Thursday, 15 March 2012

Week Six

This week we focused on animation. First we created some basic geometry, a box and a torus. Then we looked at key framing; positional, scale and rotation. 

We then looked at key framing materials so the colour of something can change throughout the animation, in this case a sphere:


Week Five

This week we looked at lighting. First we used omni lighting by going into the create tab and then clicking the light and selecting omni. First we looked at positioning the light to best suit the scene and then we looked at how different intensities would look.




Then we looked at adding shadows to react to the lighting.

We then looked at spot lighting. initially it didn't look to different until we looked at the spotlight parameters. In this section there is a hotspot/beam section, this controls the width of the most powerful part of the light, and a falloff/field section, this controls falloff from maximum light to the darkness or shadow. I tried entering a few different values in these sections to see how it looked:





Week Four

This week we looked at materials 

Week Three

This week we looked at basic box modelling to create a robot kind of guy. First I created a basic box shape and pulled the vertexs until the box took on the shape of a torso. Then selected the face in the middle top face and extruded it up to create a neck. Then bevelled and extruded up from the neck to create the head. Using the same techniques I created the legs and feet. Then using the hinge from edge part of the extrude tool, then the arms and wrists were created the same way was the arms and feet. 
For the hands I selected the bottom face of the wrist and divided it up into three sections and extruded the outer two parts to create a kind of pincer hand. 
After I finished modelling the basic man I added the turbo smooth modifier and this is how it turned out:


Sunday, 4 March 2012

Week Two

This week we were doing basic modelling, we initially just did very basic geometry by opening the create tab and clicking on sphere left clicking in the view port and dragging it on. We then messed around with the other standard primitives like the tube and the cylinder and put them together to try and make something a little more complex, a tea cup for example: 


After resetting the scene I created a box, I then opened the modifier tab which brought up options for the size  and the segments of the box. I then added a bend modifier to the box and changed the angle to 90 degrees, the more segments the box had the smoother the 90 degree bend looked, we tried it with 3 segments, 8 segments and 32 segments. Then I added a taper modifier to the box, this allowed me to change the curves of the box. I changed the taper amount value to 3.0 and the curve to -5.0, here is what the box looked like with the effects of the bend and the taper:


After resetting the scene again I went back to the create tab and selected shapes from the buttons within the tab and the selected line. Under the creation method section I changed the initial type to corner and drag type to smooth. So I just played around a little in the different ways of creating lines:


if you left click the last point on the line so it touches the first point of the line an option will come up to close the spline, if you select yes the line will be closed off.
I then reset my workspace again and created a smooth spline matching the example given, after the spline was created and selected I went to the modifier tab and selected lathe from the dropdown menu, this spins the shape around the central axis creating 3D geometry. On the menu on the right three options appear for me to choose which axis the shape spins around. Here is how it looks on the X axis:


We then went on to look at boolean operations. First of all I created a basic box and a basic sphere and placed the sphere in the middle of the box, with the box selected I then went to the create tab and selected geometry selection then compound objects and then clicked ProBoolean. In the parameters section there are a few operations that are there to select, we used subtraction.I clicked the start picking and click on the sphere, the sphere is then cut out of the box:


Using these techniques we created a space craft and I assigned a few materials to the scene:


  

Saturday, 3 March 2012

Week One

In the first week of the 3D course we were initially just looking at the basic controls of 3DS Max, zoom rotate and pan around an existing scene. We then went on to insert a camera into the scene. To look at the scene through the cameras eye you simply have to change one of the view ports to camera. We then messed around with the different controls of the camera like zoom, pan and arc rotate. I then rendered out the scene through the cameras view and this is what it looked like:


I then had to add an orange to the scene, to do this I simply had to add a sphere of an appropriate size and position it correctly. Then a material needed to be added so it would look like and orange and not just a green sphere.

 Pressing 'M' will bring up the material editor menu, click on the one that looks like and orange and drag it onto the sphere in the view port, this is how it looks with the material on:



After creating the orange I had to animate the scene. To do so I first selected the key frame button so every adjustment I made would be saved. I moved the time slider to frame 100 and moved the orange into the air then I rotated the bottle in frame 100 rotated and moved the knife and apple, after all of this this is what the scene looked like: