SBS Materials

[darn42 1,268]

So the BAT school crashed and burned because no students ended up sticking with the program (besides like one person) so I am releasing the content I made for my class and the basic assignment outlines. Very little of what I have up to this point was specific to architecture, but was for modeling purposes. The idea of these assignments is to attempt to make the object pictured without help, go through the tutorials, then try it again. That's probably the best way to learn many of these techniques required. 

 

The first assignment was:

 

Try it out, here is how to do it my way.

 

 

Assignment 1 Solution:

 

 

Second assignment:

 

My way:

Assignment 2: Lamp

Solution

 

 

Here is the finished lamp wire frames. Not as complicated as it looks.

 

I'll start with the most simple shape. The tippy top box.

 

 

Not too big of a deal. I used taper, you could also use outline or scale on the top square. 

 

I do however have all of the edges selected because I want to soften the edges a bit without turbosmooth since this is such a simple shape.

 

After selecting all of those, a simple chamfer in the edit poly rollout will help with that.

 

 

The reason I did this is because it is 1) Metal and 2) made for a more closeup rendering. Later we'll discuss rendering metals, but because of how reflective they are, round corners are very important to define the edges in a way that looks realistic because of the light it catches.

 

 

Let's move on to the base. 

 

To start, it's just a simple box.

 

 

Then, we'll select a ring of edges. You can select one edge and click "ring" underneath the selection buttons, or you can use the hot-key (alt+r). I suggest getting used to the hot key for both ring and loop, it comes in very very handy.

 

After selecting the ring, connect the edges. Because the feet of the base are not in thirds with the gap, but rather wider, we will use the pinch function given in the windowed version of connect to spread it out.

 

 

Select the other ring and connect again. Settings will be saved in connect so it will be perfectly symmetrical.

 

 

Now, if you look closely at the picture, you see the extrusion in the base is wider than the feet, so we can either outline or scale the center square made from the connect to achieve this effect.

 

 

Now extrude the feet and the extrusion on top.

 

 

 

If you look at the picture, you can see the edges are not sharp, but pretty soft. Especially on top. We'll do turbosmooth for this instead of chamfering because of how smooth some of it gets.

 

If you add a turbosmooth, though, I'm sure you notice that the edges get really funky and turn almost circular. Turbosmooth and most other smoothing functions use support loops to decided how sharp or soft an edge is. No loops = a circle.

 

So we have to add those.

 

The swift loop tool is by far the best for this. Accessed in the graphite modeling tools, it is highlighted in the next picture. It basically does a ring select and connect in the same function. To make placement of these loops easier, right above the edge select click, show cage. This will show those orange guidelines.

 

 

Keep placing those support loops wherever the edge is harder. Generally on corners, you need 3 loops to make the corner close to 90 degrees.

 

 

Now we will do the lamp column. Starting with splines, very similar to the lamp exercise, pretty much exactly the same really, we will create a lathe for the very base.

 

 

The only difference is that some of the vertices need to be bezier corners. 

 

 

Then like before, cap. And in my case I want to add a bit of a bevel to the top instead of using splines to do that. Note: Mine was too wide here, so I adjusted the lathe to be narrower at the top

 

 

 

Now we add a bevel to be the actual column.

 

 

 

If we notice, though, the column is skewed to one side. I'm not sure if anybody noticed that while making it. That was why I chose this lamp, it was an exercise in perception as well as modeling. Anyways, we can skew it just by moving the top to the right.

 

 

Then there is the lip at the top. The process I do for this is a windowed bevel with 0 extrusion. Then I extrude, then If it goes back in, I switch back to the windowed bevel and switch the negative sign. For the last part, an inset is also easy to do, but the bevel is already set to the exact amount outwards which is why I do that instead. But here, that wasn't necessary.

 

 

 

Then there's the last part of the column that has a slight lip then goes almost straight up. Inset, extrude.

 

 

But then I noticed it's not centered, so we can select the top face, hit "grow" which is near the ring and loop select buttons, and it will select all adjacent faces for us. Then move the selection offcenter. Afterwards, I forgot this picture, but just inset or bevel inwards to get the lip, and extrude again.

 

 

Follow the same process with edge loops you had before, but since it's circular, we only need to do horizontal loops. Then turbosmooth.

 

 

That's it for the column.

- - - - - -

 

Now the chains.

 

These are nice and simple. Create a geosphere with low resolution. I like geospheres whenever it's only the shape and no extra modeling because they are faster to render than normal spheres.

 

Anyways, create the sphere, then, under the tools dropdown menu, click array with the sphere selected.

 

 

This menu will pop up. Play with the settings a bit, but we want 1D movement in negative z, and we want instances. Preview to see how close together they will be. Make 'em touch.

 

Then, select them all and group them together. I have the two clicks visible at the top left of the screen.

 

 

That's all the chain is.

 

- - - - - - - -

 

The lamp shade was pretty easy except for the frills. Basically, the first steps are 1) create a cylinder with lots of subdivision 2) inset into the middle for the rims (I'm not sure what to call the edges) 3) detach the middle portion.

 

 

Then, select all the middle edges and perform a windowed extrusion so you can easily adjust the settings.

 

 

Now this is the trickier part to think of, not that hard to perform, though. With rotate tool selected, click and hold the highlighted button and a menu will drop down. Select the middle one. This is how the transform gizmo will affect the objects. This particular one goes off of selection center, not individual pivot points. P.S. in the picture I don't have the rotate tool selected, I had to do it a second time after I took the screenshot.

 

 

Then rotate. This will create that overlapping bit that basically defines the frills.

 

 

However, they aren't supposed to be super sharp corners at the end, so select one of the extruded edges, then click the highlighted function in the graphite modeling tools. It's called dot-ring selection and it basically selects every other/every other-x amount of edges in a ring. Default settings is every other.

 

 

Chamfer those edges just a little.

 

 

After this we need to get the variation that they have a lot of in the picture.

 

Select all of the top vertices, then go to selection in the graphite modeling (Instead of modeling). There is a random selection toolbar. You see a cursor button above a downward facing arrow. Click the arrow and there should be a cursor above a green sphere. That is the select within current selection button. So it takes what you have and when you click it selects the determined amount/percent from your selection. With percentage selected, do so. Then, rotate the vertices you have left. Do this several times in both directions for both top and bottom half. 

 

 

Then it is finished. 

 

 

Third assignment:

 

This one was difficult for me to make accurate in the time-frame I had to do it, so I just made one that illustrates the principles needed to make something like this.

 

* * * * * *

I have not documented every step for these leaves, in between steps I make small corrections, added lines for shape, and just generally used the transform tools to tweak the shapes. 

 

* * * * * *

 

There are 5 leaf shapes to each of the individual details. A bottom that has a bit of a curve, the one I made already; 3 Almost identical sets that are stacked on top of each other; and the top, flat leaf which I have not been successful in making yet. We will start by making the first of the ascending sets.

 

 

The first step is to create a plane, the subdivision doesn't quite matter yet because you can add it later. Hold shift and drag and edge that doesn't go to the top of that plane to the left. This is going to become a separate section and will create the hole you see. The shape I have doesn't really matter at the moment, it will be drastically changed later.

 

 

Now you'll see that I dragged another set of edges on the right side as well and I continued to drag on the left side a few more times. With this next step we define the triangle shape for the fan of the leaf. Select target weld click on the circled vertex on the right, and then click on the next vertex to it's left. This should make a triangle.

 

 

Then, drag the top segments out and then, with either swift loop or the connect tool, create these 2 loops, then select the top segments of them. Use the split function, outlined in red. This splits the line segment (the opposite of weld) and they will be our leaves later.

 

 

move them around like shown and then select the whole leaf area. There is an extrusion downwards that I didn't do earlier, to remedy we have to get a little fancy, extrude...

 

 

... and select a face from the extrusion, then shift+click on the next one around the ring. This selects the whole ring. Deselect the part that is attached to the original shape and delete.

 

Now we will add a bit of a ridge to each leaf.

 

 

Connect all of the rings on the leaves and move them backwards a little.

 

 

Next, we want to soften up the ends of the leaves. Select the vertices shown, and in the red box, there is an option that says "edges." Select it. This constrains all movement to an edge. Then we can just move with the transform gizmo and it will move the vertices along the outside edges.

 

Now we want to add a bit of shape to the fan, so select these middle segments, then connect 'em.

 

 

Use the scale tool and scale down the new lines. Then move it so the left edge is in line with the rest of the left edges.

 

 

 

After some tweaking of the cups.

 

To add some bend....

 

 

I use face selections and move that selection backwards or forwards. Then, deselect a layer and do it again. By layer, I mean I have 4 selected right now, I would deselect the bottom 2 polygons and smooth out the transform.

 

 

Unsmoothed which would be how I would present it in a Simcity Render...

 

 

And with a turbosmooth.

 

 

Then for the other 2 sets going up, we can shift drag to copy the entire object, and just tweak it a little.

 

 

Add a symmetry modifier....

 

 

And then we can add the last ascending set, which is more bent than the others. For this I will add a bend modifier.

 

 

Notice the "limit effect" and the shape of the gizmo. The orange box stops curving about halfway down. 

 

There we have the completed leaf.

 

I am going to leave the way I distributed them around the column up for personal discovery still. It has to do with array and working pivot. I hope this helps you all in your making of the column. I know it isn't the most clearly put and a lot was left out, but I included everything that I did that was different and new.

 

And Part 2 of tutorial

 

Corinthian Capital: Part 2

 

Ok, so we made the leaves last time, now we are going to finish it off with one of the most useful tools I've ever used. Loft. 

 

Mine ended up looking like this:

 

 

It's not terribly accurate to the reference, I'm afraid. I don't have the time for tweaking the shapes that I would like to get it accurate, but it resembles it, and this is mainly for the modeling tools more than anything.

 

So we are going to use a tool called "loft" which I will explain how to use as we go, but it is a very powerful tool that basically extrudes a shape along a spline, with the benefit being you can modify the shape along the spline parametrically.

 

The first step is, I'm sure you can remember, to create the spline.

 

 

Because this is a continuous curve, I create 4 vertices per "circle" in the spiral and add extras if I think it will help the shape. 4 per rotation is what's needed to make the shape, though.

 

Then we convert to bezier and edit to make it smooth.

 

 

Then, for later, we will create the little spiral thingy on top with the same process.

 

 

We can now start the loft process. I already have my "path" but now I need the shape that goes along the path, another spline. If we look at the reference, it seems to be a T shape going around the spiral. So we will make something similar. 

 

First, I create 2 rectangles.

 

 

Then I copy and drag the smaller rectangle straight down. (you can hold shift while transforming it for this). Then, I am going to do a spline boolean operation. The spline video covered this so I won't go into detail.

 

 

You have to be in element mode and you want it on the settings I have to create the result that we want. Afterwards, I didn't take a picture of this, but go into vertex mode, and weld the extra vertices together if there are extra vertices from the operation.

 

Then edit the shape to be narrower.

 

 

If you select two symmetrical halves of the vertices and make the transform center be selection center (it is highlighted blue in the dropdown on the above picture) you can use the scale tool (the transform has to be set while scale is selected) to equally transform the vertices from the point of symmetry.

 

 

Select vertices and select the chamfer tool (highlighted in blue) to split them into 2 vertices each with a line connecting them.

 

 

Now that we have the shape, we can actually loft it now. Go to the solids menu and select compound objects from the dropdown. I have loft highlighted.

 

With the path spline already selected, click loft, and when the rollout comes up, click "pick shape" which is the spline we just finished making. Click on that spline.

 

It will then extrude the shape around the path making a solid. Nifty, right? I know you can already see the possibilities with this tool, but it gets better. Note: if your shape isn't the correct direction, I cover that later.

 

 

 

The first thing after making a very geometric, non-round shape on a loft you should do is to go to skin parameters, and set shape steps to 0.

 

Also, you usually want to turn off adaptive path steps just a little lower in that menu.

 

Our next step is to edit the scaling along this extrusion, now this is the power of loft. Click the "scale" button and a curve editor will pop up. This will probably be your first time seeing one of these in 3ds max. It works very similar to splines. First thing, is there will be a box highlighted yellow, this locks the x and y direction together so one curve affects both of them equally. We don't want that. Click it to turn it off.

 

 

Now we get to editing it.

 

To edit one curve at a time, click either the green or red lines. Drag one of the default points up or down to determine which direction it is. Right now, we are going to work on the long side.

 

I circled the 2 buttons we will use for editing, the normal hotkeys don't work. So there's the create point button on the right, and the move button on the left. Pretty self-explanatory.

 

 

And, just like splines, when you select a point and right click it, you have the option of making it bezier. I made it get smaller as it goes in to the middle and that's pretty much it with this.

 

Now we will work with the other direction. If we notice, it kinda flares out when it goes to the middle of the shape.

 

 

I made I a curve like that to represent that flare.

 

Now, we see there is a kinda skew to the shape that we want to get. Surprisingly, skew will not help us here, but twist will. Twist rotates the shape, skew does some very situational thing that is hard to explain. Anyways, it's the same process as with scale.

 

 

I wanted to just get a bit of a twist so I didn't go higher than 20 degrees of rotation.

 

To zoom in like I did, making the y-axis smaller, I highlighted the zoom tool in the curve editor box. This just works vertically.

 

Next step is to get the symmetry on. I used the symmetry modifier for this.

If you click the symmetry modifier name itself, it should turn blue, and if it does that means you are now editing the mirror itself. You can move and rotate it however you want. Conversely, you can instead add an edit poly underneath the symmetry and move/rotate the object around the mirror.

 

 

 

 

Now we will loft that smaller shape we made earlier that spirals upwards.

 

The shape I made for it is just a single curved line, and I will demonstrate why this being used is awesome.

 

 

First, the loft itself. Mine was not lined up the correct way. To fix this, click the "+" next to loft in the modifier list and click on shape. Then do a marquee selection over the entire lofted shape because we don't know yet which side is the beginning or end. The only thing selected will be the shape used to create the loft. You can freely rotate or scale it. If you rotate it, it changes the alignment. Mine was off by 90 degree so I rotated it 90 degrees.

 

 

I can shell the shape I lofted, and also, give it more geometry by adding more shape steps. But this is also the cool part. If you look at the reference, it changes concavity halfway through. By dragging on end of the vertical curve down to -100 scale, I can flip it halfway. It's bowed one way when it starts, and bowed the opposite way when it finishes. Nifty, eh?

 

 

Then the other axis.

 

 

In this last step I went back to the original path spline and edited that as well to better fit the environment. 

 

And that is the spiral. If I wanted to spend much more time on it, and get it better for super closeups, which would involve welding all the outside parts to the inside parts.

 

Anyways, now I will show you how to distribute things in a circle.

 

First, we want a centerpoint to rotate around. Mine is the center of the pillar. To make this a viable spot to rotate around, we need the working pivot to be there. Select "edit working pivot" in the hierarchy tab. It will give you an axis to move. Using the align tool, with the settings shown, click the pillar. It will move the working pivot point to the bottom middle of the column. Now, when we say "use working pivot" it will now automatically transform from that spot. Great for scaling or rotating.

 

 

Now, select what you want to rotate, and in the tools menu click array.

 

 

This brings up this dialogue with the important parts circled. 

 

 

Basically, what this says is that it will do an array totaling 360 degrees of rotation, in those 360 degrees it will evenly distribute 4 instances of the object you have selected. By clicking preview you can see what will happen when you click ok without committing to anything.

 

- - - - - - - 

 

 

 

For the middle spirals I just reused the old spirals for the middle ones reorienting the symmetry and scaling them down to fit.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - -

 

Wireframes smoothed

 

 

Unsmoothed

 

I will also post any tutorials I make for the remaining student. Feel free to ask questions in this topic.

[SimCoug 5,972]

Your tutorials are always an excellent resource for BATers - thanks for sharing! 

[darn42 1,268]

I should also include this. These should almost be compulsory for anyone who has not seen a series of basic 3ds max poly, spline and miscellaneous modeling tutorials. Perfect for beginners. They were what got me started learning 3ds max. 

 

http://www.3dtotal.c...86#.U1ftb_ldV8F

[Vlasky 1,803]

Amazing job darn!!! I will have to try out these tutorials. Maybe I'll conquer my fear of classical buildings

[9gruntsand1hammer 3,193]

When I get a new computer that can handle 3dsmax these tutorials will really help me out, thanks for posting them.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

I'm definitely going to try the Corinthian column, I think its overkill for BATing but I want to be able to say I've made one .. I think the general techniques and concepts will come in handy for other types of moldings as well.. thanks for sharing Darn.