Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 Essentials – Read Now and Download Mobi

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Publisher's Note

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Introduction

Who Should Read This Book

What Is Covered in This Book

The Essentials Series

Chapter 1: The 3ds Max Interface

The Workspace

Transforming Objects Using Gizmos

Graphite Modeling Tools Ribbon

Command Panel

Time Slider and Track Bar

File Management

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 2: Your First 3ds Max Project

Starting to Model a Chest of Drawers

Modeling the Top

I Can See Your Drawers

Modeling the Bottom

Creating the Knobs

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 3: Modeling in 3ds Max: Part I

Building the Red Rocket

Creating Planes and Adding Materials

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 4: Modeling in 3ds Max: Part II

Creating the Thruster

Making the Wheels

Getting a Handle on Things

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 5: Animating a Bouncing Ball

Animating the Ball

Refining the Animation

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 6: Animating a Thrown Knife

Anticipation and Momentum in Knife Throwing

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 7: Character Poly Modeling: Part I

Setting Up the Scene

Creating the Soldier

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 8: Character Poly Modeling: Part II

Completing the Main Body

Creating the Accessories

Putting On the Boots

Creating the Hands

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 9: Character Poly Modeling: Part III

Creating the Head

Merging In and Attaching the Head’s Accessories

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 10: Introduction to Materials: Red Rocket

Materials

Compact Material Editor

Mapping the Rocket

Bring on the Nose, Bring on the Funk

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 11: Textures and UV Workflow: The Soldier

Mapping the Soldier

UV Unwrapping

Seaming the Rest of the Body

Applying the Color Map

Applying the Bump Map

Applying the Specular Map

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 12: Character Studio: Rigging

Character Studio Workflow

Associating a Biped with the Soldier Model

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 13: Character Studio: Animating

Character Animation

Animating the Soldier

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 14: Introduction to Lighting: Red Rocket

Three-Point Lighting

3ds Max Lights

Default Lights

Standard Lights

Lighting the Red Rocket

Selecting a Shadow Type

Atmospheres and Effects

Light Lister

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 15: 3ds Max Rendering

Rendering Setup

Cameras

Safe Frame

Raytraced Reflections and Refractions

Rendering the Rocket

The Essentials and Beyond

Chapter 16: mental ray and HDRI

mental ray Renderer

Final Gather with mental ray

HDRI

The Essentials and Beyond

Index

Bonus Chapter 1: Particles

Understanding Particle Systems

Setting Up a Particle System

Controlling the Particles with Deflectors

The Essentials and Beyond

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Cover Image: Randi L. Derakhshani, Dariush Derakhshani

Copyright © 2011 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-01675-6

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 Essentials. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

Sybex was founded in 1976. More than 30 years later, we’re still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles, we’re working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on, to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available.

I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. I’d be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how we’re doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at [email protected]. If you think you’ve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com. Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

Best regards,

Neil Edde

Vice President and Publisher

Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley

To Max Henry

Acknowledgments

We are thrilled to be a part of Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 Essentials, a complete update and style change to our previous Introducing 3ds Max series. Education is an all-important goal in life and should always be approached with eagerness and earnestness. We would like to show appreciation to the teachers who inspired us; you always remember the teachers who touched your life, and to them we say thanks. We would also like to thank all our students, who taught us a lot during the course of our many combined academic years. Equally, we want to extend many thanks to the student artists who contributed to this book, many of whom are our own students from The Art Institute of California—Los Angeles.

Having a good computer system is important with this type of work, so a special thank-you goes to Hewlett-Packard for keeping us on the cutting edge of workstation hardware. Special thanks go to Mariann Barsolo, Dick Margulis, Dassi Zeidel, and Liz Welch, our editors at Wiley who have been professional, courteous, and ever-patient. Our appreciation also goes to technical editors Jon McFarland and Jeff Harper, who worked hard to make sure this book is of the utmost quality, in addition to contributing to the writing of a few chapters. We could not have done this revision without their help.

In addition, thanks to Dariush’s mother and brother for their love and support, not to mention the life-saving babysitting services.

—Randi L. Derakhshani, Dariush Derakhshani

About the Authors

Randi Lorene Derakhshani is a staff instructor with The Art Institute of California—Los Angeles. She began working with computer graphics in 1992, and was hired by her instructor to work at Sony Pictures Imageworks, where she developed her skills with 3ds Max and Apple Shake, among many other programs. A teacher since 1999, Randi enjoys sharing her wisdom with young talent and watching them develop at The Art Institute. Currently, she teaches a wide range of classes, from Autodesk 3ds Max to compositing with Apple Shake and Adobe After Effects. Juggling her teaching activities with caring for a little boy makes Randi a pretty busy lady.

Dariush Derakhshani is a visual effects supervisor and Supervisor of Games at Zoic Studios in Culver City, CA, and a writer and educator in Los Angeles, as well as Randi’s husband. Dariush used Autodesk’s AutoCAD software in his architectural days and migrated to using 3D programs shortly after. Dariush started using Alias PowerAnimator version 6 when he enrolled in the University of Southern California (USC) Film School’s Animation program, and he has been using Alias/Autodesk animation software for quite a while. He received an M.F.A. in Film, Video, and Computer Animation from the USC Film School in 1997 and holds a BA in architecture and theater from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has worked on feature films, music videos, game cinematics, and countless commercials as a 3D generalist and CG/VFX supervisor. Dariush also serves as an editor and is on the advisory board of HDRI 3D, a professional computer graphics (CG) magazine from DMG Publishing.

Introduction

Welcome to Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 Essentials. The world of computer-generated imagery (CG) is fun and ever-changing. Whether you are new to CG in general or are a CG veteran new to 3ds Max, you’ll find this book the perfect primer. It introduces you to Autodesk 3ds Max and shows how you can work with the program to create your art, whether it is animated or static in design.

This book exposes you to all facets of 3ds Max by introducing and plainly explaining its tools and functions to help you understand how the program operates—but it does not stop there. This book also explains the use of the tools and the ever-critical concepts behind the tools. You’ll find hands-on examples and tutorials that give you valuable experience with the toolsets. Working through these will develop your skills and the conceptual knowledge that will carry you to further study with confidence. These tutorials expose you to various ways to accomplish tasks with this intricate and comprehensive artistic tool. These chapters will give you the confidence you need to venture deeper into 3ds Max’s feature set, either on your own or by using any of 3ds Max’s other learning tools and books as a guide.

Learning to use a powerful tool such as 3ds Max can be frustrating. You need to pace yourself. The major complaints CG book readers have are that the pace is too fast and that the steps are too complicated or overwhelming. Addressing those complaints is a tough nut to crack, to be sure. No two readers are the same. However, this book offers the opportunity to run things at your own pace. The exercises and steps may seem confusing at times, but keep in mind that the more you try and the more you fail at some attempts, the more you will learn how to operate 3ds Max. Experience is king when learning the workflow necessary for any software program, and with experience comes failure and aggravation. But try and try again. You will find that further attempts will always be easier and more fruitful.

Above all, however, this book aims to inspire you to use 3ds Max as a creative tool to achieve and explore your own artistic vision.

Who Should Read This Book

Anyone who is interested in learning 3ds Max should start with this book.

If you are an educator, you will find a solid foundation on which to build a new course. You can also treat the book as a source of raw materials that you can adapt to fit an existing curriculum. Written in an open-ended style, Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 Essentials contains several self-help tutorials for home study, as well as plenty of material to fit into any class.

If you’re interested in certification for 3ds Max 2012, this book can be a great resource to help you prepare. See www.autodesk.com/certification for more certification information and resources.

What You Will Learn

You will learn how to work in CG with 3ds Max 2012. The important thing to keep in mind, however, is that this book is merely the beginning of your CG education. With the confidence you will gain from the exercises in this book, and the peace of mind you can have by using this book as a reference, you can go on to create your own increasingly complex CG projects.

What You Need

Hardware changes constantly, and it evolves faster than publications can keep up. Having a good, solid machine is important to a production, although simple home computers will be able to run 3ds Max quite well. Any laptop (with discrete graphics; not a netbook) or desktop PC running Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit) with at least 2 GB of RAM and an Intel Pentium Core2 Duo/Quad or AMD Phenom or higher processor will work. Of course, having a good video card will help; you can use any hardware-accelerated OpenGL or Direct3D video card. Your computer system should have at least a 2.4-GHz Core2 or i5/i7 processor with 2 GB of RAM, a few GBs of hard drive space available, and a GeForce FX or ATI Radeon video card. Professionals may want to opt for workstation graphics cards, such as the AMD FirePro or the Nvidia Quadro series of cards. The following systems would be good ones to use:

• Intel i7, 4 GB of RAM, Quadro FX 2000, 400-GB 7200-RPM hard disk
• AMD Phenom II, 4 GB of RAM, ATI FirePro V5700, 400-GB hard disk

You can check the list of system requirements on Autodesk’s website at www.autodesk.com/3dsmax.

What Is Covered in This Book

Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 Essentials is organized to provide you with a quick and essential experience with 3ds Max software to allow you to begin a fruitful education in the world of computer graphics.

Chapter 1, “The 3ds Max Interface,” begins with an introduction to the interface for 3ds Max 2012 to get you up and running quickly.

Chapter 2, “Your First 3ds Max Project,” is an introduction to modeling concepts and workflows in general. It shows you how to model using 3ds Max tools with polygonal meshes and modifiers to create a bedroom dresser.

Chapter 3, “Modeling in 3ds Max: Part I,” takes your modeling lesson from Chapter 2 a step further by showing you how to model a complex object, a child’s toy rocket.

Chapter 4, “Modeling in 3ds Max: Part II,” shows you how to use and add to the tools you learned in Chapter 3 to complete the toy rocket model. You will learn how to loft and lathe objects, as well as how to use Booleans.

Chapter 5, “Animating a Bouncing Ball,” shows you the basics of 3ds Max animation techniques and workflow using a bouncing ball. You will also learn how to use the Track View - Curve Editor to time, edit, and finesse your animation.

Chapter 6, “Animating a Thrown Knife,” rounds out your animation experience by exploring the animation concepts of weight, follow-through, and anticipation when you animate a knife thrown at a target.

Chapter 7, “Character Poly Modeling: Part I,” introduces you to the first of three chapters on creating a low polygon mesh character model of a soldier. In this chapter, you begin by blocking out the primary parts of the body.

Chapter 8, “Character Poly Modeling: Part II,” continues the soldier model, focusing on using the Editable Poly toolset. You will finish the body and add hands and boots.

Chapter 9, “Character Poly Modeling: Part III,” shows you how to finish the model of the special operations soldier started in Chapter 7. You will create the head and merge in elements such as goggles and a face mask and integrate them into the scene.

Chapter 10, “Introduction to Materials: Red Rocket,” shows you how to assign textures and materials to your models. You will learn to texture the toy rocket from Chapter 4, as you learn the basics of working with 3ds Max’s materials and UVW mapping.

Chapter 11, “Textures and UV Workflow: The Soldier,” furthers your understanding of materials and textures and introduces UV workflows in preparing and texturing the soldier.

Chapter 12, “Character Studio: Rigging,” covers the basics of Character Studio in creating a biped system and associating the biped rig to the soldier model.

Chapter 13, “Character Studio: Animating,” expands on Chapter 12 to show you how to use Character Studio to create and edit a walk cycle using the soldier model.

Chapter 14, “Introduction to Lighting: Red Rocket,” begins by showing you how to light a 3D scene with the three-point lighting system. It then shows you how to use the tools to create and edit 3ds Max lights for illumination, shadows, and special lighting effects. You will light the toy rocket to which you added materials in Chapter 10.

Chapter 15, “3ds Max Rendering,” explains how to create image files from your 3ds Max scene and how to achieve the best look for your animation by using proper cameras and rendering settings when you render the toy rocket.

Chapter 16, “mental ray and HDRI,” shows you how to render with mental ray. Using Final Gather, you will learn how to use indirect lighting as well as get a brief introduction to HDRI lighting.

The companion web page at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials, provides all the sample images, movies, and files that you will need to work through the projects in this book. There you will also find a special downloadable chapter in PDF format, Bonus Chapter 1, “Particles,” which introduces you to 3ds Max’s particle systems and space warps, tools that come in handy when you create a firing machine gun.

The Essentials Series

The Essentials series from Sybex provides outstanding instruction for readers who are just beginning to develop their professional skills. Every Essentials book includes these features:

• Skill-based instruction with chapters organized around projects rather than abstract concepts or subjects.
• Suggestions for additional exercises at the end of each chapter, where you can practice and extend your skills.
• Digital files (via download) so you can work through the project tutorials yourself. Please check the book’s web page at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials for these companion downloads.

You can contact the authors through Wiley or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/3dsMaxEssentials.

Chapter 1

The 3ds Max Interface

This chapter explains the 3ds Max interface and its basic operation. You can use this chapter as a reference as you work through the rest of this book, although the following chapters and their exercises will orient you to the 3ds Max user interface (UI) quickly. It’s important to be in front of your computer when you read this chapter, so you can try out techniques as we discuss them in the book.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• The workspace
• Transforming objects using gizmos
• Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon
• Command panel
• Time slider and track bar
• File management

The Workspace

This section presents a brief rundown of what you need to know about the UI and how to navigate in 3ds Max’s 3D workspace.

User Interface Elements

Figure 1-1 shows the 3ds Max UI. At the very top left of the application window is a large button ( ) called Application; clicking it opens the Application menu, which provides access to many file operations. Also running along the top is the Quick Access toolbar, which provides access to common commands, and the InfoCenter, which offers support for various Autodesk applications. Some of the most important commands in the Quick Access toolbar are file management commands such as Save File and Open File. If you do something and then wish you hadn’t, you can click the Undo Scene Operation icon ( ) or press Ctrl+Z. To redo a command or action that you just undid, click the Redo Scene Operation button ( ) or press Ctrl+Y.

Figure 1-1: 3DS Max interface elements

Just below the Quick Access toolbar is the menu bar, which runs across the top of the UI. The menus give you access to a ton of commands—from basic scene operations, such as Undo under the Edit menu, to advanced tools such as those found under the Modifiers menu. Immediately below the menu bar is the Main toolbar. It contains several icons for functions such as the three Transform tools: Move, Rotate, and Scale ( ).

When you first open 3ds Max, the workspace has many UI elements. Each is designed to help you work with your models, access tools, and edit object parameters.

Viewports

You’ll be doing most of your work in the viewports. These windows represent 3D space using a system based on Cartesian coordinates. That is a fancy way of saying “space on X, Y, and Z axes.”

You can visualize X as left–right, Y as up–down, and Z as in–out (into and out of the screen from the Top viewport). The coordinates are expressed as a set of three numbers such as (0, 3, –7). These coordinates represent a point that is at 0 on the X axis, 3 units up on the Y axis, and 7 units back on the Z axis.

Four-Viewport Layout

3ds Max’s viewports are the windows into your scene. By default, there are four main views: front, top, left, and perspective. The first three—front, top, and left—are called orthographic (2D) views. They are also referred to as modeling windows. These windows are good for expressing exact dimensions and size relationships, so they are good tools for sizing up your scene objects and fine-tuning their layout. The General viewport label menu ( ) in the upper-left corner of each viewport provides options for overall viewport display or activation as shown in Figure 1-2. It also gives you access to the Viewport Configuration dialog box.

Figure 1-2: Viewport label menu

The perspective viewport displays objects in 3D space using perspective. Notice in Figure 1-1 how the distant objects seem to get smaller in the perspective viewport. In actuality, they are the same size, as you can see in the orthographic viewports. The perspective viewport gives you the best representation of what your output will be.

To select a viewport, click in a blank part of the viewport (not on an object). If you do have something selected, it will be deselected when you click in the blank space. You can also right-click anywhere in an inactive viewport to activate it without selecting or deselecting anything. When active, the view will have a mustard yellow highlight around it. If you right-click in an already active viewport, you will get a pop-up context menu called the quad menu. You can use the quad menu to access some basic commands for a faster workflow. We will cover this topic in the section “Quad Menus” later in this chapter.

ViewCube

The ViewCube navigation control, shown in Figure 1-3, provides visual feedback of the current orientation of a viewport, lets you adjust the view orientation, and allows you to switch between standard and isometric views.

Figure 1-3: ViewCube navigation tool

The ViewCube is displayed by default in the upper-right corner of the active viewport, superimposed over the scene in an inactive state to show the orientation of the scene. It does not appear in camera or light views. When you position your cursor over the ViewCube, it becomes active. Using the left mouse button, you can switch to one of the available preset views, rotate the current view, or change to the home view of the model. Right-clicking opens a context menu with additional options.

Mouse Buttons

Each of the three buttons on your mouse plays a slightly different role when manipulating viewports in the workspace. When used with modifiers such as the Alt key, they are used to navigate your scene, as shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4: Breakdown of the three computer mouse buttons

Quad Menus

When you click the right mouse button anywhere in an active viewport, except on the viewport label, a quad menu is displayed at the location of the mouse cursor (see Figure 1-5). The quad menu can display up to four quadrant areas with various commands without your having to travel back and forth between the viewport and rollouts on the Command panel (the area of the UI to the right—more on this later in the section “Command Panel”).

The two right quadrants of the default quad menu display generic commands, which are shared between all objects. The two left quadrants contain context-specific commands, such as mesh tools and light commands. You can also repeat your last quad menu command by clicking the title of the quadrant.

The quad menu contents depend on what is selected. The menus are set up to display only the commands that are available for the current selection; therefore, selecting different types of objects displays different commands in the quadrants. Consequently, if no object is selected, all of the object-specific commands will be hidden. If all of the commands for one quadrant are hidden, the quadrant will not be displayed.

Cascading menus display submenus in the same manner as a right-click menu. The menu item that contains submenus is highlighted when expanded. The submenus are highlighted when you move the mouse cursor over them.

Some of the selections in the quad menu have a small icon next to them. Clicking this icon opens a dialog box where you can set parameters for the command.

To close the menu, right-click anywhere on the screen or move the mouse cursor away from the menu and click the left mouse button. To reselect the last selected command, click in the title of the quadrant of the last menu item. The last menu item selected is highlighted when the quadrant is displayed.

Figure 1-5: Quad menus

The Caddy Interface

Like the quad menu, the new caddy interface is designed to keep your eyes in the viewports while providing context-sensitive tools. The caddies replace the Settings dialog boxes available in previous versions of 3ds Max. Depending on the tool, clicking the Settings button (identified as a small arrow below the name of the tool) displays the tool-specific caddy directly over the selected objects or subobjects. Figure 1-6 shows the Extrude Polygons caddy. Each tool’s caddy is slightly different and may include more than one parameter.

Figure 1-6: The Extrude Polygons caddy

Pausing your cursor over any of the highlighted features changes the caddy title to reflect the name of that feature. Clicking a feature with a down arrow opens a drop-down menu where you can choose an option. There are three methods for executing the changes in a caddy: OK, Apply And Continue, and Cancel. Clicking OK applies the parameter values set and then closes the caddy. Clicking Apply And Continue applies the parameter values but keeps the caddy open. Clicking Cancel terminates the command.

Display of Objects in a Viewport

Viewports can display your scene objects in a few ways. If you click the viewport’s name, you can switch that panel to any other viewport angle or point of view. If you click the viewport display mode, a menu appears to allow you to change the display mode. The display mode names differ depending on the graphics drive mode you selected when starting 3ds Max. This book uses the display modes with Direct3D driver mode selected. If you use the recommended graphics driver mode Nitrous, you will find slightly different names for the viewport display modes.

The most common view modes are Wireframe mode and Smooth + Highlights mode (called Realistic in Nitrous driver mode). Wireframe mode displays the edges of the object. It is the fastest to use because it requires less computation on your video card. The Smooth + Highlights mode is a shaded view where the objects in the scene appear solid (see Figure 1-7).

Figure 1-7: Viewport rendering options with Direct3D or OpenGL driver modes

Each viewport displays a ground plane grid (as shown in the perspective viewport), called the Home Grid. This is the basic 3D-space reference system where the X axis is red, the Y axis is green, and the Z axis is blue. It’s defined by three fixed planes on the coordinate axes (X, Y, Z). The center of all three axes is called the origin, where the coordinates are (0, 0, 0). The Home Grid is visible in 3ds Max’s default settings when you start the software, but it can be turned off in the right-click viewport menu or by pressing the G key.

Selecting Objects in a Viewport

Click an object to select it in a viewport. If the object is displayed in Wireframe mode, its wireframe turns white while it is selected. If the object is displayed in a Shaded mode, a white bracket appears around the object.

To select multiple objects, hold down the Ctrl key as you click additional objects to add to your selection. If you Alt+click an active object, you will deselect it. You can clear all your active selections by clicking in an empty area of the viewport.

Changing/Maximizing the Viewports

To change the view in any given viewport—for example, to go from a perspective view to a front view—click the current viewport’s name. From the menu, select the view you want to have in the selected viewport. You can also use keyboard shortcuts. To switch from one view to another, press the appropriate key on the keyboard, as shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1: Viewport shortcuts

If you want to have a larger view of the active viewport than is provided by the default four-viewport layout, click the Maximize Viewport Toggle icon ( ) in the lower-right corner of the 3ds Max window. You can also use the Alt+W keyboard shortcut to toggle between the maximized and four-viewport views.

Viewport Navigation

3ds Max allows you to move around its viewports either by using key/mouse combinations, which are highly preferable, or by using the viewport controls found in the lower-right corner of the 3ds Max UI. An example of navigation icons is shown for the Top viewport in Figure 1-8, though it’s best to become familiar with the key/mouse combinations.

Figure 1-8: Viewport navigation controls are handy, but the mouse keyboard combinations are much faster to use for navigation in viewports.

Open a new, empty scene in 3ds Max. Experiment with the following controls to get a feel for moving around in 3D space. If you are new to 3D, using these controls may seem odd at first, but it will become easier as you gain experience and should become second nature in no time.

Pan Panning a viewport slides the view around the screen. Using the middle mouse button (MMB), click in the viewport and drag the mouse pointer to pan the view.

Zoom Zooming moves your view closer to or farther away from your objects. To zoom, press Ctrl+Alt and MMB+click in your viewport, and then drag the mouse up or down to zoom in or out, respectively. You may also use the scroll wheel to zoom.

Orbit Orbit will rotate your view around your objects. To orbit, press Alt and MMB+click and drag in the viewport. By default, Max will rotate about the center of the viewport.

Transforming Objects Using Gizmos

Using gizmos is a fast and effective way to transform (move, rotate, and/or scale) your objects with interactive feedback. When you select a transform tool such as Move, a gizmo appears on the selected object. Gizmos let you manipulate objects in your viewports interactively to transform them. Coordinate display boxes at the bottom of the screen display coordinate or angular or percentage information on the position, rotation, and scale of your object as you transform it. The gizmos appear in the viewport on the selected object at their pivot point as soon as you invoke one of the transform tools, as shown in Figure 1-9.

You can select the transform tools by clicking the icons in the Main toolbar’s Transform toolset ( ) or by invoking shortcut keys: W for Move, E for Rotate, and R for Scale. In a new scene, create a sphere by choosing Create ⇒ Standard Primitives ⇒ Sphere. In a viewport, click and drag to create the sphere object. Follow along as we explain the transform tools next.

Move

Invoke the Move tool by pressing W (or accessing it through the Main toolbar), and your gizmo should look like the top image in Figure 1-9. Dragging the XYZ axis handles moves an object on that specific axis. You can also click on the plane handle, the box between two axes, to move the object in that two-axis plane.

Figure 1-9: Gizmos for the transform tools

Rotate

Invoke the Rotate tool by pressing E, and your gizmo will turn into three circles, as shown in the middle image in Figure 1-9. You can click on one of the colored circles to rotate the object on the axis only, or you can click anywhere between the circles to freely rotate the selected object in all three axes.

Scale

Invoke the Scale tool by pressing the R key, and your gizmo will turn into a triangle, as shown in the bottom of Figure 1-9. Clicking and dragging anywhere inside the yellow triangle will scale the object uniformly on all three axes. By selecting the red, green, or blue handles for the appropriate axis, you can scale along one axis only. You can also scale an object on a plane between two axes by selecting the side of the yellow triangle between two axes.

Graphite Modeling Tools Ribbon

The Graphite Modeling Tools (also called the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon) is a section of the UI directly under the main toolbar (as you saw earlier in Figure 1-1). The Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon provides you with a wide range of tools to make building and editing models in 3ds Max fast and easy. All the available tools are divided into tabs that are organized by function, and then further divided into panels. For example, the Graphite Modeling Tools tab contains the tools you use most often for polygon modeling and editing, organized into separate panels for easy, convenient access. In the following chapters, you will make copious use of the Graphite Modeling Tools (see Figure 1-10).

Figure 1-10: The Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon

The panels found in the Polygon Modeling tab are:

• Polygon Modeling panel
• Modify Selection panel
• Edit panel
• Geometry (All) panel
• [Subobject] panel
• Loops panel
• Additional panels

Command Panel

Everything you need to create, manipulate, and animate objects can be found in the Command panel running vertically on the right side of the UI (Figure 1-1). The Command panel is divided into tabs according to function. The function or toolset you need to access will determine which tab you need to click. When you encounter a panel that is longer than your screen, 3ds Max displays a thin vertical scroll bar on the right side. Your cursor also turns into a hand that lets you click and drag the panel up and down.

You will be exposed to more panels as you progress through this book. Table 1-2 is a rundown of the Command panel functions and what they do.

Table 1-2: Command panel functions

Icon	Name	Function
	Create panel	Lets you create objects, lights, cameras, etc.
	Modify panel	Lets you apply and edit modifiers to objects
	Hierarchy panel	Lets you adjust the hierarchy for objects and adjust their pivot points
	Motion panel	Lets you access animation tools and functions
	Display panel	Lets you access display options for scene objects
	Utilities panel	Lets you access several functions of 3ds Max, such as motion capture utilities and the Asset Browser

Object Parameters and Values

The Command panel and all its tabs give you access to an object’s parameters. Parameters are the values that define a specific attribute of or for that object. For example, when an object is selected in a viewport, its parameters are shown in the Modify panel, where you can adjust them. When you create an object, that object’s creation parameters are shown (and editable) in the Create panel.

Modifier Stack

In the Modify panel you’ll find the modifier stack (Figure 1-11). This UI element lists all the modifiers that are active on any selected object. Modifiers are actions applied to an object that change it somehow, such as bending or warping. You can stack modifiers on top of each other when creating an object and then go back and edit any of the modifiers in the stack (for the most part) to adjust the object at any point in its creation. You will see this in practice in the following chapters.

Figure 1-11: The modifier stack in the Modify panel

Objects and Subobjects

An object or mesh in 3ds Max is composed of polygons that define the surface. For example, the facets or small rectangles on a sphere are polygons, all connected at common edges at the correct angles and in the proper arrangement to make a sphere. The points that generate a polygon are called vertices. The lines that connect the points are called edges. Polygons, vertices, and edges are examples of subobjects and are all editable so that you can fashion any sort of surface or mesh shape you wish.

To edit these subobjects, you have to convert the object to an editable polygon, which you will learn how to do in the following chapters.

Time Slider and Track Bar

Running across the bottom of the 3ds Max UI are the time slider and the track bar, as shown earlier in Figure 1-1. The time slider allows you to move through any frame in your scene by scrubbing (moving the slider back and forth). You can move through your animation one frame at a time by clicking on the arrows on either side of the time slider or by pressing the < and > keys.

You can also use the time slider to animate objects by setting keyframes. With an object selected, right-click on the time slider to open the Create Key dialog box, which allows you to create transform keyframes for the selected object.

The track bar is directly below the time slider. The track bar is the timeline that displays the timeline format for your scene. More often than not, the track bar is displayed in frames, with the gap between each tick mark representing frames. On the track bar, you can move and edit your animation properties for the selected object. When a keyframe is present, right-click it to open a context menu where you can delete keyframes, edit individual transform values, and filter the track bar display.

The Animation Playback controls in the lower right of the 3ds Max UI ( ) are similar to the ones you would find on a VCR (how old are you?) or DVD player.

File Management

3ds Max provides several subfolders automatically grouped into projects for you. Different kinds of files are saved in categorized folders under the project folder. For example, scene files are saved in a Scenes folder and rendered images are saved in a Render Output folder within the project folder. The projects are set up according to what types of files you are working on, so everything is neat and organized from the get-go. 3ds Max automatically creates this folder structure for you once you create a new project, and its default settings keep the files organized in that manner.

The conventions followed in this book and on the accompanying web page (www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials) follow this project-based system so that you can grow accustomed to it and make it a part of your own workflow. It pays to stay organized.

Setting a Project

The exercises in this book are organized into specific projects such as Dresser, the one you will tackle in the next chapter. The Dresser project will be on your hard drive, and the folders for your scene files and rendered images will be in that project layout. Once you copy the appropriate projects to your hard drive, you can tell 3ds Max which project to work on by choosing Application ⇒ Manage ⇒ Set Project Folder. Doing so will send the current project to that project folder. For example, when you save your scene, 3ds Max will automatically take you to the Scenes folder of the current project.

Designating a specific place on your PC or server for all your project files is important, as is having an established naming convention for its files and folder.

For example, if you are working on a project about a castle, begin by setting a new project called Castle. Choose Application ⇒ Manage ⇒ Set Project Folder, as shown in Figure 1-12. In the dialog box, click Make New Folder to create a folder named Castle on your hard drive. 3ds Max will automatically create the project and its folders.

Figure 1-12: Choosing Set Project Folder

Once you save a scene, one of your scene filenames should look like this: Castle_GateModel_v05.max. This tells you right away it’s a scene from your Castle project and that it is a model of the gate. The version number tells you that it’s the fifth iteration of the model and possibly the most recent version. Following a naming convention will save you oodles of time and aggravation.

Version Up!

After you’ve spent a significant amount of time working on your scene, you will want to version up. This means you save your file using the same name, but you increase the version number by 1. Saving often and using version numbers are useful for keeping track of your progress and protecting yourself from mistakes and from losing your work.

To version up, you can save by selecting Application ⇒ Save As and manually changing the version number appended to the end of the filename. 3ds Max also lets you do this automatically by using an increment feature in the Save As dialog box. Name your scene file and click the Increment button (the + icon) to the right of the filename text. Clicking the Increment button appends the filename with 01, then 02, then 03, and so on as you keep saving your work using Save As and the Increment button.

The Essentials and Beyond

In this chapter you learned about the interface and how to navigate 3d space in 3ds Max. As you continue with the following chapters, you will gain experience and confidence with the UI, and many of the features that seem daunting to you now will become second nature.

Additional Exercises

• From the Create panel, choose Standard Primitives and create each one of the primitives. Pay attention to each object’s parameters to get familiar with what each object is capable of.
• Explore the viewport labels for rendering types and changing viewports.
• Convert each primitive to an editable polygon and, using the selection tools, practice selecting and deselecting vertices, edges, and polygons.

Chapter 2

Your First 3ds Max Project

Modeling in 3D programs is akin to sculpting or carpentry; you create objects out of shapes and forms. Even a complex model is just an amalgam of simpler parts. The successful modeler can dissect a form down to its components and translate them into surfaces and meshes.

3ds Max’s modeling tools are incredibly strong for polygonal modeling. The focus of the modeling in this book is polygonal modeling because the majority of 3ds Max models are created with polygons. In addition to mechanical models, you will model an organic low polygon count model—a soldier fit for a game—and use that model to animate a character with Character Studio.

In this chapter, you will learn modeling concepts and how to use 3ds Max modeling toolsets. You will also tackle a model to get a sense of a workflow using 3ds Max.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Starting to model a chest of drawers
• Modeling the top
• I can see your drawers
• Modeling the bottom
• Creating the knobs

Starting to Model a Chest of Drawers

Begin by modeling a chest of drawers (or dresser) to develop your modeling muscles. This exercise introduces you to primitives and polygons. You will be modeling by editing the polygon component, called editable-poly modeling. Why buy a chest of drawers when you can just make one in 3ds Max? Be sure you make it large enough for all your socks.

Ready, Set, Reference!

You’re so close to modeling something! You’ll want to get some sort of reference for what you’re modeling. Study the photo in Figure 2-1 for a look at the desired result.

There are plenty of reference photos to help you build different parts of the chest. You may want to flip through the pictures on the following pages to get a better idea of what you will be modeling.

Of course, if this were your chest of drawers, you could have captured tons of pictures already, right?

Figure 2-1: Model this chest of drawers.

Ready, Set, Model!

Create a project called Dresser, or download the Dresser project, Dresser.zip, from the companion web page directly to your hard drive.

3ds Max gives you the option of a few display drivers. While nitrous is default, this book uses Direct3D driver set. Some of the screens may be slightly different from yours if you run 3ds Max with the nitrous driver. For example, the viewport display option “Smooth + Highlights” will display as “Realistic” under the nitrous display.

Modeling the Top

To begin modeling the chest of drawers, follow these steps:

1. Begin with a new scene (choose Application ⇒ New ⇒ New All, and then click OK in the New Scene dialog box).

2. Select the Perspective viewport, which is set to Smooth + Highlights display mode by default. Enable Edged Faces mode in the viewport by moving the cursor to Viewport Labels in the upper left and clicking Smooth + Highlights. This opens a drop-down menu. Choose Edged Faces. This shows the wireframe edges of the object. (Or use the keyboard shortcut F4 to toggle Edged Faces on or off.)

3. In the Command panel, choose the Create tab ( ), click the Geometry icon, and make sure Standard Primitives is selected. In the Object Type rollout, click Box. You are going to create a box using the Keyboard Entry rollout shown in Figure 2-2. These options allow you to specify the exact size and location to create an object in your scene.

4. Leave the X, Y, and Z values at 0, but enter these values: Length of 15, Width of 30, and Height of 40. Click Create to create a box aligned in the center of the scene with the specified dimensions.

Figure 2-2: Keyboard Entry rollout

5. With the box still selected, go to the Modify tab ( ). You can see the box’s parameters here. You will need to add more height segments, so change the Height Segs parameter to 6. Your box should look like the one in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3: The box from which a beautiful chest of drawers will emerge

6. To start the process of using the Graphite modeling tools, we will convert the box to an editable poly. Below the main toolbar and in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click the Polygon Modeling tab. This expands and you see the Convert To Poly button. Click it, as shown in Figure 2-4.

7. Also in the top of the Polygon Modeling tab you see a line of icons (top of Figure 2-5). These are the components, or subobjects, of your object. Click the Polygon icon ( ) or use the keyboard shortcut by pressing 4 to enter the Polygon subobject mode. Now select the polygon on the top of the box. As you can see in the viewport, the polygon is shaded red when it’s selected.

Figure 2-4: Convert the box to an editable poly.

8. In the Polygons tab in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click the small arrow below the Bevel button, and then click the Bevel Settings button, which opens the Bevel caddy controls (Figure 2-5). In the following steps, we are going to bevel several times to create the lip on the crown of the dresser shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-5: Bevel caddy controls

Figure 2-6: The lip of the real dresser

9. In the text boxes of the Bevel caddy, enter the following parameters: Height: 0.5 and Outline: 1.3. Keep Bevel Type (the top button in the caddy) set to Group. Click Apply And Continue ( ); 3ds Max applies the specified settings, without closing the caddy, to give you results that should be similar to Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-7: The first bevel for the crown of the dresser

10. In the still open Bevel caddy, input these parameters: Height: 0.3 and Outline: 0 (as shown in Figure 2-8). Click Apply And Continue.

11. For the last bevel, input the following values: Height: 0.1 and Outline: -0.03. Click OK ( ). Your dresser’s top should resemble Figure 2-9.

Figure 2-8: The second bevel

Figure 2-9: This shows a rough version of the dresser’s crown.

12. Click the Edge icon ( ) in the Polygon Modeling tab on the Graphite Modeling ribbon or press 2 on your keyboard to enter the Edge subobject mode. Select the two new edges that were created with the bevel, as shown in red in Figure 2-10.

Figure 2-10: Select these two edges.

13. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and in the Modify tab click the Loop tool. This selects an edge loop based on your current subobject selection. An edge loop is essentially edges that loop all the way around an object, making it much easier to adjust models.

14. Now with the edges selected (looped) all around the top of the dresser, go to the Edges tab in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon. Choose the Chamfer tool and be sure to select the Chamfer Settings drop-down menu using the arrow below the button, as shown in Figure 2-11, to bring up the Chamfer caddy.

15. In the Chamfer caddy, enter the following parameters: Edge Chamfer Amount: 0.1 and Connect Edge Segments: 2; then click OK. Figure 2-12 shows the result.

Figure 2-11: The Edges tab

Figure 2-12: The top of the dresser is ready.

These values are not necessarily set in stone. You can play around with the settings to get as close to the image as you can or to add your own design flair. Set your project to the Dresser and load the Dresser01.max scene file from the Scenes folder in the Dresser project from the companion web page.

I Can See Your Drawers

In the beginning of this exercise, you created a box with six segments for its height. You can use those segments to create the drawers. This is thinking ahead and planning your model before you start working on an object; using another tool to add segments for the drawers after the box is made is much more laborious.

For simplicity’s sake, in this exercise you will not create drawers that can open and shut. If this dresser were to be used in an animation in which the drawers would be opened, you would make them differently. Figure 2-13 shows the drawers and an important detail you need to consider.

Figure 2-13: Notice the small gap around the edge of the box. This gap represents the space between the drawer and the main body of the dresser.

To model the drawers, begin with these steps:

1. Go to Polygon mode (press 4), and select the six polygons on the front of the box that represent the drawers. Hold the Ctrl key while selecting the additional polygons to allow you to make multiple polygon selections. You can toggle between shaded and wireframe selected by pressing F2.

2. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, go to the Polygons tab and click the Inset Settings button to bring up the Inset caddy. Set the Inset Amount to 0.6, as shown in Figure 2-14, and keep the top button’s Inset Type set to Group. Click OK.

Figure 2-14: Inset settings caddy controls

You can load the Dresser02.max scene file from the Scenes folder in the Dresser project from the companion web page to check your work or to continue here.

3. Keep those newly inset polygons selected (or select them) and go back to the Polygons tab to select the Bevel Settings button to bring up the caddy. Change the Height to –0.5, keep Type set to Group, and click Apply And Continue. The polygons now extrude inward a little bit, as shown in Figure 2-15 (left). Keep those polygons selected and repeat the procedure in step 2 to create another inset with an Inset Amount of 0.6 (see Figure 2-15, right).

Figure 2-15: Using Bevel to perform an extrude and then another 0.6 inset

4. In the original reference picture (Figure 2-1), the top drawer of the dresser is split into two, so you need to create an edge vertically in that top-drawer polygon to create two drawers. Go to Edge mode and select the top and bottom horizontal edges on the top drawer, as shown in red in Figure 2-16.

Figure 2-16: Select the upper and lower edges of the top drawer.

5. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and in the Loops tab, click the Connect Settings button to bring up the caddy (Figure 2-17). Set Segments to 1, Pinch to 0, and Slide to 0 (Figure 2-18), and then click OK.

Figure 2-17: The Loops tab with an arrow pointing to the Connect tool

Figure 2-18: Connect Edges caddy

6. Select the two polygons in the newly created top drawers. Go back to the Polygons tab and click Inset Settings. Set Amount to 0.25. This time you are going to change Inset Type from Group to By Polygon, as shown in Figure 2-19.

Figure 2-19: Inset caddy with settings for the top drawers

This setting insets each polygon individually instead of performing this operation on multiple, contiguous polygons (which is what the Group option does). Click OK to commit the Inset operation and close the caddy. Your polygons should resemble the ones in Figure 2-20.

Figure 2-20: The top drawers are inset separately.

7. Perform the same inset operation on the remaining drawer polygons on the front of the box. Set the Amount to .25, and set Inset Type to By Polygon. This will inset the five lower, wide drawers, as shown in Figure 2-21.

Figure 2-21: The remaining drawers are inset.

8. Select all of the drawer polygons. Go to the Polygons tab and click Extrude Settings. Set Height to 0.7. You don’t need it to extrude very much; you just want the drawers to extrude a bit more than the body of the dresser (Figure 2-22).

Figure 2-22: The drawers are extruded.

You can load the Dresser03.max scene file from the Scenes folder in the Dresser project from the companion web page to check your work or to skip to this part in the exercise.

Modeling the Bottom

Now it is time to create the bottom of the dresser. This dresser doesn’t have legs, but nonetheless has a nice detail at the bottom, as you can see in Figure 2-23. To create this detail, you need to extrude a polygon.

Figure 2-23: An angle view of the dresser’s bottom corner

1. Enter polygon mode (press 4). You may already be in Polygon subobject mode if you are continuing with your own file. Select the polygon on the bottom of the dresser, as shown in red in Figure 2-24.

Figure 2-24: Select the polygon at the bottom of the dresser.

2. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, go to the Polygons tab and click the Extrude Settings button to bring up the caddy. Change Height to 2.5, as shown in Figure 2-25, and click OK. This will extrude a polygon out from the bottom of the dresser, essentially adding a segment to the box, as shown in Figure 2-26.

Figure 2-25: Extrude Polygons caddy

Figure 2-26: Extrude the bottom of the dresser.

3. The polygon will still be selected, so click the Inset Settings button to bring up its caddy. Change Amount to 0.6, and click OK. This creates an inset poly, as shown in Figure 2-27.

4. The poly should still be selected, so click the Extrude Settings button to bring up the caddy, enter a height of –2.0, and click OK. Figure 2-28 shows how the bottom of the dresser has moved up into itself slightly.

To create the detail on the bottom, you need to cut into the newly extruded polygons to create the “legs” in the corners of the dresser that you saw in Figure 2-23. To do this, you will use the ProBoolean tool. This method uses two or more objects to create a new object by performing a Boolean operation.

We need another object to flesh out the shape to cut from the bottom of the dresser. We are going to create this object in the shape of the cutout at the bottom of the dresser (refer to Figure 2-23). It is a very specific shape starting with a simple rectangle.

Figure 2-27: The inset polygon

Figure 2-28: The dresser’s bottom lip

5. In the Command panel, click the Create tab ( ), click the Shapes icon ( ), and click the Rectangle tool, as shown in Figure 2-29.

Figure 2-29: Select the Rectangle tool.

6. In a front view, create a rectangle with Length of 3.0 and Width of 26.0 as shown in the top of Figure 2-30. Press W or click the Select And Move Tool ( ), select the rectangle shape, and move it so it is sitting in front of the dresser, as shown in Figure 2-30.

Figure 2-30: Move the rectangle into place. The top image shows the Front viewport; the bottom image shows the Left viewport.

7. In the Command panel, select the Modify tab ( ) and in the modifier stack, right-click the Rectangle entry. From the context menu, choose Editable Spline, as shown in Figure 2-31. In the Editable Spline parameters, open the Selection rollout and click the Vertex icon ( ) to enter Vertex subobject mode. An editable spline provides controls for manipulating an object as a spline object and at three subobject levels: Vertex, Segment, and Spline.

8. In the Front viewport, select the two top vertices by clicking and dragging a selection box around them. In the Geometry rollout click the Fillet tool, as shown in Figure 2-32.

9. Click and drag one of the two selected vertices to create a rounded corner. Because both vertices are selected, they will both get the fillet, as shown in Figure 2-33. The amount of the fillet is 0.9. You can watch the value of the fillet in the Geometry rollout.

Figure 2-31: Converting a shape to an editable spline

Figure 2-32: Fillet tool

Figure 2-33: The two vertices are filleted.

10. With the rectangle shape selected, select the Modify tab. Above the modifier stack is a drop-down menu. From the modifier list choose Extrude, which will then appear in the modifier stack above the existing editable spline object. Use an amount of 30.0 and then move the extrusion so that it penetrates both sides of the dresser.

11. Do the same to the side of the dresser:

a. Create another rectangle but make it smaller to fit the side of the dresser.

b. Convert to an editable spline as in step 7.

c. Select the two top vertices and fillet them.

d. Add an Extrude modifier and change Amount to 40.0.

e. Place that object penetrating through both sides of the dresser, as shown in Figure 2-34.

Figure 2-34: Objects placed for Boolean

Now for the ProBoolean operation itself. Don’t get this confused with the regular Boolean operation, however.

1. To begin, select the object you want to keep—in this case, the dresser object.

2. In the Create Panel, select the Geometry rollout; choose Compound Objects from the drop-down menu, and at the bottom of the Object Type rollout, click the ProBoolean button.

3. In the Pick Boolean rollout, click the Start Picking button (Figure 2-35).

Figure 2-35: Click the Start Picking button.

4. Click both extruded rectangles placed at the bottom of the dresser. By default, ProBoolean is always set to Subtraction, so the object’s shape will be subtracted from the dresser, as shown in Figure 2-36.

Figure 2-36: Finished dresser bottom

5. In the Name text box (shown in the Command panel’s Modify tab to the far right of Figure 2-37), change the name of the object to Dresser, and pick a nice light color. Go grab yourself a frosty beverage!

The finished dresser body should look like the dresser in Figure 2-1. Remember to save this version of your file. You can load the Dresser04.max scene file from the Scenes folder in the Dresser project on the companion web page to check your work or to skip to this point in the exercise.

Figure 2-37: Assigning the finished dresser body a name and a color

Creating the Knobs

Now that the body of the dresser is done, it’s time to add the knobs. We will use splines and a few surface creation tools new to your workflow. Goosebumps, anyone? Take a look at the reference for the knobs in Figure 2-38. You are going to create a profile of the knob and then rotate the profile around its axis to form a surface. This technique is known as lathe, not to be mistaken for latte, which is a whole different deal and not covered in this book.

Figure 2-38: A drawer knob

A spline is a group of vertices and connecting segments that form a line or curve. To create the knob profile, we are going to use the line spline, shaped in the outline of—you guessed it—a knob. The Line tool allows you to create a freeform spline.

You can use your last file from the Dresser exercise, or you can load Dresser04.max from the Scenes folder of the Dresser project from the companion web page. To build the knobs, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you are in the Left viewport so you can see which side of the dresser the drawers are on, as shown in Figure 2-39. You are going to create a profile of half the knob, as shown in Figure 2-40. Don’t worry about creating all the detail in the knob, because detail won’t be seen; a simple outline will be fine.

Figure 2-39: Left view of the dresser

2. Select Create ⇒ Shapes ⇒ Line. Use the current default values in the Creation Method rollout.

Click once to create a corner vertex for a line, but click and drag to create a Bézier vertex if you want to put a curve into the line.

3. In the Left viewport, click once to lay down a vertex for this line, starting at the bottom of the profile for the knob (Figure 2-41). This is the starting point for the curve. When you are creating a line, every click lays down the next vertex for the line. If you want to create a curve in the line, click once and drag the mouse in any direction to give the vertex a curvature of sorts. This curve vertex creates a curve in that part of the line. You need to follow the rough outline of a knob, so click and drag where there is curvature in the line. Once you have laid down your first vertex, continue to click and drag more vertices for the line clockwise until you create the half-profile knob shape shown earlier in Figure 2-40.

Figure 2-41 shows the profile line with the vertices numbered according to their creation order.

To create a straight orthogonal line segment between two vertices, press and hold Shift to keep the next vertex orthogonal to the last vertex, either horizontally or vertically.

Figure 2-40: The intended profile curve for the knob

Figure 2-41: The knob’s profile line’s vertices are numbered according to the order in which they were created.

4. Once you lay down your last vertex at the bottom, finish the spline by either right-clicking to release the Line tool or clicking the first vertex you created to close the spline. For this example, it doesn’t matter which method you choose. Either an open or closed spline will work; a closed spline is shown in Figure 2-41. Drawing splines entails a bit of a learning curve, so it might be helpful to delete the one you did first and try again for the practice. Once you get something resembling the spline in Figure 2-41, you can edit it. Don’t drive yourself crazy; just get the spline as close as you can.

5. With the spline selected, in the Modify Panel’s Modifier Stack, choose Line. Click the plus sign (+) to expand the list of subobjects, as shown in Figure 2-42.

Figure 2-42: Line subobject modes

Editing the Profile

A line’s subobjects are similar to the Editable Spline subobject modes. A spline is made up of three subobjects: a vertex, a segment, and a spline. A vertex is a point in space. A segment is the line that connects two vertices. To continue with the project, follow these steps:

1. Choose the vertex subobject for the line. Make sure you are still working in the Left viewport. Use the Move tool to click one of the vertices. Use the Move tool to edit the shape to better fit the outline of the knob.

To catch up to this point and have the profile already created for you, load the Dresser05.max file from the companion web page.

2. The profile line is ready to turn into a 3D object. This is where the modifiers are used. Get out of subobject mode for your line. Choose Modifiers ⇒ Patch/Spline Editing ⇒ Lathe. When you first put the Lathe modifier on your spline, it probably won’t look anything like the knob (see Figure 2-43)—but don’t panic; right now the object is turned inside out! Select Y and Max and adjust the parameters to match Figure 2-44.

3. Adjust the Perspective viewport so you can see the top of the knob. You may notice a strange artifact. To correct this, check the Weld Core box under the Parameters rollout for the lathe.

That’s it! Check out Figure 2-45 for a look at the lathed knob. By using splines and the Lathe procedure, you can create all sorts of surfaces for your models. In the next section, you will resize the knob, position it, and copy it to fit on the drawers.

Figure 2-43: Eek! That isn’t a knob at all.

Figure 2-44: The titillating parameters for the Lathe modifier

Figure 2-45: The lathe completes the knob.

Now that you have a knob, you may need to adjust it and make it the right size. If you still want to futz with the knob, go back down the stack to the Line to edit your spline. For example, you may want to scale the knob a bit to better fit the drawer (refer to the reference photo in Figure 2-38). Select the Scale tool, and click and drag until the original line is about the right size in your scene. The Lathe modifier will re-create the surface to fit the new size. You can also delete the knob and restart with another line for more practice.

Copying the Knob

In the following steps, you will copy and position the knob for the drawers.

1. Position and rotate the knob to fit on to the front of a top drawer. Change its default color (if you want) and change its name to Knob.

2. You’ll need a few copies of the original knob, one for each drawer. Choose Edit ⇒ Clone to open the Clone Options dialog box (Figure 2-46). You are going to use the Instance option. An instance is a copy but is still connected to the original. If you edit the original or an instance, all of the instances change (including the original). Click OK to create an instance.

Figure 2-46: Using an instance to copy the knob

3. Position the instanced knob in the middle of the other top drawer.

4. Using additional instances of the original knob, place knobs in the middle of all the remaining drawers of your dresser, as shown in Figure 2-47.

Figure 2-47: The dresser, knobs and all

As you saw with this exercise, there are plenty of tools for the Editable Poly object. Your model doesn’t have to be all of the same type of modeling, either. In this example, we created the dresser with box modeling techniques, where you begin with a single box and extrude your way into a model, and with surface creation techniques using splines.

You can compare your work to the scene file Dresser06.max from the Scenes folder of the Dresser project from the companion web page.

The Essentials and Beyond

In this chapter, you learned how to model with 3ds Max. Through exploring the modeling toolsets and creating a dresser, you saw firsthand how the primary modeling tools in 3ds Max operate.

You learned how to create a primitive box and from that use editable polygons and the Graphite modeling tools, ProBoolean, shapes, editable splines, and the Lathe tool to make a simple dresser.

Additional Exercises

• Select the Edges around the dresser drawers and use Chamfer to add a bit of roundness to the dresser.
• Model one of the drawers so that you can animate it opening and closing. This can be done by selecting the polygons for one of the drawers and deleting them. Then create a primitive box the size of a drawer.
• Play around with the knobs and create different styles. You can find examples at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials.
• Create a similar piece of furniture like a nightstand to match the style of the dresser.

Chapter 3

Modeling in 3ds Max: Part I

Building models in 3D is as simple as building them out of clay, wood, stone, or metal. Using 3ds Max to model something may not be as tactile as physically building it, but the same concepts apply: you have to identify how the model is shaped and figure out how to break it down into manageable parts that you can piece together into the final form.

Instead of using traditional tools to hammer or chisel or weld a shape into form, you will use the vertices of the geometry to shape the Computer Generated (CG) model. As you have seen, 3ds Max’s polygon toolset is quite robust.

In this chapter, we will tackle a more complex model with a children’s red rocket ride-on toy. We will use the Editable Poly toolset to create the toy. We will also examine the use of Boolean operations. Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Building the red rocket
• Creating planes and adding materials

Building the Red Rocket

Using reference materials will help you efficiently create your 3D model and achieve a good likeness in your end result. The temptation to just wing it and start building the objects is strong, especially when time is short and you’re raring to go. This temptation should always be suppressed in deference to a well-thought-out approach to the task. Sketches, photographs, and drawings can all be used as resources for the modeling process. Not only are references useful for giving you a clear direction in which to head, but you can also use references directly in 3ds Max to help you model. Photos, especially those taken from different sides of the intended model, can be added to a scene as background images to help you shape your model.

Creating Planes and Adding Materials

For the best in modeling reference, bring in photos of your model and use the crossing boxes technique, which involves placing the reference images on crossing plane objects or thin boxes in the scene. In this exercise, you’ll build a child’s rocket ride-on toy, as shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1: You’ll build child’s red rocket toy like this one.

Before you begin, download the Red Rocket folder from this book’s companion web page (www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials) to your hard drive where you keep your other 3ds Max projects.

1. Set your project folder to the Red Rocket project you just downloaded (Application ⇒ Manage ⇒ Set Project Folder).

2. Navigate to the place on the hard drive where you saved the book projects.

3. Click Red Rocket, and then click OK.

Now when you want to open a scene file, just choose Application ⇒ Open, and you will automatically be in the Red Rocket project’s Scenes folder.

To begin the rocket toy, start with a new 3ds Max file:

1. Open a new 3ds Max file by choosing Application ⇒ New.

2. Go to the Create panel to create a box, click the Geometry icon ( ) and, under Standard Primitives, click the Box button.

Instead of creating the box with the click-and-drag method, use the Keyboard Entry rollout, as shown in Figure 3-2. Expand the Keyboard Entry rollout. Make sure the Perspective viewport is selected. Leave the X, Y, and Z parameters all set to 0; this places the box at the origin (center) of your scene. Change the parameters to Length 22, Width 0.01, and Height 12 and click Create:

Figure 3-2: The Keyboard Entry rollout for creating the box

3. When you click Create, 3ds Max creates the image-plane box we’ll use for the side view. Rename the Box001 object Side View.

4. Activate the Top viewport, and using Length 22, Width 12, and Height 0.01, create a new box. Rename the box Top View.

Don’t forget to click Create! This creates another flat box, which you’ll use for the Top View image-plane box.

5. Activate the Front viewport and expand the Keyboard Entry rollout. Leave the X, Y, and Z parameters all set to 0, and use these parameters: Length 12, Width 12, Height 0.01 Click Create. Rename the box Front View. This creates the image-plane box for the front view of the rocket toy.

6. Move the Front View box up 6 units in the Z axis to raise it so the bottom edge is directly on the Home Grid, as shown in Figure 3-3. Then switch all the viewports to Smooth + Highlights (F3) and Zoom Extents All (Z).

Figure 3-3: The Front View box is moved up.

7. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the sceneassets\images folder in the Red Rocket folder that you downloaded to your hard drive. In this folder, you will find three reference JPEG images, one for each of the three image-plane box views you just created in the scene. Select the Top View reference image (called TOP VIEW.jpg), drag it into the Top viewport in 3ds Max, and drop it onto the Top View image-plane box. This automatically places the image onto the box, so the image is viewable in the viewport.

If the rocket images do not show up in the viewport after you drop them onto the boxes, make sure the viewport is set to Smooth + Highlights and try again.

8. Repeat the previous step to place SIDE VIEW.jpg onto the Side View image-plane box in the Left viewport and place FRONT VIEW.jpg onto the Front View image-plane box in the Front viewport. Figure 3-4 shows the image-plane boxes with the reference images applied.

9. If you need to, adjust the placement of the Front View image-plane box so the proportions of the rocket match up. The bottom of the wheels and the top of the handlebars should line up in all three images. Move the box using the Select And Move tool. Use the Orbit viewport navigation tool to rotate the view so that the image-plane boxes can be viewed from different sides to get them aligned.

Figure 3-4: The image-plane boxes with the rocket views applied

Fixing the Top View

If for some reason the image on your Top View object seems to be the reverse of what is shown in the book, rotate the Top View object to line it up the way the images appear in this chapter. Also, you may notice black bars appearing in the images. They are intended to allow the images to better line up with one another.

Creating the Body

To begin the body of the rocket, set your project to Red Rocket and load the scene file Rocket_00.max from the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project that you downloaded from the web page. In the following steps, you will begin the rocket model:

1. Change the Front viewport to a Back viewport by clicking on the viewport name and choosing Back from the drop-down menu. In the Create panel, click the Geometry icon ( ) and select Extended Primitives from the drop-down menu. Click to activate the Capsule tool, and then create a Capsule object with Keyboard Entry values set to a radius of 3 and a height of 21. Remember to use the Back viewport so that the capsule is created oriented as shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5: Capsule in the Perspective viewport

2. Open the Modify panel ( ) to edit the capsule’s parameters. Set the capsule’s Sides to 8 and Height Segs to 6. Uncheck the Smooth option; we will smooth it out later.

3. Rename the capsule Rocket Body. Make Rocket Body see-through by pressing Alt+X in all the viewports. This way, you will be able to see the image-plane boxes through the geometry. Also set the viewports to Edged Faces (F4), which will show the wireframe over the Smooth + Highlights.

4. Using the Select And Move tool, line up the rocket body with the Side, Top, and Front image-plane boxes, matching the rocket body to the front end of the image, as shown in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6: Line up the Rocket Body object to the image-plane box views.

5. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click the Polygon Modeling tab and select Convert To Poly, as shown in Figure 3-7.

Figure 3-7: Convert to an editable poly.

6. In the Polygon Modeling tab, click the Vertex subobject mode icon ( ) or press (1) and select the vertex at the very front tip of the rocket body, as shown in Figure 3-8.

Figure 3-8: Select the vertex at the very front tip.

7. In the Polygon Modeling tab, click the Use Soft Selection icon, as shown in Figure 3-9. Look at the end of the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon tabs; click the Soft tab. Set Falloff to 6.0, as shown in Figure 3-10.

Figure 3-9: Click the Use Soft Selection icon in the Polygon Modeling tab.

Figure 3-10: Soft tab with Falloff set to 6.0

Soft Selection gives your surface modifications a soft, clay-like feel. When Use Soft Selection is enabled, the effects of move, scale, and rotate edits are the same as usual on selected elements (vertices, edges, or polygons) but are also distributed to adjacent vertices based on a gradual falloff. This causes edits to have a smoothed or softened effect on the model.

8. Now switch to the Scale tool (R). We need to scale along the XY axis, which is a nonuniform scale. Do the scale in the Back viewport: center your cursor over the Transform gizmo’s XY axis, as shown in Figure 3-11, and scale while watching the Top viewport. Scale down to create a more pointed front.

Figure 3-11: Center your cursor over the Transform gizmo’s XY axis (shown as an angled yellow bar).

9. Selecting some of the front vertices in the Top viewport, scale and move the rest of the front to match the front of the rocket in the Top View image-plane box, as shown in Figure 3-12.

10. Using vertices with or without Soft Selection and changing the Falloff setting if desired, shape the rest of the body to the shape in the three image-plane boxes. Don’t worry about the back end of the rocket body just yet; we’ll tackle that in the next step.

11. When you have the general shape of the body of the rocket, go into Polygon mode; select the polygons at the rounded back end of your shape, as shown in Figure 3-13; and delete them by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard.

Figure 3-12: Select some front vertices and scale and move to match.

Figure 3-13: Select the end polygons to cut off the end of the rocket body.

Smoothing the Body

The body looks very rough and chunky right now. To smooth out the rough model, we will use nonuniform rational mesh smooth (NURMS). NURMS is a surface that has been divided into more faces to create a smoother surface while still retaining the object’s general shape. You subdivide to add more detail to an object or to smooth out the shape.

The following steps will guide you through the process of smoothing out the rocket body shape:

1. With the rocket body selected, go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and in the Edit tab click the Use NURMS icon. While in Polygon subobject mode, you will see the orange NURMS cage appear. This cage allows you to continue editing the body’s overall shape by selecting the lower-resolution cage’s polygons and editing them. This lets you affect its broader form without having to select many more polygons of the smoothed version. Click the Use NURMS icon again to turn it off.

2. Press 4 to enter Polygon subobject mode. With the rocket body selected, select the polygons on the rocket body’s right side, as shown in Figure 3-14, and delete them.

3. Go to the top level of the editable poly (press 6); this gets you out of Polygon subobject mode. Open the Modify panel, and from the modifier list, choose the Symmetry modifier. In the Symmetry parameters, choose X as the Mirror Axis and uncheck the Flip box. This creates a mirrored copy of that half of the body. Using Symmetry allows you to make changes to the original side of the body and automatically have those changes mirrored to the other side.

When you go back to editing the mesh, the mirrored half of the rocket disappears. To stop this from occurring, click the Show End Result icon, which is in the line of icons below the modifier stack, shown in Figure 3-15.

Figure 3-14: Select the polygons as shown; then delete them.

Figure 3-15: Clicking the Show End Result icon

Adding Detail to the Rocket Body

The wheel wells on the front sides of the body are the first details we will add. To create the wheel wells, we need to add some more segments to the main body. To do this, we will use a tool from the Graphite Modeling Tools called Swift Loop. It places edge loops with just a click. As you move the mouse cursor over your object, a real-time preview shows where the loop will be created when you click.

Isolate Selection

Occasionally, you might need to isolate your model to avoid the distractions of reference image planes and even other meshes in your scene. Here’s an easy technique to do this: Right-click your selected model. On the pop-up menu, click Isolate Selection. Suddenly everything but the model is hidden in your scene and you have a floating Exit Isolation Mode icon, which you click when you want your scene back. Isolate Selection can be used on individual objects or several. Just hold down the Ctrl key while selecting multiple objects.

The SwiftLoop tool, as we’ll see in the following steps, can be used in any of the subobject modes or in the top level with no subobject mode selected.

1. With the rocket body selected, make sure you are in Editable Poly level. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, choose the Edit panel and select Swift Loop. Move your cursor over to the rocket to see a preview of where a loop will eventually be placed. When the loop is in the correct place, just click and it will be added. You want to match placement of four new loops with those shown in Figure 3-16.

Figure 3-16: Use the Swift Loop tool to add detail to these areas on the rocket body.

Now that the new loops are in, turn off Swift Loop, and you can see there is a little issue. The front-end vertex of the rocket doesn’t connect to the newly added Swift Loop edge. All of those edges need to come to a point at the tip, so you will continue the new segment to the tip manually, using the Connect tool, in the next step.

2. Press the 1 key to enter Vertex subobject mode, and turn off Use Soft Selection, if it isn’t already off. Select the two vertices shown in Figure 3-17.

Figure 3-17: Select these two vertices.

3. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, and in the Loops tab click the Connect tool. This completes the loop.

4. Repeat the same with the vertex on the lower side of the rocket.

Creating the Wheel Well

Now that you have created more detail on the mesh, you can mold the wheel wells, as shown on the rocket in Figure 3-18.

You can continue with your own scene file (just be sure to turn off NURMS smoothing before you continue), or use the scene file Rocket_01.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project that you downloaded to your hard drive.

Figure 3-18: The rocket’s wheel wells

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Select the rocket and change to Polygon subobject mode (press 4), and from the Left viewport select the three polygons in the middle of the body, as shown in Figure 3-19.

Figure 3-19: Change to the Polygon subobject mode and select these three polygons.

2. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon in the Polygons tab, click the Extrude Settings button to bring up the caddy. In the Extrude Polygons caddy, set Extrusion Type to Group and Height to 0.8, as shown in Figure 3-20. Click OK.

Figure 3-20: Setting the extrusion parameters in the caddy

3. Now select all the polygons that were created with the extrude operation, shown in Figure 3-21 (on the left). Activate a back view, and exit Isolate mode if you are still in it. Then, use the Rotate and Move tools to align the polygons so that they line up with the wheel well in the Front View image-plane box, as shown in Figure 3-21 (on the right).

Figure 3-21: Use the Rotate and Move tools.

4. Switch to Vertex mode. Use a window selection to select and move the second row of vertices from the bottom of the rocket body out to the right and slightly down, as shown in Figure 3-22. This evens out the bottom part of the body to give it a more rounded look. If we left those vertices where they were, that part of the body would appear lopsided. And who wants that?

Figure 3-22: Round out the bottom of the rocket’s body.

5. Let’s apply NURMS to the model again to see how the wheel wells look when smoothed. There are still several things that we need to do to improve the look of the body. The wheel well polygons need to be moved down and reshaped to have an arch on the top.

6. Exit subobject mode and select Rocket Body, and in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click the Use NURMS button in the Edit tab. Now, when it is subdivided it looks a bit better. Figure 3-23 shows the rocket after NURMS has been enabled for the mesh.

Figure 3-23: After Use NURMS is applied, the smoothed rocket looks better (shown here with the rocket in Isolate Selection mode).

Now you need to hollow out the wheel well. Follow these steps.

7. Disable NURMS smoothing by clicking the Use NURMS button again.

8. Enter Polygon subobject mode. Select the polygons at the bottom side of the wheel well, as shown in Figure 3-24. Use Isolate if you need to.

Figure 3-24: Select the polygons at the bottom of the wheel well.

9. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, go to the Polygons tab and click the Bevel Settings button to bring up the caddy. Set Outline to –0.1 and Height to 0.0, and then click Apply And Continue. Reset Outline to 0.0, set Height to –0.7 to push in the area, and then click OK. Finally, delete the inside polygon, as shown in Figure 3-25.

Figure 3-25: The wheel well after polygons are deleted. You may see some geometry poking through the side, as shown here.

We don’t need to create the inside of the wheel well because we are not going to see it. We extruded into the wheel well in step 3 to make a solid lip at the wheel well, but it only needs to go halfway up.

10. Check to make sure that the new edges don’t poke through the mesh, as shown in Figure 3-26. If any do, select the vertices and move them inward.

Figure 3-26: The geometry is poking through the outside!

11. Enable NURMS smoothing, and your rocket body should resemble the one in Figure 3-27. Be sure to disable NURMS smoothing before you continue with the rest of the exercise.

12. Save your work.

Figure 3-27: The smoothed wheel wells look pretty good.

Creating the Control Panel

We’ll now create the control panel for the rocket, as shown in Figure 3-28. You can continue with your own scene file or use the scene file Rocket_02.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project you downloaded from the web page.

Figure 3-28: The control panel

1. To create the control panel, you need to add one more segment along the top of the body for extra mesh detail, as you can see in Figure 3-29. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click the Edit tab, select Swift Loop, and create an edge as shown in Figure 3-29.

Figure 3-29: Add an edge loop using Swift Loop to create extra mesh detail for the control panel.

2. Repeat Step 2 to create a segment vertically down the rocket body, from the nose to tail, as shown in Figure 3-30.

Figure 3-30: Add a lengthwise cut line to the rocket body.

Now we see the same problem at the tip of the rocket that you saw earlier in this exercise. You need to connect the vertices together as you did earlier. Go back to the steps immediately after Figure 3-16 for a refresher to guide you through connecting two vertices.

3. In the Top viewport, move the vertices to fit the shape of the control panel, as shown in the Top View image-plane box. See Figure 3-31.

4. Switch to Polygon subobject mode and select the control panel polygons shown in Figure 3-32.

5. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and click the Extrude Settings button in the Polygons tab. Extrude the polygons with a Height of 1.0 and with the Extrude Type set to Group, and click OK.

If you look at the top view of the rocket, you will see the new extrusion where it meets the reference half of the rocket body, as shown in Figure 3-33.

The two sides where you extruded should split away from each other. Remember that the two sides are being stitched together to form the whole body using the Symmetry modifier, so all we need to do is make sure that all the vertices of the original side are aligned in the middle. For the original rocket half, you’ll need to delete the polygons along the middle and move the vertices together. We’ll do this in the following steps.

Figure 3-31: Shape the new vertices around the control panel in the Top viewport.

Figure 3-32: Select the control panel polygons.

Figure 3-33: The top view of the rocket

6. Select the middle inside polygons, as shown in Figure 3-34, and delete them.

7. Switch to Vertex mode and select the vertices on the original side of the model where the control panel halves meet. Move them along the X axis to the middle, where the original and the reference halves meet, as shown in Figure 3-35. The problem is fixed! When the body halves are stitched together later, the body mesh will look seamless.

8. Make sure you are in Vertex mode. Using the Front, Side, and Top viewports, move the vertices of the control panel to line up with the real rocket’s control panel in the image-plane boxes, as shown in Figure 3-36.

Figure 3-34: Select the middle inside polygons and delete.

Figure 3-35: Line up the vertices to fix the split in the control panel between the two halves of the rocket body.

9. Let’s look at this rocket body smoothed. Go to the Edit tab in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and click the Use NURMS button to smooth the model again. It should look like Figure 3-37.

10. Use the cage to further edit the control panel to better fit the real control panel in the reference image-plane boxes.

You will see the Subdivision Surfaces cage as long as you are in a subobject mode.

Figure 3-36: Shape the vertices of the control panel to the outline shown in the image-plane boxes.

Figure 3-37: Use NURMS subdivision.

When you disable NURMS, the polygons for the control panel will seem exaggerated, as shown in Figure 3-38, and will go beyond the outlines of the real control panel in the image-plane boxes.

Figure 3-38: The polygons appear exaggerated.

That is because the lower-resolution cage model is a rough shape before smoothing is applied to it. Once NURMS is enabled, it smoothes the detail down, shrinking it back from the cage’s shape a little. With NURMS smoothing enabled, the control panel looks like Figure 3-39 and fits the real model.

Figure 3-39: The smoothed control panel as seen in profile

Creating the Back Wheel Axle Assembly

Let’s turn our attention to the back wheels. In the following steps, we will create the back axle assembly shown in Figure 3-40. You can use your own scene file or load the scene file Rocket_03.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project.

1. If smoothing is on, disable it by clicking the Use NURMS option and switch to Polygon sub-object mode. Change your Top viewport to a Bottom viewport by using (V) on your keyboard in the selected top view, then choose Bottom View from the drop-down menu. Also, select the Rocket and enter Isolate Selection mode.

2. Select the four polygons at the back bottom of the body, shown in Figure 3-41, and extrude them with a Height of 0.6.

Figure 3-40: The back wheels

Figure 3-41: Select the four polygons at the back bottom of the body.

3. The extruded polygons will split at the middle where the original and mirrored reference halves of the body meet, as they did with the control panel earlier in this exercise. Move the vertices and fix the seam in the center the same way you did for the control panel. Make sure to delete the unneeded inside polygons as you did with the control panel. You can see the result in Figure 3-42.

Figure 3-42: The result of the extrude

4. Go into Vertex mode and adjust the extruded polygons of the back axle so that they have the shape of the axle from the Side View image-plane box, as shown in Figure 3-43. Exit Isolate Selection mode so you can see your image plans.

Figure 3-43: Adjust the extruded polygons to better fit the shape of the back.

5. Switch to Polygon mode, and select the polygons on the side of the extruded polygons and extrude them with a Height of 0.6, then click OK, as shown in Figure 3-44.

Figure 3-44: An extrusion with a Height of 0.6

6. Rearrange the vertices to create a small delta wing coming off the bottom/side of the body, as shown in Figure 3-45.

Figure 3-45: Create a small delta wing.

7. Turn on NURMS again to see the smoothed results shown in Figure 3-46.

8. While still in Use NURMS, try moving the cage vertices to sculpt the back wheel axle. Save your work.

The body is finished for now. Later we will create the seat and add the small lip that connects the thruster to the back.

Figure 3-46: The rocket body is starting to take shape.

Further Body Work

We need to add some finishing touches to the rocket body. You can continue working with your own scene file or load Rocket_04.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project.

You should see a seam running along the top middle of the body, as shown in Figure 3-47. To fix this, we need to bring those vertices in toward the center of the body until the seam disappears.

Figure 3-47: A seam runs down the middle of the rocket body.

1. Select the rocket, then in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, enter Vertex mode. The mirrored side of the body will disappear because we are lower in the modifier stack. If you want the Symmetry to remain, click the Show End Result icon ( ), which you will find in the row of icons below the modifier stack.

2. Select Graphite Modeling Tools and click the Edit tab; then turn off Use NURMS. Next, select the vertices that run along the middle. Select and move a few at a time. From the side view, you can see that those vertices stick up farther than the row below; this is what causes the ridge. Make the vertices level with the row of vertices below them by moving them along the Y axis, as shown in Figure 3-48.

Figure 3-48: Make the vertices level with the row of vertices below them.

3. Go to Symmetry up in the modifier stack to view the whole body without the seam. Turn Use NURMS back on to see if the seam is gone, as shown in Figure 3-49.

Figure 3-49: The seam is gone!

The next detail to manage is a small lip at the back end of the body, as shown in Figure 3-50. We are doing the lip after we complete the body because this detail is easier to create after the body is stitched together.

Figure 3-50: The lip between the thruster and the rocket body

1. Turn off Use NURMS if it’s currently enabled.

2. Make sure the body is selected (with the Symmetry modifier). Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, and in the Polygon Modeling menu click Collapse Stack. This combines the two separate halves of the rocket into one.

3. In the Polygon Modeling menu, click on Border mode ( ) and select the border edges in the back of the body, as shown in Figure 3-51.

Figure 3-51: Select the border edges in the back of the body.

4. Go to the Geometry (All) tab in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and click Cap Poly. This will create a poly where the hole was.

5. Switch to Polygon subobject mode and select the new polygon. Go to the Polygons tab of the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and click the Bevel Settings button to open the Bevel caddy. We will do four bevels through the open Bevel caddy. Between each bevel, make sure you click Apply And Continue ( ), not OK ( ). This applies your bevel but keeps the caddy open for more.

6. Make four bevels with the following values:

Bevel No.	Height	Outline
1	0.05	0.3 ( )
2	0.2	0.1( )
3	0.2	–0.1( )
4	0.05	–0.3( )

7. Click the Editable Poly entry in the modifier stack. Turn on NURMS to see how the rocket body is looking (see Figure 3-52).

Figure 3-52: Thruster detail completed with NURMS

Hold On to Your Seat

What fun would it be to ride a rocket standing up? Speaking from experience, it’s not fun. So let’s give our rocket model a nice comfy seat. To create the cutout for the seat we will be using ProBoolean. A Boolean operation is a geometric operation in 3ds Max that creates a shape from the addition of two shapes, the subtraction of one shape from another, or the common intersection of two shapes.

In theory, we will need to subtract a cylinder shape from the rocket body we have created so far. We’ll start by creating the cylinder:

You can continue with your own scene file or load Rocket_05.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project.

1. Using your own scene file or the provided Rocket_05.max scene, in the Left viewport create a cylinder with the parameters shown in Figure 3-53.

Figure 3-53: The Parameters rollout

2. From the side view, line up the cylinder so it is over the part of the rocket body where the seat would be, as shown in Figure 3-54.

Figure 3-54: Line up the cylinder with the seat area.

From the top view, the cylinder should be evenly spaced on both sides of the rocket, as shown in Figure 3-55.

Figure 3-55: The top view of the cylinder

3. Select the rocket body, and before performing the Boolean operation, turn on Use NURMS if needed from the Graphite Modeling Tools. Then in the Create tab, click Geometry, Compound Objects, and ProBoolean. Choose Start Picking from the Pick Boolean rollout, and then select the cylinder in a viewport. The cylinder will cut a seat into the rocket body as shown in Figure 3-56.

Figure 3-56: The rocket body is finished.

Merging Objects into a Scene

Let’s try to merge an external model into this scene. Pretend that you have created a fin model for the red rocket in a different scene file. You can import that fin into your current scene with the rocket body instead of creating a whole new fin object in this scene. In 3ds Max, this procedure is called merging.

1. Save your work.

2. Click Application ⇒ Import ⇒ Merge and navigate to the Fin.max file in the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project.

3. Click Open. The Merge dialog window opens.

4. Select the fin object from the dialog window and click OK. The Fin object will appear in your scene as the top center fin of the rocket.

You can clone and position the fin to create the side fins, or you can load your previous scene file and continue with the Red Rocket exercise.

The Essentials and Beyond

The more you use these tools, the faster they will become an instinctive part of your workflow.

After setting up the scene with background images, you were able to line up model parts and build them to fit the actual object as you worked in the scene. When you built the red rocket, you employed several of the Editable Poly tools and ProBoolean functions you learned about in the previous chapter. You also used the very handy Symmetry modifier to cut your work on the body in half.

If you study the rocket image at the beginning of the chapter, you can see there are many elements that still need to be done. Some will be built in the following chapter. But some of these elements you, as a burgeoning modeler, should attempt on your own.

Additional Exercises

• Study the images of the rocket at the start of the chapter. The fins on the back of the rocket are not included in the step-by-step exercises. Try building them on your own. Use reference image planes to guide you, and start with a simple primitive box, convert it to an Editable Polygon, and use Vertex mode to reshape the box into a rough shape of the fin. Apply NURMS and continue to reshape until you have a match to the picture. You can find images of the fins for the rocket at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials.
• Another model you can practice with is the rocket seat. On the rocket we subtracted out a cylindrical shape using ProBoolean, but there should be a smooth rim around the top and edges—using the same techniques as you did on the rocket body and fins.
• The control panel on the top of the rocket has some buttons. Study them in the reference, and try to re-create.

If you want to see the finished parts of these models, you can merge the finished models into your rocket body scene by choosing Application ⇒ Import ⇒ Merge.

Chapter 4

Modeling in 3ds Max: Part II

In the previous chapter, you began working on a complex model with a child’s red rocket ride-on toy. In this chapter you will complete the model using the Lathe and Bevel modifiers as well as use the Loft compound object to create the toy. You will learn more about splines and shapes. Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Creating the thruster
• Making the wheels
• Getting a handle on things

Creating the Thruster

Before you begin, download the Red Rocket folder from this book’s companion web page (www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials) to your hard drive where you keep your other 3ds Max projects.

The back end of the rocket toy is the round thruster shown in Figure 4-1. You can continue with your own scene file or load Rocket_05.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project you downloaded from the web page.

Figure 4-1: The thruster seen from above and below

You will create the thruster using the Lathe modifier technique, which you used to create the knobs for the dresser model in Chapter 2, “Your First 3ds Max Project.” Using Lathe works only when the object to be modeled is round and has the same look and detail all the way around. As you did with the dresser knob you created in Chapter 2, you will use splines—more specifically the Line tool—to fashion the profile of the thruster. The Line tool creates a 2D shape with no depth. The Lathe modifier then creates a 3D object by rotating that shape about one of the three axes (X, Y, or Z).

Using Lathe for the Thruster Shape

You first need to identify the profile and draw it with the Line tool.

1. The profile shape you need to use is laid out in Figure 4-2. In the Create tab, click the Shapes icon. There you will find the Line tool button. Click Line, and in the Top viewport lay out a profile similar in shape to Figure 4-2. The shape will make more sense once you see it lathed.

Figure 4-2: This shape will be used to lathe the thruster for the rocket.

You can merge in an existing shape for the thruster’s profile. Navigate to the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project, and open ThrusterProfile.max. Select the Exhaust Profile Line object and click OK.

2. Once you have created the spline or merged the existing one into the scene, select the spline, go to the Modify tab, and add the Lathe modifier to the line.

Don’t worry if you get something like the lathe shown in Figure 4-3, where the profile line is rotating about the axis at the center of the line shape. You need the axis of rotation to be at the inside edge of the profile shape.

Figure 4-3: The lathe is rotating about the wrong axis.

3. Go to the Modify panel and in the modifier stack make sure the Lathe is selected. Under the Parameters rollout, in the Align section click the Min button, as shown in Figure 4-4. This moves the rotation axis for the profile to the inside edge.

Figure 4-4: In the Lathe modifier, click the Min button.

The lathed object should look more like the thruster but will have a big hole in the middle, as shown in Figure 4-5. This is also an axis issue. You need to adjust the lathe’s axis of rotation to get rid of the hole.

Figure 4-5: The lathe is starting to look more like the thruster.

4. In the modifier stack, expand the Lathe modifier (click the plus sign to the left of the Lathe entry), and select Axis for the lathe’s subobject mode. Go to the Perspective viewport and move the Transform gizmo to the left (or right, depending on your orientation) along the X axis until the hole is closed to the naked eye.

Be cautious with step 4. Don’t close the hole; just make it as small as you can. If you cross over the line, the normals flip on the entire object.

5. Go back to the Lathe parameters and change Segments to 20. This will help the thruster look less faceted than it does right now, but it will look a bit chunky on the edges. Don’t be too concerned with that; the thrusters will not be seen close up in this scenario. Use the Segments parameter to make your lathes look only as smooth as needed for your shot.

6. Name your thruster geometry Thruster.

7. Move it to the back of the rocket body, according to the reference images.

Creating the 3D Object for the Thruster Detail

To create the indented thruster detail you will use a Boolean operation, so you need the object for the subtraction object. In Figure 4-1, you can see that the top of the indented shape has flat corners, the bottom corners are rounded, and the whole rectangle shape tapers. You will create this detail by using a simple rectangle shape and editing it at a subobject level to fine-tune.

You can continue with your own work or open Rocket_06.max in the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project to catch up to this point. This scene has the thruster created up to this point in the exercise. If you want to use the one you already created, feel free to just select and delete the thruster. Then merge your thruster into the scene.

1. Let’s make the work area a little easier to navigate by hiding some of the rocket parts. You can’t use Isolate Selection mode because you want to hide all the objects in the scene. Select all the objects in the scene by zooming out until you have gray all around the model and image planes. Click and drag a selection box around the objects. Right-click over the selected objects to open the context menu and from the list, choose Hide Selection, as shown in Figure 4-6.

You can merge an already created spline from the scene file Thruster Detail Spline.max in the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project and skip to step 3.

2. Go to the Create panel and, under Shapes, select Rectangle. Click and drag in the Top viewport to create a rectangle with Length 0.74 and Width 0.42. Move the rectangle above the thruster geometry you just lathed.

Oh no…you just hid that! No problem. Just right-click again in your viewport and up comes the context menu. Choose Unhide By Name from the dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-7. Then choose the Thruster from the Unhide Objects dialog box and click the Unhide button at the bottom of the dialog box.

Figure 4-6: Choose Hide Selection in the context menu.

Figure 4-7: Use the Unhide Objects dialog box.

3. Now move the rectangle above the thruster geometry you just lathed, as shown in Figure 4-8.

4. Center your cursor over the wireframe of the rectangle and right-click; choose Convert To ⇒ Convert To Editable Spline, as shown in Figure 4-9. Converting to an editable spline will give you access to the subobject modes, as you saw in the previous chapter, and it will let you edit the shape for the detail you need in the thruster.

Figure 4-8: Move the rectangle above the thruster geometry.

Figure 4-9: Convert the rectangle to an editable spline.

5. Enter Vertex mode for the rectangle spline and from the Top viewport, select the bottom two vertices. Select the Modify panel and in the Editable Spline parameters open the Geometry rollout and choose Chamfer, enter a value of 0.04, and press Enter. This will give a cutoff angle to the corners of the rectangle.

Watch carefully to make sure the chamfer and fillet in steps 5 and 6 don’t create overlapping vertices. Too much of a good thing can cause trouble.

6. Now select the two top vertices in the Top viewport individually and move them closer together so that the rectangle tapers at that end. Select both of the top vertices and in the Geometry rollout choose Fillet, enter a value of 0.1, and press Enter; doing so will round out the top of the spline, as shown in Figure 4-10.

Figure 4-10: Enter a value of 0.1 and press Enter to round out the top of the spline.

7. Exit Vertex mode by clicking Editable Spline in the modifier stack.

8. With the spline selected, select the modifier list and choose Extrude. Set Amount to 0.4. You will use this object for the Boolean operation to create the indent into the thruster sides.

9. Line up the thruster detail object with the thruster, as shown in Figure 4-11. Center the object on top of the thruster for best results in the following steps.

We are going to copy the object and array the indentation around the thruster eight times. To make it easier, move the pivot point of the Boolean object to the center of the thruster; this will enable the object to be copied nicely around the thruster.

Figure 4-11: Center the thruster detail object on the thruster.

You can merge the premade model from the scene file Thruster Detail.max in the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project.

10. Select the extruded thruster detail. The pivot of the extruded thruster detail needs to move to the center of the Thruster object. In the Command panel, select the Hierarchy panel ( ) and click the Affect Pivot Only button.

11. In the Main toolbar select the Align icon ( ), and then select the thruster; it does not matter in which viewport. The Align Selection dialog box will appear; leave the dialog box settings at their default values—except for Target Object, which should be set to Center—and click OK.

The pivot should be the only thing that moves. If the object moves, Undo (Ctrl+Z) and try the step again.

12. Click Affect Pivot Only again to disable it. Press the A key to turn on Angle Snap, and then select the Rotate tool. While holding down the Shift key, rotate the thruster detail object 45 degrees in either direction around the thruster dish. When you release the mouse button, the Clone Options dialog box should open. Select Copy, enter a value of 7 for Number of Copies, and click OK. This will place seven copies of the object, each at 45 degrees of rotation around the thruster, making a total of eight objects that are 360 degrees around.

13. Next, select the thruster, then choose Create ⇒ Geometry ⇒ Compound Objects ⇒ ProBoolean. Choose Start Picking from the Pick Boolean rollout. Move to the thruster detail objects and click on each one to subtract from the thruster.

Your thruster should now have the indentations shown in Figure 4-12.

14. Right-click to turn off the Start Picking feature. Then unhide the other parts of the rocket to see how everything looks so far.

Figure 4-12: The thruster with its indentation detail

Making the Wheels

We are in the home stretch. In this section, you will model the wheels shown in Figure 4-13. You can continue with your own scene file or load Rocket_07.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project.

Figure 4-13: The wheels of the rocket are next.

You can merge the wheels using already created models from the scene file Wheels.max in the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project.

Creating the First Wheel

The wheels are created using the same general technique as the body: Select the polygons of a standard/extended primitive and edit them. This time we are going to use a chamfer cylinder.

1. If the image planes are hidden, unhide the side view image planes. If you are in Isolate Selection mode, exit; then select the side view image plane and enter Isolate Selection again.

2. Choose the Create tab. From the drop-down menu, select Extended Primitives and click ChamferCyl to create a chamfer cylinder.

3. To get the side of the wheel to finish, click and drag in the Left viewport to create the circle of the cylinder, and then release the mouse button. Drag and click the mouse again to set the depth of the cylinder, and finally drag the mouse a third time to set the amount of the chamfer. Click to set the final shape in the Left viewport. Select the Modify panel and set the Chamfer Cylinder parameters as shown in Figure 4-14.

Figure 4-14: Set the Chamfer Cylinder parameters as shown.

4. Select the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, and in the Polygon Modeling tab click Convert To Poly. Go into Vertex mode and select the vertex on the front in the center, as shown in Figure 4-15.

Figure 4-15: Select the vertex on the front in the center.

5. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon’s Vertices tab and click the Chamfer Settings button. Set Vertex Chamfer Amount to 0.4 and click OK.

6. Switch to Polygon mode and select the new center polygon.

7. Select the Polygons tab and open the Bevel Settings caddy. Set Height to –0.4 and Outline to 0.0, and click Apply And Continue to create one bevel. Then set Height to 0.5 and Outline to –0.12 and click OK to create a second bevel.

8. Now change the viewport so you can see the back of the wheel. The Side View image will be in the way, so exit subobject mode by clicking the Polygon icon in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon’s Polygon Modeling tab. Select the wheel and enter Isolation mode again. This adds the Side View image to the isolate selection you already have set up.

9. Go back into Vertex mode and select the center vertex. Choose the Vertices tab and click the Chamfer Settings button. Set Vertex Chamfer Amount to 0.2 and click OK.

10. Switch back to Polygon mode and select the new center polygon. In the Polygons tab, extrude the polygon with an Amount of 3.0. You can see the completed wheel in Figure 4-16.

Figure 4-16: The completed wheel

Placing the Wheels

One wheel is done! Now exit the Polygon level and make three clones for the front and back wheels. Unhide the rocket body and place the wheels at the wheel wells. Don’t worry if the front wheels don’t fit perfectly and happen to penetrate the body’s geometry. It was hard to tell how big to make the wheel wells until you had the wheels. You will fix that here:

1. Unhide or exit Isolate Selection mode so you can select the rocket body.

2. Enter Vertex mode. Change any viewport to a bottom view. Select the vertices on the inside of the wheel well and move them to make the opening larger so the wheels can fit. Use Soft Selection to make the movement of multiple vertices easier. The finished wheel well is shown in Figure 4-17.

One last thing you can do is give your new wheels proper names; we used Wheel01, Wheel02, Wheel03, and Wheel04.

Figure 4-17: Make sure the wheels fit into the wheel wells.

Getting a Handle on Things

The red rocket has a set of handlebars just as a bike does. They help keep the driver (usually a child) from face planting every time he or she gets on it. As funny as that may be, a parent can watch it only so many times. This is why most grownups find the handlebars as shown in Figure 4-18 to be the most important part of the rocket. You will model them now.

Figure 4-18: The handlebars help prevent calamities of the falling kind.

The handlebars will be created using a modeling technique called lofting, which creates a shape that is extruded along a path. Each handlebar is a compound object that uses one shape as a profile and another as the path to form a 3D surface or object.

Lofting

The Loft compound object has many features and only a few restrictions. The Shape object can be complex, consisting of several noncontiguous splines and even nested splines. A new Shape object can be selected at any point along the path, and the cross-section will automatically transition from one shape to the next. Any 2D shape can be used as the Shape object, but only a shape that consists of a single spline can be used as the Path object.

Creating the Path

Take a look at Figure 4-18 and imagine a straight line passing through the middle of one of the handlebars. This is the path you want to create.

You can continue with your own scene file or load Rocket_08.max from the Scenes folder in the Red Rocket project. Select the FRONT VIEW image and enter Isolate Selection mode.

Merge the scene file Handle Bar Spline.max from the Scenes folder of the Red Rocket project if you don’t want to create the path yourself.

1. Start by choosing the Create panel. Click the Shapes icon and select the Line tool.

2. Switch a viewport to a Back viewport by pressing V in any view and choosing Back from the pop-up list. Against the image of the front view of the rocket, click to place the line’s first point where the handlebar ends. Move the cursor to where the handlebar bends, and create another point. Place a final point where the handlebar meets the control panel, as shown in Figure 4-19, and right-click to complete the line. You may need to move the line forward in the Top viewport to get the proper alignment shown in Figure 4-19.

3. Move to the Modify panel and enter Vertex mode for the line. Select the middle vertex, go to the Fillet parameter in the Geometry rollout, and enter 0.1. This will add a smooth corner to the bend.

Figure 4-19: Completed path for the handlebar loft

Creating the Shape

Now that you have the path for the loft, you need the profile shape, which is a cross-section of the handlebar. This shape is an oval with a flat top, as shown in Figure 4-20.

To create this shape, follow these steps:

1. Exit Vertex mode. Go back to the Create panel and click Shapes, and create a circle shape with a radius of 0.4 in the Left viewport. Convert the circle shape to an editable spline by right-clicking on the circle and choosing Convert To ⇒ Editable Spline from the context menu.

2. Go into Vertex mode, select the top vertex, and delete it to flatten the top. Move the new shape so that it sits at the end of the path.

Next, you will create the Loft object.

3. Exit Vertex mode, then select the path spline for the handlebar and choose the Create panel. Click the Geometry rollout and click Compound Objects ⇒ Loft.

4. Because you started the lofting process with the handlebar’s path line, you only need to let 3ds Max know which shape to use. In the Creation Method rollout, select Get Shape.

5. Select the handlebar shape in a viewport to use as the loft’s shape.

Figure 4-20: An oval with a flat top

Editing the Loft Object

In Figure 4-21, you can see the loft’s path and cross-section shape as well as the resulting Loft object. We moved the Loft object next to the path so you can see the result. In your file, the Loft object will be created on top of the path.

In this example the shape is rotated 90 degrees along the path, putting the handle on its side, as you can see in Figure 4-22.

The shape needs to be turned to so that the broad flat side is on the top. To edit the loft, you will go into its subobject mode. The subobjects of a loft are the path and the shape.

1. Select the Loft object and on the Modify tab, expand the Loft object in the modifier stack.

Figure 4-21: The loft lives!

Figure 4-22: The handlebar is oriented incorrectly, with the broad flat side facing the rider.

Splines for the Loft

The original splines were instanced when the loft was created, so they are still connected to the loft. This means changes made at the subobject level on the splines will be transferred to the lofted object. If necessary, you can alter the shape of the path line or shape splines and the loft will change accordingly. You cannot, however, move or rotate the path or shape splines to affect the shape of the loft. You must use Move or Rotate at the subobject level of the loft instead.

2. Enter the Shape subobject mode, as shown in Figure 4-23.

Figure 4-23: The Shape subobject mode

3. In a viewport, select the loft’s shape at the end of the Loft object. The shape will turn red when it is selected, as shown previously in Figure 4-22. The shape spline is the thin, smoother line in this grayscale figure.

4. Select the Rotate tool and rotate the shape on the loft –90 degrees. The entire loft will be updated.

Adding Detail

The next step is to create the subtle curves and dips of the handlebars. The outside end of the real handlebar is curved. There is a groove toward the middle, and the handle tapers up where it meets the control panel. To look this good, the handlebar you’ve created needs more than one cross-section. With a Loft compound object in 3ds Max, you can have any number of cross-sections for your loft, and they can be of varying shapes.

To edit a loft for these details, you are going to add more shapes along the path, and then edit those shapes to taste.

1. Go back to the top level of the Loft object in the Modify tab, and open the Skin Parameters rollout. This is where you can manage the steps (subdivisions) in the loft. By default, there is a value of 5 for both Shape Steps and Path Steps. Shape Steps here are fine, but the Path Steps value is too high. To fix this, turn Path Steps down to 1, as shown in Figure 4-24. If there are too many steps in your loft, it will get too heavy and dense to model.

Figure 4-24: Reduce the Path Steps value.

If you prefer, you can merge the scene file Handle Bar.max from the Red Rocket project to check your own work.

2. Go back to Shape mode and select the shape. Using the Move tool, center the cursor over the Z axis wire of the Transform gizmo that is connected to the shape.

3. You need to make copies of the shapes so you can taper down the end of the handlebar. Shift+click and drag the gizmo to move the shape just a bit up the body of the handlebar to make a copy of the loft shape, as shown in Figure 4-25. The loft shape is shown as a dashed red line.

4. In the Copy Shape dialog box, choose Copy and then click OK. Repeat these steps twice to end up with three copies, and place them close to the end of the handle, as shown in Figure 4-26 (left image). Switch to the Scale tool, and scale the outside shape down 30 percent and the middle shape down 10 percent. Leave the last inside shape alone, which should create a nice curved taper at the end of the handlebar, as shown in Figure 4-26 (right image).

Figure 4-25: Make a copy of the loft shape.

Figure 4-26: Place copies of the loft’s shape close together (left image). At the end, scale them down to create the handlebar’s end (right image).

5. Select the inside shape on the loft, and make four more copies in a row close to where the bar curves down. Select the two inside copies and scale them both down 20 percent. Doing so will create the groove toward the center of the handlebars, as shown in Figure 4-27.

Figure 4-27: Creating the groove

6. Select the shape closest to the bend and make a copy. Move it all the way to the other end of the object, away from the tapered tip. This is where it will meet the body of the rocket. Select the Scale tool, and scale this end shape up 50 percent. Exit the loft’s subobject mode.

7. If any parts of the rocket are hidden, unhide them and see how the handlebars line up. You will probably agree that there is room for improvement.

8. Instead of rotating the Loft object, rotate the last shape at the end of the loft. Go back to the Shape subobject mode and select the last shape to rotate to line up with the body, as shown in Figure 4-28.

9. Select the handlebar, and in the Main toolbar click the Mirror icon ( ) to mirror a copy of the handle for the other side of the rocket. Place it as needed. Figure 4-29 shows the rocket with its handlebars.

Figure 4-28: Rotate the end shape object to line up with the rocket body.

Most of the parts are built, so this would be a good time to merge in all the other parts you built for the rocket. If you didn’t build any of the parts in this chapter and Chapter 3, “Modeling in 3ds Max: Part I,” you can merge them in from the Red Rocket/Scenes files. You can select each model and change the color to fit the original, as shown in Figure 4-29.

Figure 4-29: Final render of the red rocket with all its parts

The Essentials and Beyond

In this chapter you completed the red rocket. Using the Line tool, you created a profile to lathe. Then, using a rectangle converted to an editable spline, you created the detail, and then using the Boolean operation finished the thruster. You learned how to use Loft, a tool that uses a combination of splines, to create the handlebars. Now that you have completed a complex 3D model using multiple techniques, it is time to apply those techniques to a model of your own. Find an object in which you can clearly see the shapes and primitives.

Additional Exercises

• Start with simple pieces of furniture, such as a dining room chair or coffee table, to practice with editable polygons and the Graphite modeling tools. You can find some examples at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials.
• Once you feel comfortable, try a softer surface like a comfy couch, bed, or chair, so you can utilize NURMS.
• Take some time to explore some of the other tools in the Graphite modeling tools as you create your own models.

Chapter 5

Animating a Bouncing Ball

The best way to learn how to animate is to jump right in and start animating. You’ll take a good look at 3ds Max’s animation tools so you can start editing animation and developing your timing skills.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Animating the ball
• Refining the animation

A classic exercise for all animators is to create a bouncing ball. It is a straightforward exercise, but there is much you can do with a bouncing ball to show character. Animating a bouncing ball is a good exercise in physics as well as cartoon movement. You’ll first create a rubber ball, and then you’ll add cartoonish movement to accentuate some principles of the animation. Aspiring animators can use this exercise for years and always find something new to learn about bouncing a ball.

In preparation, download the Bouncing Ball project from the companion web page at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials to your hard drive. Set your current project by choosing Application ⇒ Manage ⇒ Set Project Folder and selecting the Bouncing Ball project that you downloaded.

Animating the Ball

Your first step is to keyframe the positions of the ball. As you learned in Chapter 1, “The 3ds Max Interface,” keyframing is the process—borrowed from traditional animation—of setting positions and values at particular frames of the animation. The computer interpolates between these keyframes to fill in the other frames to complete a smooth animation.

Open the Animation_Ball_00.max scene file from the Scenes folder of the Bouncing Ball project you downloaded. If you get a warning to “Disable Gamma/LUT,” click OK.

Start with the gross animation, or the overall movements. This is also called blocking. First, move the ball up and down to begin its choreography.

Follow these steps to animate the ball:

1. Move the pivot point for the ball from the center of the ball to the bottom of the ball. Select the ball, and then go to the Hierarchy panel ( ). Choose Pivot, and under the Adjust Pivot rollout, click the Affect Pivot Only button. Zoom in on the ball in the Front viewport and move the pivot so that it is at the bottom of the ball. Then click the Affect Pivot Only button again to deactivate—but you already knew that.

2. Move the time slider to frame 10. The time slider is at the bottom of the screen below the viewports, as shown in Figure 5-1. The time slider is used to change your position in time, counted in frames.

Figure 5-1: The time slider allows you to change your position in time and scrub your animation.

Scrubbing the Time Slider

You can click and drag the horizontal time slider bar to change the frame in your animation on the fly; this is called scrubbing. The bar displays the current frame/end frame. By default, your 3ds Max window may show a start frame of 0 and an end frame of 100.

3. Now, in the lower-right corner of the window, click the Auto Key button, as shown in Figure 5-2. Both the Auto Key button and the time slider turn red. This means that any movement in the objects in your scene will be recorded as animation. How exciting!

4. With the ball selected, move it along the Z axis down to the ground plane, so it is 0 units in Z axis when you release the mouse button in the Transform Type-In box at the bottom of the interface. You can also just enter the value and press Enter.

This exercise has created two keyframes, one at frame 0 for the original position the ball was in, and one at frame 10 for the new position to which you just moved the ball.

Figure 5-2: The Auto Key button records your animations.

Copying Keyframes

Now you want to move the ball up to the same position in the air as it was at frame 0. Instead of trying to estimate where that was, you can just copy the keyframe at frame 0 to frame 20.

You can see the keyframes you created in the timeline. They appear as red boxes in the timeline. Red keys represent Position keyframes, green keys represent Rotation, and blue keys represent Scale. When a keyframe in the timeline is selected, it turns white. Now we’ll copy a keyframe:

1. Select the keyframe at frame 0; it should turn white when it is selected. Hold down the Shift key on the keyboard (this is a shortcut for the Clone tool), and click and drag the selected keyframe to copy it to frame 20. This will create a keyframe with the same animation parameters as the keyframe at frame 0, as shown in Figure 5-3.

Figure 5-3: Press Shift and move the keyframe to copy it to frame 20.

2. Click and drag the time slider to scrub through the keyframes. Turn off Auto Key.

Using the Track View–Curve Editor

Right now the ball is going down and then back up. To continue the animation for the length of the timeline, you could continue to copy and paste keyframes as you did earlier—but that would be very time-consuming, and you still need to do your other homework and clean your room. A better way is to loop, or cycle, through the keyframes you already have. An animation cycle is a segment of animation that is repeatable in a loop. The end state of the animation matches up to the beginning state, so there is no hiccup at the loop point.

In 3ds Max, cycling animation is known as parameter curve out-of-range types. This is a fancy way to create loops and cycles with your animations and specify how your object will behave outside the range of the keys you have created. This will bring us to the Track View, which is an animator’s best friend. You will learn the underlying concepts of the Curve Editor as well as its basic interface throughout this exercise.

The Track View is a function of two animation editors, the Curve Editor and the Dope Sheet. The Curve Editor allows you to work with animation depicted as curves on a graph that sets the value of a parameter against time. The Dope Sheet displays keyframes over time on a horizontal graph, without any curves. This graphical display simplifies the process of adjusting animation timing because you can see all the keys at once in a spreadsheet-like format. The Dope Sheet is similar to traditional animation exposure sheets, or X-sheets.

Navigation inside the Track View – Curve Editor is pretty much the same as navigating in a viewport; the same keyboard/mouse combinations work for panning and zooming.

You will use the Track View – Curve Editor (or just the Curve Editor for short) to loop your animation in the following steps:

1. With the ball selected, in the menu bar choose Graph Editors ⇒ Track View – Curve Editor. In Figure 5-4, the Curve Editor displays the animation curves of the ball so far.

Figure 5-4: The Curve Editor shows the animation curves of the ball.

2. A menu bar runs across the top of the Curve Editor. In the Controller menu, select the Out-of-Range Types option, as shown in Figure 5-5.

3. Doing so opens the Param Curve Out-of-Range Types dialog box, shown in Figure 5-6. Select Loop in this dialog box by clicking its thumbnail. The two little boxes beneath it will highlight. Click OK.

Figure 5-5: Selecting Out-of-Range Types

Figure 5-6: Choosing to loop your animation

4. Once you set the curve to Loop, the Curve Editor displays your animation, as shown in Figure 5-7. The out-of-range animation is shown as a dashed line. Scrub your animation in a viewport and see how the ball bounces up and down throughout the timeline range.

Figure 5-7: The Curve Editor now shows the looped animation curve.

Reading Animation Curves

As you can see, the Track View – Curve Editor (from here on called just the Curve Editor) gives you control over the animation in a graph setting. The Curve Editor’s graph is a representation of an object’s parameter, such as position (values shown vertically) over time (time shown horizontally). Curves allow you to visualize the interpolation of the motion. Once you are used to reading animation curves, you can judge an object’s direction, speed, acceleration, and timing at a mere glance.

Here is a quick primer on how to read a curve in the Curve Editor.

In Figure 5-8, an object’s Z Position parameter is being animated. At the beginning, the curve quickly begins to move positively (that is, to the right) on the Z axis. The object shoots up and comes to an ease-in, where it decelerates to a stop, reaching its top height. The ease-in stop is signified by the curving beginning to flatten out at around frame 70.

Figure 5-8: The object quickly accelerates to an ease-in stop.

In Figure 5-9, the object slowly accelerates in an ease-out in the positive Z direction until it hits frame 100, where it suddenly stops.

In Figure 5-10, the object eases in and travels to an ease-out where it decelerates, starting at around frame 69, to where it slowly stops, at frame 100.

Figure 5-9: The object eases out to acceleration and suddenly stops at its fastest velocity.

Figure 5-10: Ease-out and ease-in

Finally, in Figure 5-11, to showcase another tangent type, step interpolation makes the object jumps from its Z Position in frame 20 to its new position in frame 21.

Figure 5-11: Step interpolation makes the object “jump” suddenly from one value to the next.

Figure 5-12 shows the Curve Editor, with its major aspects called out for your information.

Figure 5-12: The Curve Editor

Refining the Animation

Let’s play the animation now. In the bottom right of the interface you will see an animation player with the sideways triangle to signify Play. Select the Camera01 viewport and click the play button. The framework of the movement is getting there. Notice how the speed of the ball is consistent. If this were a real ball, it would be dealing with gravity; the ball would speed up as it got closer to the ground and there would be “hang time” when the ball was in the air on its way up as gravity takes over to pull it back down.

This means you have to edit the movement that happens between the keyframes. This is done by adjusting how the keyframes shape the curve itself, using tangents. When you select a keyframe, a handle will appear in the UI, as shown in Figure 5-13.

Figure 5-13: The keyframe’s handle

This handle adjusts the tangency of the keyframe to change the curvature of the animation curve, which in turn changes the animation. There are various types of tangents, depending on how you want to edit the motion. By default the Auto tangent is applied to all new keyframes. This is not what you want for the ball, although it is a perfect default tangent type to have.

Editing Animation Curves

Let’s edit some tangents to better suit your animation. The intent is to speed up the curve as it hits the floor and slow it down as it crests its apex. Instead of opening the Curve Editor through the menu bar, this time you are going to use the shortcut. Close the large Curve Editor dialog box, and then at the bottom-left corner of the interface, click the Open Mini Curve Editor button shown in Figure 5-14.

Figure 5-14: Click the Open Mini Curve Editor button.

The Mini Curve Editor is almost exactly the same as the one you launch through the Main menu. A few tools are not included in the Mini Curve Editor toolbar, but you can find them in the menu bar of the Mini Curve Editor.

To edit the curves, follow these steps:

1. Scroll down the Controller window on the left of the Mini Curve Editor by dragging the Pan tool (the hand cursor) to find the Ball object’s position. Click on the Z Position track. This will bring only the curves to the Key Editing window that you want to edit.

2. The Z Position curve is blue, as is almost everything relating to the Z axis. The little gray boxes on the curves are keyframes. Select the keyframe at frame 10. You may need to scrub the time slider out of the way if you are on frame 10. The key will turn white when selected. Remember, if you need to zoom or pan in the Curve Editor’s Key Editing window, you can use the same shortcuts you would use to navigate in the viewports. You will change this key’s tangency to make the ball fall faster as it hits and bounces off the ground.

3. In the Mini Curve Editor toolbar, change the tangent type for the selected keyframe from the Auto default to Fast by clicking the Set Tangents To Fast icon ( ). When you do this, you will see the animation curve change shape, as shown in Figure 5-15.

4. Select the Camera viewport and play the animation. You can easily correlate how the animation works with the curve’s shape as you see the time slider travel through the Mini Curve Editor as the animation plays.

Figure 5-15: The effect of the new tangent type

Finessing the Animation

Although the animation has improved, the ball has a distinct lack of weight. It still seems too simple and without any character. In situations such as this, animators can go wild and try several different things as they see fit. Here is where creativity helps hone your animation skills, whether you are new to animation or have been doing it for 50 years.

Animation shows change over time. Good animation conveys the intent, the motivation for that change between the frames.

Squash and Stretch

The concept of squash and stretch has been an animation staple for as long as there has been animation. It is a way to convey the weight of an object by deforming it to react (usually in an exaggerated way) to gravity, impact, and motion.

You can give your ball a lot of flair by adding squash and stretch to give the object some personality. Follow along with these steps:

1. Press the N key to activate Auto Key. In the Mini Curve Editor, drag the yellow double-line time slider (called the track bar time slider) to frame 10. Click and hold the Scale tool to access the flyout. Choose the Select And Squash tool ( ). Center the Scale cursor over the Z axis of the Scale Transform gizmo in the Camera viewport. Click and drag down to squash down about 20 percent. Doing so will scale down on the Z axis and scale up on the X and Y axes to compensate, as shown in Figure 5-16.

Figure 5-16: Use the Select And Squash tool to squash down the ball on impact.

2. Move to frame 0. Click and drag up to stretch the ball up about 20 percent (so that the ball’s scale in Z is about 120). When you scrub through the animation, you will see that at frame 0 the ball stretched; then the ball squashes and stays squashed for the rest of the time. You’ll fix that in the next step.

You need to copy the Scale key from frame 0 to frame 20 first, and then apply a loop for the Parameter Curve Out-of-Range Type. Because the Mini Curve Editor is open, it obstructs the timeline; therefore, you should copy the keys in the Mini Curve Editor. You can just as easily do so in the regular Curve Editor in the same way.

3. In the Mini Curve Editor, scroll in the Controller window until you find the Scale track for the ball. Highlight it to see the keyframes and animation curves. Click and hold the Move Keys tool in the Mini Curve Editor toolbar to roll out and access the Move Keys Horizontal tool ( )

4. Click and drag a selection marquee around the two keyframes at frame 0 in the Scale track to select them. Hold the Shift key and then click and drag the keyframes at frame 0 to frame 20.

5. In the Mini Curve Editor’s menu bar, select Controller ⇒ Out-of-Range Types. Choose Loop, and then click OK. Play the animation. The curves are shown in Figure 5-17.

Figure 5-17: The final curves

Setting the Timing

Well, you squashed and stretched the ball, but it still doesn’t look right. That is because the ball should not squash before it hits the ground. It needs to return to 100 percent scale and stay there for a few frames. Immediately before the ball hits the ground, it can squash into the ground plane to heighten the sense of impact. The following steps are easier to perform in the regular Curve Editor rather than in the Mini Curve Editor. So close the Mini Curve Editor by clicking the Close button on the left side of its toolbar.

Open the Curve Editor to fix the timing, and follow these steps as if they were law:

1. Move the time slider to frame 8; Auto Key should still be active. In the Curve Editor, in the Controller window select the ball’s Scale track so that only the scale curves appear in the Editing window. In the Curve Editor’s toolbar, click the Insert Keys icon ( ). Your cursor will change to an arrow with a white circle at its lower right. Click on one of the Scale curves to add a keyframe on all the Scale curves at frame 8. Because scales X and Y are the same value, you will see only two curves instead of three.

2. Because they are selected, the keys will be white. In the Key Entry tools, you will find two text type-in boxes. The box on the left is the frame number, and the box on the right is the selected key’s (or keys’) value. Because more than one key with a different value is selected, there is no number in that type-in box. Enter 100 (for 100 percent scale) in the right type-in box, and a value of 100 for the scale in X, Y, and Z for the ball at frame 8, as shown in Figure 5-18.

Figure 5-18: Enter a value of 100.

3. Move the time slider to frame 12, and do the same thing in the Curve Editor. These settings are bracketing the squash so that the squash happens only a couple frames before and a couple frames after the ball hits the ground. Press the N key to deactivate Auto Key. Save your work.

Once you play back the animation, the ball will begin to look a lot more like a nice cartoonish one, with a little character. Experiment with changing some of the scale amounts to have the ball squash a little more or less, or stretch it more or less to see how that affects the animation. See if it adds a different personality to the ball. If you can master a bouncing ball and evoke all sorts of emotions with your audience, you will be a great animator indeed.

Moving the Ball Forward

You can load the Animation_Ball_01.max scene file from the Bouncing Ball project on your hard drive (or from the companion web page) to catch up to this point or to check your work.

Now that you have worked out the bounce, it’s time to add movement to the ball so that it moves across the screen as it bounces. Layering animation in this fashion, where you settle on one movement before moving on to another, is common. That’s not to say you won’t need to go back and forth and make adjustments through the whole process, but it’s generally nicer to work out one layer of the animation before adding another. The following steps will show you how:

1. Move the time slider to frame 0. Select the ball with the Select And Move tool, and move the ball in the Camera viewport to the left so it is still within the camera’s view. That’s about –30 units on the X axis.

2. Move the time slider to frame 100. Press the N key to activate Auto Key again. Move the ball to the right about 60 units so that the ball’s X position value is about 30.

3. Don’t play the animation yet; it isn’t going to look right. Go to the Curve Editor, scroll down in the Controller window, and select the X Position track for the ball, as shown in Figure 5-19.

Figure 5-19: The X position of the ball does not look right.

When you created the keyframes for the up and down movement of the ball (which was the Z axis), 3ds Max automatically created keyframes for the X and Y Position tracks, both with essentially no value. To fix it, keep following these steps.

4. Select the keyframes on the X Position track at frame 10 and frame 20, and delete them by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard.

5. Click the Parameter Curves Out-of-Range Types button, and select Constant. This removes the loop from the X Position track but won’t affect the Z Position track for the ball’s bounce. Press the N key to deactivate Auto Key. Play the animation. You can use the / (slash) button as a shortcut to play the animation.

6. There is still a little problem. Watch the horizontal movement. The ball is slow at the beginning, speeds up in the middle, and then slows again at the end. It eases out and eases in. This is caused by the default tangent, which automatically adds a slowdown as the object goes in and out of the keyframe. In the Curve Editor, select both keys for the X Position Curve and click the Set Tangents To Linear icon ( ) to create a straight line of movement so there is no speed change in the ball’s movement left to right.

Figure 5-20 shows the proper curve.

Figure 5-20: The X Position curve for the ball’s movement now has no ease-out or ease-in.

Adding a Roll

You need to add some rotation, but there are several problems with this. One, you moved the pivot point to the bottom of the ball in the very first step of the exercise. You did that so the squashing would work correctly—that is, it would be at the point of contact with the ground. If you were to rotate the ball with the pivot at the bottom, it would look like Figure 5-21.

Figure 5-21: The ball will not rotate properly because the pivot is at the bottom.

Using the XForm Modifier

You need a pivot point at the center of the ball, but you can’t just move the existing pivot from the bottom to the middle—it would throw off all the squash and stretch animation. Unfortunately, an object can have only one pivot point. To solve the issue, you are going to use a modifier called XForm. This modifier has many uses. You’re going to use it to add another pivot to the ball in the following steps:

1. Select the ball. From the menu bar, select Modifiers ⇒ Parametric Deformers ⇒ XForm. You may also select this option from the modifier list in the Modify tab. XForm will be added to the ball in the modifier stack, and an orange bounding box will appear over the ball in the viewport. XForm has no parameters, but it does have subobjects.

2. Expand the modifier stack by clicking the black box with the plus sign next to XForm. Then click Center. In the next step you will use the Align tool to center the XForm’s center point on the ball.

3. Click the Align tool, and then click on the ball. In the resulting dialog box, make sure the check boxes for X, Y, and Z Position are checked, which means those axes are active. Now click Center under Target Object, and then click OK. The XForm’s center will move.

Now to be clear, this isn’t a pivot point. This is the center point on the XForm modifier. If you go to the modifier stack and click on the sphere, the pivot point will still be at the bottom.

The XForm modifier allows the ball to rotate without its squashing and stretching getting in the way of the rotation. By separating the rotation animation for the ball’s roll into the modifier, the animation on the sphere object is preserved.

Animating the XForm Modifier

To add the ball’s roll to the XForm modifier, follow along with these steps:

1. Turn on Auto Key and choose the Select And Rotate tool.

2. In the modifier stack, click on Gizmo for the subobject of XForm. This is a very important step because it tells the modifier to use the XForm’s center instead of using the pivot point of the ball.

3. In the Camera viewport, move the time slider to frame 100 and rotate the ball 360 degrees on the Y axis (you can use Angle Snap Toggle to make it easier to rotate exactly 360 degrees). Click on the XForm modifier to deactivate the subobject mode. Play the animation.

The Ball Doesn’t Rotate 360 Degrees!

If you rotate the ball in the third step 360 degrees but the ball does not animate, 3ds Max could potentially be interpreting 360 degrees to be 0 degrees in the Curve Editor, thereby creating a flat curve. If this is the case, you can try rotating the ball 359 degrees instead to force the animation to work. You could also manually change the value in the Curve Editor for the keyframe at frame 100 to a value of 360.

The ball should be a rubbery cartoon ball at this point in the animation. Just for practice, let’s say you need to go back and edit the keyframes because you rotated in the wrong direction and the ball’s rotation is going backward. Fixing this issue requires you to go back into the Curve Editor as follows.

1. Open the Curve Editor (mini or regular) and scroll down in the Controller window until you see the Ball tracks. Below the Ball’s Transform track is a new track called Ball/Modified Object.

2. Expand the track by clicking on the plus sign in the circle next to the name. Go to the Gizmo track and select the Y Rotation track. You will see the Function curve in the Key Editing window.

3. You want the keyframe at frame 0 to have the value 0 and the keyframe at frame 100 to be a value of 360. Select both keyframes and change the tangents to Linear, as shown in Figure 5-22.

Figure 5-22: The XForm’s gizmo selected in the Controller window with the rotation of the ball set to Linear Tangents

Close the Curve Editor and play the animation. Play the bounce ball.avi movie file located in the RenderOutput folder of the Bouncing Ball project to see a render of the animation. You can also load the Animation_Ball_02.max scene file from the Bouncing Ball project to check your work.

The Essentials and Beyond

Working with the bouncing ball gave you quite a bit of experience with the 3ds Max’s animation toolset. There are several ways to animate a bouncing ball in 3ds Max. It is definitely a good idea to try this exercise a few times at first, and then to come back to it later—after you have learned other 3ds Max techniques.

Animation can be a lot of fun, but it is also tedious and sometimes aggravating. A lot of time, patience, and practice is required to become good at animation. It all boils down to how the animation makes you think. Is there enough weight to the subjects in the animation? Do the movements make sense? How does nuance enhance the animation? These are all questions you will begin to discover for yourself. This chapter merely introduced you to how to make things move in 3ds Max. It gave you some basic animation techniques to help you develop your eye for motion. Don’t stop here. Go back into the chapter and redo some of the exercises.

Additional Exercises

Try different variations on the same themes, such as:

• Bounce the ball on the floor and then off a wall. Try bouncing the ball off a table, onto a chair, and then onto the floor.
• Animate three different types of balls bouncing next to one another, such as a bowling ball, a ping pong ball, and a tennis ball. Examples may be found at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials.

Most important, keep working at it!

Chapter 6

Animating a Thrown Knife

This chapter is a continuation of the animation work you began in Chapter 5, “Animating a Bouncing Ball,” and introduces you to some new animation fundamentals.

• Anticipation and momentum in knife throwing

Anticipation and Momentum in Knife Throwing

This exercise will give you more experience animating in 3ds Max. You will edit more in the Curve Editor (yeah!) and be introduced to the concepts of anticipation, momentum, and secondary movement. First, download the Knife project from this book’s companion web page. Set your 3ds Max project folder by choosing Application ⇒ Manage ⇒ Set Project Folder and selecting the Knife project that you downloaded.

Blocking Out the Animation

To begin this exercise, open the Animation_Knife_00.max file in the Knife project and follow along here:

1. Move the Time Slider to frame 30 and activate the Auto Key button.

2. Move the knife to the target object, as shown in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1: Move the knife to the target at frame 30.

3. Move the Time Slider to frame 15, where the knife is halfway between its start and the target, and move the knife slightly up on the Z axis so that the knife moves with a slight arc, as shown in Figure 6-2.

Figure 6-2: Move the knife up slightly at frame 15.

4. Click the Time Configuration icon ( ) at the bottom of the UI next to the navigation controls. Figure 6-3 shows the Time Configuration dialog box. In the Animation section, change End Time to 30 from 100 and click OK. The Time Slider will reflect this change immediately.

5. Play your animation, and you should see the knife move with a slight ease-out and ease-in toward the target, with a slight arc up in the middle. The animation of the knife needs to start at frame 0, so open the Curve Editor and scroll down in the Controller window until you see the X, Y, Z Position tracks for the knife. Hold the Ctrl key and select all three tracks to display their curves, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Figure 6-3: Change the frame range in the Time Configuration dialog box.

Figure 6-4: The initial curves for the knife

6. Drag a selection marquee around the three keys at frame 0. In the Key Controls toolbar, select and hold the Move Keys tool ( ) to access the flyout icons, and select the Move Keys Horizontal tool in the flyout ( ). Use this tool to move the keys to frame 10.

7. Doing so compacts the curve, so you need to move the keys at frame 15 to the new middle, frame 20. The finished curve is shown in Figure 6-5.

That’s it for the gross animation (or blocking) of the shot. Did you have fun?

Figure 6-5: Finished curves with the position of the knife starting at frame 10.

Trajectories

When it comes to animation, it is very helpful to be able to see the path your object is taking over time, called trajectories. Select the knife object, go to the Command panel, click the Motion icon ( ) to open the options shown in Figure 6-6, and then click Trajectories. Your viewports will display a red curve to show you the path of the knife’s motion as it arcs toward the target, as shown in Figure 6-7.

Figure 6-6: Turning on Trajectories for the knife

Figure 6-7: The curve shows the trajectory for the knife’s motion.

The large hollow square points on the trajectory curve represent the keyframes set on the knife so far. Let’s adjust the height of the arc using the trajectory curve. Select the Sub-Object button at the top of the Motion Panel.

Keys are your only subobject choice in the pull-down menu to the right of the button. Select the middle keyframe and move it up or down to suit your tastes. Once you settle on a nice arc for the path of the knife, turn off Trajectories mode by clicking the Parameters button in the Motion Panel.

As you can imagine, the Trajectories options can be useful in many situations. It not only gives you a view of your object’s path, but it also allows you to edit that path easily and in a visual context, which can be very important.

Adding Rotation

Throwing knives is usually a bad idea, but you can throw something else at a target (the inanimate kind) to see how to animate your knife. You’ll find that the object will rotate once or twice before it hits its target. To add rotation to your knife, follow these steps:

1. Move to frame 30, and press the E key for the Select And Rotate tool. Auto Key should still be active. In the Camera001 viewport, rotate on the Y axis 443 degrees.

2. With the knife selected, go into the Curve Editor. Scroll down to find the X, Y, and Z Rotation tracks, and select them. Select the keys at frame 0, then use the Move Keys Horizontal tool to shift the keyframes to frame 10. Press N to deactivate the Auto Key. Figure 6-8 shows the Curve Editor graph for the knife.

Figure 6-8: Curve Editor graph for the knife

3. Play the animation, and you will see that the knife’s position and rotation eases in and eases out. A real knife would not ease its rotations or movement. Its speed would be roughly consistent throughout the animation.

4. Go back to the Curve Editor; change Move Keys Horizontal back to Move Keys. Then select the X Position track, select all the keyframes, and switch the tangent to Linear. Now select the Z Position track; you’ll need to finesse this one a bit more than the X Position track. You are going to use the handles on the tangents that appear when you select a key. These handles can be adjusted; just center your cursor over the end and click and drag using the Move Keys tool. Figure 6-9 illustrates how you want the Z Position animation curve to look. This will give the trajectory a nice arc and a good rate of travel.

Figure 6-9: Adjust the curve for the knife’s arc through the air.

5. Now it is time to edit the Rotation keys. In the Curve Editor, scroll to find the X, Y, and Z Rotation tracks. The first thing you can do is add a bit of drama to the knife to make the action more exciting. To this end, you can say that the rotation on the knife is too slow. Select the X Rotation track and select its key at frame 30. In the Key Stats, change the value to –290. The higher the value, the faster the knife will rotate. This will add one full revolution to the animation and some more excitement to the action.

6. Adjust the tangent handles to resemble the curve shown in Figure 6-10. The knife will speed up just a bit as it leaves the first rotation keyframe. The speed will be even as it goes into the last keyframe.

Figure 6-10: Match your curve to this one.

With just a little bit of fast rotation as the knife leaves frame 10, you give the animation more spice. The knife should now have a slightly weightier look than before, when it rotated with an ease-in and ease-out.

Adding Anticipation

Now let’s animate the knife to move back first to create anticipation, as if an invisible hand holding the knife pulled back just before throwing it to get more strength in the throw. This anticipation, although it’s a small detail, adds a level of nuance to the animation that enhances the total effect. Follow these steps:

1. Move the Time Slider to frame 0. Go to the Curve Editor, scroll in the Controller window, and select the X Rotation track for the knife. In the Curve Editor toolbar, click the Insert Keys icon ( ), bring your cursor to frame 0 of the curve, and click to create a keyframe. Doing so creates a key at frame 0 with the same parameters as the next key, as shown in Figure 6-11.

Figure 6-11: Adding a key to the beginning to create anticipation for the knife throw

2. Select the Move Keys tool and select the key at frame 10. In the Key Stats type-in, change the value of that key to 240. If you play back the animation, it will look weird. The knife will cock back really fast and spin a bit. This is due to the big hump between frames 0 and 10.

3. Keep the tangent at frame 0 set to the default, but change the tangent on the key at frame 10 to Linear ( ). Play back the animation. You’ll have a slight bit of anticipation, but the spice will be lost and the knife will look less active and too mechanical.

It’s common to try something and rely on Undo to get back to the starting point. You can use Undo several times when you find yourself at a dead end.

4. To regain the weight you had in the knife, press Ctrl+Z to undo your change to the tangency on frame 10 and set it back to what you had. You may have to undo more than once. Now, select the Move Keys Vertical tool ( ) and select the In tangent handle for keyframe 10. This is the tangent handle on the left of the key.

5. Press Shift and drag the tangent handle down to create a curve that is similar to the one shown in Figure 6-12. By pressing Shift as you dragged the tangent handle, you broke the continuity between the In and Out handles, so that only the In handle was affected. Play back the animation. It should look much better now.

Figure 6-12: To create a believable anticipation for the knife throw, set your curve to resemble this one.

Follow-Through

The knife needs more weight. A great way to show that in animation is by adding follow-through; have the knife sink into the target a little bit and push back the target. To add follow-through to your animation, use these steps:

1. You want to sink the knife into the target after it hits. Select the Time Configuration button and change End Time to 45 to add 15 frames to your frame range. Click OK. Doing so will not affect the animation; it will merely append 15 frames to the current frame range.

2. Select the knife and go to frame 30, where it hits the target. In the Curve Editor, select the X Position track of the knife. Add a keyframe with the Insert Keys tool at frame 35.

3. Note the value of the key in the type-in boxes at the top right of the Curve Editor (not the type-in boxes at the bottom of the main UI). In this case, the value in this scene is about –231. You will want to set the value for this key at frame 35 to about –224 to sink it farther into the target. If your values are different, adjust accordingly so you don’t add too much movement. Also make sure the movement flows into the target and not back out of the target as if the knife were bouncing out.

4. Keep the tangent for this new key set to Auto. With these relative values, scrub the animation between frames 30 and 35. You should see the knife’s slight move into the target. The end of your curve should look like the curve in Figure 6-13.

Figure 6-13: Your animation should end like this.

5. You still need to add a little bit of follow-through to the rotation of the knife to make it sink into the target better. In the Curve Editor, select the X Rotation track to display its curve. Add a key to the curve at frame 35. The value of the key at frame 30 should already be about –652. Set the value of the keyframe at frame 35 to be about –655. Keep the tangent set at Auto. If your values are different, adjust accordingly to what works best in your scene.

Be careful about how much the knife sinks into the target. Although it is important to show the weight of the knife, it is also important to show the weight of the target; you do not want the target to look too soft.

Transferring Momentum to the Target

To make the momentum work even better for the knife animation, you will have to push back the target as the knife hits it. The trouble is, if you animate the target moving back, the knife will stay in place, floating in the air. You have to animate the knife with the target.

Parent and Child Objects

To animate the knife and target together, the knife has to be linked to the target so that when the target is animated to push back upon impact, the knife will follow precisely since it is stuck in the target. Doing this won’t mess up the existing animation of the knife because the knife will be the child in the hierarchy and will retain its own animation separate from the target. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to frame 30, about when the knife impacts. On the far left of the Main toolbar, choose the Select And Link tool ( ). Select the knife and drag it to the target as shown in Figure 6-14 (left). Nothing should change until you animate the target object.

Figure 6-14: Link the knife to the target (left), and then rotate the target back slightly (right).

2. Move the Time Slider to frame 34 and press the N key to activate the Auto Key tool. With the Select And Rotate tool, select the target object and rotate it back about 5 degrees, as shown in the second image in Figure 6-14 (right). The pivot of the target has already been placed properly, at the bottom back edge.

3. Go to the Curve Editor, scroll to find the Y Rotation track for the target object, select the keyframe at frame 0, and move it to frame 30. Then hold the Shift key, and click and drag the keyframe (which will make a copy of it) to frame 37.

4. Change the tangent for the key at frame 30 to Fast and leave the other key tangents alone.

5. Add a little wobble to the target to make the animation even more interesting. This can be done easily in the Curve Editor. Use Insert Keys to add keys at frames 40 and 44. Using the Move Keys Vertical tool, give the key at frame 40 a value of about 1.7. Your curve should resemble the one in Figure 6-15.

6. Finally, add a little slide to the target. Using the Select And Move tool, move the Time Slider to frame 37, and move the target just a bit along the X axis. Go to the Curve Editor, scroll to the X position of the target object, select the keyframe at frame 0, and move it to frame 30 so the move starts when the knife hits the target. Change the tangent for frame 30 to Fast and leave the other tangent at Auto.

Figure 6-15: The target animation curve

Done! Play back your animation. Experiment and change some of the final timings and values of the target’s reaction to the impact to see different weights of the knife and target and how the weight looks to the viewer.

You can see a sample render of the scene in the knife_animation.mov QuickTime file in the RenderOutput folder of the Knife project on the companion web page (or copied onto your hard drive). You can also download the Animation_Knife_01.max scene file from the Scenes folder of the Knife project to check your work.

The Essentials and Beyond

In this, our second chapter on animation, you further expanded your knowledge of creating and editing animation. You learned about hierarchies and how to link objects together to create a hierarchy useful for our knife animation as well as how pivot points are used. You also learned what key animation terms are, such as anticipation, follow-through, and momentum, and how they apply to the animation.

Additional Exercises

• Try animating simple objects like boxes and just play around with anticipation, follow-through, and momentum.
• Again using simple primitives, create hierarchies and play around with anticipation, follow-through, and momentum.
• Constrain and animate a camera on a path through a nice modeled environment.
• Animate planets around the sun using paths.

Chapter 7

Character Poly Modeling: Part I

In games, characters are designed and created cleverly to achieve the best look with the lowest amount of mesh detail to keep the polygon count low. With that in mind, this and the next two chapters introduce you to character modeling, focusing on using the Editable Poly toolset to create a relatively low polygon count soldier model suitable for character animation and for use in a game engine (though that topic is not covered in this book). This chapter begins with the basic form of the character first.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Setting up the scene
• Creating the soldier

Setting Up the Scene

You can import and use sketches of the character’s front and side as background images as you create the character in 3ds Max. Additional sketches of your character from several points of view can be helpful during the modeling process for quick reference to your goal.

High- and Low-Poly Modeling

High polygon count models are used when a model’s level of detail needs to be impeccable, such as when the model is used in close-ups.

Low polygon count modeling, also called low-poly modeling, refers to a style of modeling that sacrifices some detail in favor of efficient geometry that places a very low load on the system on which it is being created or rendered.

Creating Planes and Adding Materials

Like the toy rocket exercise in Chapter 3, “Modeling in 3ds Max: Part I,” this exercise begins by creating crossed boxes and applying reference images to them. Set your project to the Soldier project downloaded to your system:

1. In a new scene, go to the Front viewport and create a plane.

2. In the Parameters rollout of the Command panel, set Length to 635 and Width to 622. The units are in inches, which is the default in 3ds Max. The size of the image planes in units is the same size as the reference images in pixels. Thus, when you apply the image to the plane it will be proportional, maintaining its width and length with no stretching or squeezing of the images.

3. Rename this box Image_Plane_Front.

4. With the plane still selected, go to the Modify tab and in the Parameters rollout set the Length and Width Segs to 1. Then select the Move tool (W) in the Main toolbar and in the transform type-ins at the bottom of the user interface, move the plane to these coordinates: (0.0, 80.169, –5.228).

5. Click in a blank space in the UI, and then press the Z key on your keyboard; it is the shortcut for Zoom Extents All. In the Main toolbar, turn on the Angle Snap toggle ( ) or press A on your keyboard. Doing so will snap your rotation to every 5 degrees. Select the Rotate tool (E) and hold down Shift on the keyboard; then in the Front viewport rotate the image plane along the Y axis 90 degrees. Using Shift activates the Clone tool, as shown in Figure 7-1.

6. In the Clone Options dialog box, under Object select Copy, name it Image_Plane_Side, and click OK.

7. Switch to the Move tool and move the plane to these coordinates: (–311.084, –229.692, –5.228).

Figure 7-1: Clone Options dialog box

Adding the Materials

At this point, the reference materials are texture-mapped onto the planes to provide reference inside the scene itself while you model the character. Therefore, it’s critical to ensure that the features of the character that appear in both reference images (the front and the side) are at the same height. For instance, the top of the head and the shoulders should be at the same height in both the front and side views to make the modeling process easier.

1. In the Left viewport, press the V key on your keyboard and select Right View from the list. Change the shading in the Right viewport to Smooth + Highlights (F3).

2. Open an Explorer window and navigate to the Soldier/sceneassets/images folder on your hard drive from the Soldier project you downloaded from the book’s web page at www.sybex.com/go/3dsmax2012essentials. Drag ImagePlane_Front.jpg from the Explorer window to the image plane in the Front viewport.

3. Drag ImagePlane_Side.jpg onto the image plane in the Right viewport. The image planes should have the two images mapped on them, as shown in Figure 7-2.

Figure 7-2: Mapped image planes in viewports

Creating the Soldier

A good practice is to block out the basic form of the character and focus on the size and crucial shapes of the major elements, and then add detail for the finer features. The following exercises describe the steps required to block out the soldier’s major features. Go wild!

Forming the Torso

The basic structure for the torso will begin with a simple box primitive. After converting the box into an editable poly, you will use the Mirror tool on the object so that any manipulations performed on one side are also performed on the other. You will begin forming the basic shape of the torso by moving the editable poly’s vertices and extruding its polygons in the following steps.

Continue with the previous exercise’s scene file, or open the Soldier_V01.max scene file in the Scenes folder of the Soldier project downloaded from this book’s web page.

1. Set each viewport to Smooth + Highlights (F3) with Edged Faces (F4) if it isn’t already set that way.

2. Start by creating a box primitive in the Perspective viewport with these parameters: Length: 25, Width: 16, Height: 53, Input Height Segs: 8. Leave the Width and Length Segs at 1, as shown in Figure 7-3. This is a starting point for the detail needed to create the form of the body. Position the box as shown in Figure 7-4. Press Alt+X to make the box see-through. Change the box’s name to Soldier.

3. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click Polygon Modeling ⇒ Convert To Poly.

4. Enter the Vertex subobject level. In the Right viewport, position the vertices on the right side of the box to match the side outline of the character on the image plane, as shown in Figure 7-5.

5. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, click Edit ⇒ SwiftLoop. Switch to Edge mode, and then use the Swift Loop tool to create two new edge loops that run vertically from the front of the model to the back, as shown in Figure 7-6. The dashed lines show the loop running in the back and bottom of the model.

Figure 7-3: Box parameters

Figure 7-4: Box position from the front and side views

Figure 7-5: Move vertices to match the soldier image in the Right viewport.

Figure 7-6: Create two new edge loops using Swift Loop.

6. Using Swift Loop, create a single new edge on the side of the model running from the left side to the right side, as shown in Figure 7-7. The dashed lines show the loop running across the bottom of the model. Turn off the tool.

Figure 7-7: Create a single new edge on the side of the model using Swift Loop.

7. Now round the side of the torso. You should still be in Edge mode. Select one of the edges running vertically on the side of the torso box (Figure 7-8). In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, select the Modify Selection tab and click Loop to select the loop of edges running along the side of the torso, as shown in Figure 7-8. Move the loop of edges toward the back of the model to begin rounding that edge. Then select the loop of edges to the left of the previous loop with the Loop tool and move them back to form a more rounded front to the torso, as shown in Figure 7-8.

Figure 7-8: Select and move edges toward the back of the model.

8. Switch to Vertex mode and select the vertex on the left side below the top edge, as shown in Figure 7-9. In the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon’s Vertices tab, select Chamfer Settings by clicking the tool’s name under the icon and then clicking Chamfer Settings. Doing so opens the tool caddy shown in Figure 7-10. Use a Vertex Chamfer Amount value of 4.808, and click the green check mark button (OK) in the caddy to commit the action. This is where the arm will be positioned.

9. Switch to Polygon mode, select the new diamond-shaped polygon in the middle, and press Delete to delete the polygon. A hole appears where the arm will be positioned.

Figure 7-9: Select the vertex right above the mouse cursor shown here.

Figure 7-10: Use Chamfer to create a new polygon where the arm will be positioned.

10. Switch to Edge mode and select the four diagonal edges of the diamond-shaped hole and the four edges shown in Figure 7-11.

Figure 7-11: Select these eight edges.

11. On the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, choose Modify Selection ⇒ Ring to select the ring of edges running across the top of the chest. Again on the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, choose Loops ⇒ Flow Connect to create more horizontal divisions for the upper chest. Flow Connect connects selected edges across one or more edge rings and adjusts the new loop position to fit the shape of the surrounding mesh. The newly created edges are illustrated in Figure 7-12. The diamond-shaped hole in the shoulder is now more rounded (the hole is now an octagon) as well, since more edges were created at the hole, too. The dashed lines show the loops running behind the model.

Figure 7-12: Use Flow Connect to create two new edges around the model.

12. Select the two horizontal edges under the armhole, as shown in Figure 7-13 (left), and from the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon choose Modify Selection ⇒ Ring to select the horizontal edges running down the side, top, and bottom of the torso. Again from the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon, select Loops ⇒ Flow Connect to create two new loops of edges, as shown on the right in Figure 7-13.

13. The new edge ring does not reach all the way up to the octagon armhole. You will need to cut an edge from the top of the new edges you just made, to the bottom of the armhole. Select the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon and choose Edit⇒ Cut. Click on the first vertex under the armhole, and then click on the second vertex above at the armhole to create the first new edge. Right-click to commit the edge. You will still be in the Cut tool, so click on the third vertex shown in Figure 7-14 and create the second new edge up to the fourth vertex shown in Figure 7-14. Right-click to commit the second edge.

Figure 7-13: Select the two horizontal edges under the armhole (left) and use Flow Connect to create more edges (right).

Figure 7-14: Use the Cut tool to add two edges to the armhole.

14. The armhole isn’t great right now; it will be easier to start from a circular shape rather than the uneven octagon form we have now. Enter Border subobject mode, select the armhole’s border, and in the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon’s Geometry (All) tab, click the Cap Poly tool to create an NGon (a polygon with more than four sides) cap to fill the hole.

15. Go to Polygon mode and select the new NGon. Go to the Graphite Modeling Tools ribbon’s Polygons tab and click the GeoPoly tool to create a symmetrical polygon from the previous shape, as shown in Figure 7-15. GeoPoly untangles a polygon and organizes the vertices to form a perfect geometric shape. This will make it easier for us when we create the arm later.

Figure 7-15: Use GeoPoly to create a symmetrical shape for the armhole.