and make modelling a little less stressful.

Photo Real Modelling - Edges

Now as the title suggests this about making your models look photo real. When you look at items in the real world notice how very few have perfectly sharp edges and this is the same when your recreating models.

There are two ways you can soften the edges of a model, Chamfering and Round Corners. The first of these, Chamfering, is adding additional geometry to the model to give the impression of a smoother edge and catch some highlights. As you can see with this box, just by adding a simple bit of Chamfering and using the smooth modifier (though you can also do this within Edit Poly) it gives a much smoother edge which helps pick up some nice highlights.

Now this method works great but is very time consuming, especially on complex models which is where Round Corners comes in. This is a option within Arch & Design materials, under the Special Effects roll down so you can only use it if your using Mental Ray as your renderer of choice. Within these sets of options it allows you to set the radius of the fillet as well as a blending option between other materials.

So as you can see that just by enabling this option it allows you to quickly add a nice smooth edge to this box without any further modelling.

An important point to mention to help you achieve photo real models is that modelling is only one step. If the lighting, texturing, scene or render is not done or set up correctly then however great your model is, it won't be showed off to it's full extent and will be let down by one of the above. It is worth spending some time learning how to do the above skills to help you really push your models to the next level.

My First Post

So for my first post I thought I'd write a little about me and why this blog!

Well, I've been using 3ds Max now for about 10 years now. It started off just as a hobby for 2 years and then I studied the subject at Uni for 3 years before finally using it for work for the past 5 years in the visualisation field. What I love about it is it's ability to pretty much create anything, with the only thing holding you back being your imagination (or computing power). Now it can be tough to get it to do exactly what you want, but thankfully there is a wealth of knowledge and help out there and with a quick search you can find most of what you need or at least adapt it to your needs; which leads me nicely to why this blog.

Well, after using Max all these years and using other websites and forums to help me I thought I'd like to give back a little. So that's the plan, as I come across problems and fixes I'll post them up here as well as any other interesting bits and bobs.

Well that's enough about me and the blog so to finish, here are a couple of very handy hints and tips that cost me many hours trying to figure out when I first started:

1: When you have lost your transform gizmo (the xyz thingy) it's normally down to accidentally hitting the x key, so hit it again and back it comes.

2: Autosave, ensure it's set to on, as there is nothing worse than spending hours and losing all your work. Also on that point...

3: Save your work incrementally, just in case you need to go back to an earlier draft.

4: In the same vain as above, stack your modifiers. In other words, as your modelling something, each time your making big steps add another edit poly, this way if you make a mistake you can just delete it and go back a step (very handy when chamfering edges).

5: Gamma, if your renders are coming out very faded, just double check your gamma is set to 2.2 as a lot of the time this can be over looked.

6: Don't model and texture everything to extreme levels. Not only is this time consuming but most of the time it won't be seen or will be so far away from the camera that it will be wasted, so better focus your time on the pieces near the camera.

7: Read and follow tutorials and don't forget the Max help, there is so much free and already available to you, so before you give up have a search on-line or in the help section and most of the time someone else has had the same problem and given steps to resolve it.

So that's it for now, I'll add some more posts soon but in the mean time I highly recommend that you check out these two sites, especially if your using Mental Ray/iRay (and why wouldn't you eh).

Zap Andersson aka Master Zap - http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/
Jeff Patton - http://jeffpatton.net/