Thinking Outside the Box:
Modelling Detris

By Paul "Villam" Steed

Anything I say comes from me and represents my personal opinions, views and subtle plans for influencing society. Read, ruminate over and remember at your own risk. If I teach you something and it helps, teach someone else.

  wanted to make something with all you Mesh-kateers out there but instead I wanted to ramble about the way I do things in 3dsMax and some salient observances.

When building a model I live by two general rules of thumb. The second of which is to try out new modeling approaches as often as you can (we'll cover the first one next week). Sometimes it's easy to miss an easier way to do something because we are comfortable in our modeling routine (sorta like 'hair-body-face' in the shower, or just realizing you paid absolutely no attention to your environment the past two miles because you zoned, letting the auto-pilot take over as your brain works on more important things travelling that same old route to work) For example when I model in 3dsMax the most often sub-object that I manipulate when tweaking a mesh is the vertex (the other two being a face and edge). Take the top line here in this mesh. Normally I'd just select the two vertices at the ends of the line, 'F7' into the z axis and drag the points down like so...

BUT what's wrong with selecting the edge made up by the two vertices and dragging it down instead?

This method involves one less mouse click that over time can add up easily to several hundred less mouse clicks. Something to think about.

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