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/