Week 2 Exercises

ALIGN TOOL

I will align these two primitive objects, step by step (x, y & z), in order to place
the cone on top of the cylinder. I made sure that both of them were aligned x and y wise
and then I just aligned them Z wise in minimum - maximum order.

I think this will be particularly useful when it comes to design structures:

BOOLEAN TOOL

I found this tool very useful and I think it will be of great help when I begin to model the Imperial Destroyer for the final animation. I simply built a wall and a Chamferm Box (from extended primitives) and used the Boolean tool on the wall. Then I set the ChamFermBox as operand B and there you have it!:

 I applied this same technique in the castle I modelled last week to make cross-shaped windows in the main towers of the castle:

Week 1 Exercises & Thoughts

I am glad that we are learning how to use 3ds Max this semester because it seems one of the most used 3d modelling & animation programs out there which is used by professionals and rookies like me alike. The only other 3d program that I have used is UDK so I am very used to it and some of the controls for 3ds Max are still a bit new for me. Hopefully, after some more practice I will feel comfortable enough to start doing some serious things.

Here are the exercises of week 1:

Ship Steering Wheel:

Low Poly House:

Castle:

I still need to get the grasp of edges and vertices manipulation as sometimes it was a bit confusing to me how to use these tools. For the CASTLE I used the WALLS TOOL which I found in a Youtube tutorial. Making walls gets much easier with this tool and is of great help when modelling structures of this sort!

I found a very interesting page which gathers 3ds Max Hotkeys. I need to look much more into it but I found particularly informative the key "7" which displays the number of Polygons & Vertices as well as the frame rate of Max in my PC.