Thursday 30 January 2014

getting out the ole material editor

Something i noticed during feedback was.... i wasnt quite done modelling like i thought. the railings! id completely forgotten about the railings around the figurines peace bridge shoes and the river below.

This glass i created the same way i created veepees glass, however, i tweaked it slightly more to suit this figurine. However im sure if 3D Max had been so kind enough to remember my original Veepees glass i probably wouldnt have recreated it then tweaked it. i like this glass, it appears thicker and sturdier.

The cannon was the first of the objects to be given a material or texture. I placed a bitmap of a first hand image of the walls cannons, however it didnt turn out the way id expected, it wasnt vivid enough, and after some messing about with material editor i eventually settled on a simple matt metal.

i dont like how you can see the separate hands and fingers, and even feet with the figurines glass. This is definitely an incentive to create whole objcts/figures in 3D Max in future.

The water i tried to create in every which way there possibly is in 3D Max.
In the end the best result is actually a rather simple method. Using a mental ray rendering, under architecture section in material editor, theres loads of sample textured materials. Its probably not the desired way to create something, but the result was far closer to my design than any other way i tired it. 
With very little tweaking i was able to get this murky rippled water. 
Which is without a doubt my favorite aspect of the model. It really brings the whole thing together.


Once i had the water finished to the way i wanted i noticed the base no longer suited, so i changed the material, then began experimenting slightly. From which i found a very odd way of turbosmoothing the base by polygons, giving the base a brick wall effect. really suiting the objects on the skirt. i always felt there was something missing from the base and it didnt really suit the figurine but she couldnt just stand on nothing. im very happy i tweaked the base to this extent.

Amoung the architecture samples, i found many that suited the stone and brick walls on the skirt, with minor tweaks they were spot on the desired outcome.
With all he materials and textures from scratch i never wouldve gotten the bricks to look the way i wanted perfectly. this completely changes my view on 3D Max and i just want to get dug into it sometime without a mandatory project, just to see the possibilities. 
To all those of you new to 3D Max (or relatively new) i suggest taking the time to really experimenting with it before actually creating anything, itll definitely make things alot simpler. 


Problems with using things you found whilst experimenting is, you wont know what to do when things go wrong, or you wot know whats wrong when it renders out. 
Thought the renders worked fine, i got plenty of warnings every now and then. likely simply fixed with the checking of a box, but its the not knowing what youre dealing with that gets you in these situations. 

The glow was simplier ow that i knew how to crate it. the glass didnt get any easier, but its a longer process. the glow, i discovered in brief one, the veepees project. getting to different coloured glows was a bit more complicated but well worth it in the end. 
One of my favourite aspects of 3D Max, it always pushes you further and further, just when you think youre getting the hang of something it gives you a bigger task. like i was pushed to create a simple glow n the last project, and now two different glows, on many objects. its the constant challenges that keep it interesting.

Creating the small but noticeable green purple and pale yellow light under the peace bridge shoes, was not a simple task, especially when adding any lights to the scene reminds 3D Max it should be pitch black in an environment with no actual light. Lighting is such a basic step and yet even now i cant  say its simple.

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