Thinking
Outside the Box:
3DS Tutorial #1: CyberGuy
|
Vol.
2, Issue 13
February 23, 2000
|
Press
Attach and now all the shapes are merged into one.
Now for
some trickery. Change your viewport to wireframe mode, go to
the Modify panel, click on Sub-Object/Spline. Select all the
splines in the front view.
Shift
drag the splines over to the right and click on Detach. Click
OK at the prompt. Don’t worry about the name unless you want
to name it something.
As you’ve
noticed by now I don’t normally name everything I make since I
do a lot of attaching, merging and consolidating of shapes and
objects. If things get tricky and hard to follow then I resort
to naming conventions for the shapes and objects. Otherwise I
save the naming for the end as a finishing move for the mesh parts.
Select
the new object and go up to Tools/Mirror.
Make sure
the Mirror dialog box has the X axis and No Clone areas checked
and hit OK.
Next turn
the viewport back to Smooth + Highlights and slide the mirrored
shape over to the right position.
Attach
the mirrored shape to the first shape and close the open lines
by using Modify/Sub-Object/Vertex/Connect…
Once you
connect the hips shape go ahead and detach that spline and rename
it to hips. While we’re at it let’s go ahead and detach the head
and side splines naming them ‘head’, ‘chest’, ‘calf’, and ‘foot
respectively. We’ll do the other body parts as well, but for
now we’ll just do these.
Now we
can start clearing up the workspace a little bit as we turn the
shapes into meshes. Select the shape we’ve been working on, go
over to the Display tab and click on Hide Unselected.
Hit P
and Zoom Extents, centering the scene in the perspective window.
Rotate the view so you’re looking obliquely at the shape and lose
the grid if it pops up. Go to the Modify tab and click on the
Extrude modifier. Enter a value of 6 for the extrusion and keep
the segments to 1.
Next add
an Edit Mesh modifier, go to Sub-Object/Face and with the Element
icon selected, drag select the left arm structure. Go down near
the bottom of the menu and click on Detach. Call the new object
‘arm’.
Turn the
Sub-Object button off, go to the Display panel, uncheck the Edges
Only box and hit Hide Selected to isolate the arm.
Hide Unselected
and Hide Selected are both useful and I can’t really say I use
one more than the other. Although since I have alt-H bound to
Hide Selected I probably use it slightly more than the other.
Before
we start working on the arm, let’s make it easier to see the changes
we make. Go to your viewport name (Perspective) and right-click
to change the view to Other: Facets. Check the Edged Faces as
well.
Once I
begin my mesh with either a primitive or extrusion, my next most
crucial technique is Edge manipulation. I use edge divide and
edge turn literally hundreds of times during the course of creating
and optimizing a model. The ease with which Max allows you to
manipulate edges is a major reason why I use it as my modeling
tool.
So, let’s
begin the arm by starting with the shoulder. With the arm selected
go to the modify panel and go to Sub-Object/Edge and activate
Divide near the bottom. Once you do divide these edges here,
here and here…