3ds Max Final Project

The Original: Glade Creek Grist Mill




Materials I used:














Beginning:
















































Middle:




























Here is a render of the scene so far.




























You can see here that the correct materials and lighting are not yet in place






























End Product:
*UPDATE*





As you can see, everything has the proper lighting, shadows, and materials now.



Here is a video animation of the scene, it's a little fast and low quality because that's all that the computer I was using could handle.

3ds Max Tutorials Chapter 14

Materials

Here is an image of the material editor window in 3ds Max. This is the compact version, and is one of the ways that you can create, edit, and assign materials.




































The other way to do it is through the slate editor window, which allows you to view the material in a more node based system. Here you can still create, edit, and assign materials to objects.


This shows my making a multi-material in the slate editor window. This is so that I can have lamps with a black outside and a white inside. A color is assigned to each polygonal face depending on its ID number. 1 is black and 2 is white in this case.





























This is how you set the ID of the polygonal faces.











End Result.

3ds Max Tutorials Chapter 13

Lighting

How to create a light (found under "lights")

























Changing the view port display quality. to show shadows and scene lighting.



Editing the light intensity and color






































Adjusting the exposure control.


























Rendering with the 3ds Max ART render.


Giving point light volume to create softer shadows. (above has volume, bottom does not)
























A render of the scene using the Sun and Sky component to light the scene.


An interactive render that will show in real time what would be rendered. This allows you to preview a render without having to go render it every time you want to see what it would look like.


Using light explorer to manage the lights in the scene.

3ds Max Tutorials Chapter 12

Keyframe Animation

The first thing that you want to do is set up your time configuration. This is what the menu looks like for that.














































There are two main ways of animating in 3ds Max, the first is by using the Auto Key function. This will automatically save any changes that you made to the object at that specific frame and then interpolate to it from the original frame or the frame before it.



The other main way to animate is by using the "Set Key" function. This is pretty similar to Maya. You enable the function, and then go to a specific frame, set the frame up how you want to, and then click the "Add key" button. The great thing about this is you can affect what things about the object will be changed or animated using the dialog box to the left of this text.











Here is an example of a fly through animation.

You can also do some fine editing work by using the dope map or the curve editor, both pictured below.

Finally, you can also fine tune the transform paths by using the trajectories editor.

3ds Max Tutorials Chapter 11

Layout and Camera

Merging models is a great way to bring in objects from other scenes into your scene. Here is a before and after of a merge being done.
























Often when modeling, the scenes will get very large, if you are saving your incrementally (as you should) then this can quickly take up a lot of space. A great way to take care of this is have a bunch of individual scenes for groups of objects and have it all just combined into one space in the main scene using xRef. This keeps the large scene from becoming a big space saver when you start saving it, because instead of having all that information copied each time, the objects are just referenced.































Using the x Reference tool to bring in new objects to the scene








Layers are a super helpful way of organizing your scene and allowing you to manipulate it just the way you want to. Here is an example of what layers look like and how they work.


Making cameras for your renders.












Adjusting the render settings.

3ds Max Tutorials Chapter 10

Hierarchies

Here you can see the full hierarchy of the model on the left side of the image. Each child is nested under the appropriate parent, that way so if you affect the parent in some way, all of its children are affected appropriately. however, if you do something to the child, it will not affect the parent.






















In these next two images you can see that there is a difference between rotating something on the gimbal and on the local.
with the gimbal, the only rotate attribute thats value is changed is the one that you have selected, however on local, it affects the other two axis's values as well. This will cause a problem for us later on when we start animating. When rotating something that is attached to a parent, always use gimbal.

In the video I showed how the axis don't all always move in gimbal mode. That's because each axis is assorted in the hierarchy so that one is the parent of the other two, and the one below that is only the parent of the last one.  you can change the order that they are parented in here.

This video shows how to link objects together in 3ds Max to parent or child objects to each other in the hierarchy.


Here is an example of what the hierarchy looks like in schematic view.

In this image I show you how to lock certain aspects of a transform of an object so that they can not be affected and their values can not be changed. This is useful for animating, especially when it comes to things like knees and elbow, which only rotate on one axis.






Here is a before and after picture. In the image on the left you can see that the torso is way too small, its actually half the size that it needs to be. To fix this I scaled it up 200%. but this created a problem, as you can see, when  I rotated the head after doing this, it is having some undesired affects on the model, this is because the scale of its parent has changed on the z axis. There are a couple of ways that we can fix this. One is resetting the x-Form.


You can see here that the z scale transform is at 200, while the others are at 100. If we want the children of this object to behave the way we expect them to, all of these scale transform values need to be at 100. We can do this by resetting the X form.







Here is where it is locate in the tools (third from the bottom) all we have to do is have the correct object selected, and then select that option. This will put it on the modifier stack. We can then "bake" the object by converting it to a poly an this will cause all the transforms of the object to be set to normal values.










See!

















The other way of fixing this is by scaling it on a sub-object level. Here is a brief video that shows you how to do this.

Yay!! It is fixed!