3ds Max Modeling Basics

hey everybody today's video is going to be a tad bit different from the rest of the videos I've done mainly because I'm going to try to explain the fundamentals of modeling inside 3ds max so in order to understand how modeling any kind of a 3d model goes in max first of all I'm going to start with the simplest or the most basic thing and that is to explain how the subdivision works in 3ds max so for this I'm going to use a simple 2d align or a splined it over here we have one simple arc or basically it's a line that has three vertices now you'll notice that right after bad this entire line is curved and it's making this arc now if we just create create this as a simple line these lines should be straight now the reason why this is arced is because this middle vert to see if you check if I right click on it you'll see that this one is set as smooth if this one was set up as a corner this would be a straight one but since this is a smooth one we get this kind of a curve now it's very important to understand how this happens in order to be able to understand a later on how this kind of a subdivision would happen in the 3d space now what is responsible for this curve well if we take a look at over here in the options where it says interpolation we have this steps slider and we can choose to go up or down for just to explain this I'm gonna go over and get this to be at one so I'm just going to right click on the buttons over here and there we go now it's a straight line now notice what happens when I increase this step to one so just going to go and click one right away you're going to notice that here which is basically in the middle between these two vertices we have another virtual vertex happening trying to get this distance between both of these vertices to curve now this is basically the basis for the interpolation since one is the number what we have set up for steps max is adding one virtual vertex in between any two vertices that are connected together for example if I put two steps then we have two vertices happening over here so as it is right now we cannot select them they are virtual vertices right because if we want to use them as an actual geometry as we will see later on we're going to have to slap on an extra modifier on top of it so if we continue to increase those steps I'm going to say we have three and those virtual vertices are getting this line to bend and look more arced so the more steps we have the more virtual vertices and the smoother the line so basically this is the most basic thing you can have for modeling so since we explained the basics for the spline let's jump over and see how we're going to do with 3d objects so for a start I'm going to start with these three well they're not models but they're simple planes that have been extruded now the thing is whenever you want to work with any kind of a 3d model in max you want to use either a smoothing nurms subdivision option or a turbosmooth modifier let me show you what the both of them do so for this middle one I'm going to click on turbo smooth and right away you're going to see that this entire line or this entire model got smoother it got those two extra edges or those two extra geometries and the reason for that extra geometry is this iteration so this is exactly like it was with the spline so I'm going to put it at zero as soon as I put it to one it's going to put one extra spline in between both of these and one extra in between both of these so this is what happens as you can see we have more geometry while here you can also choose to either show or hide those isolines or the extra line so if we click this we can make those lines disappear now if I select the first one and go over on this place where it says subdivision surface we have this option use nurms subdivision this is basically the same idea as if you would drop in a turbosmooth modifier now the only thing or the drawback is that this only works if your stack is collapsed which is really not too practical because max utilizes a lot of a lot of the modifiers in order to help you get your model to where you want it to be so if I click this you're going to notice that we get the same exact result now over here this iteration is basically controlling how many extra lies are going to show up here and also if I click on isolating display I can see all those extra lines so this is basically the same if I were using turbo smooth with the isolating displays so this was the first option to use the nerve subdivision and the second one is to use turbo smooth now I would really recommend every time when are you using modeling to go with turbo smooth and the reason why you would go with turbo smooth is that you can actually put one turbo smooth then apply an edit poly on top of it continue working from there then add another one and continue working from there also turbo smooth has an additional option in place that can help you when you're working with your models and that option is that when it's smoothing it has to well it has two options the first one is where it will smooth depending on your geometry and the second one is it will smooth depending on your smoothing groups so for now let's see how those smoothing groups would work so I'm going to select the first one I'm going to go over to polygons and select the whole piece now smoothing groups can be found over here from what I've previously had experienced my students have at least referred to this portion as the calendar because it has 32 numbers but that aside if I clear it all and then just click on one that is going to make this entire model or this entire selection have one smoothing group what that means is that if I put a turbo smooth on top of it and now click on smoothing groups not much has changed because turbo smooth by default is trying to smooth everything depending on the geometry and since the geometry is free-flowing it basically gave us this to start with but now let's go over to the second one and here select the first one and the second one actually let's let's select them all clear all so we don't have any more splitting groups select the first one in the second one apply a smoothing group of one select the second one apply a swimming group of two now let's go ahead and apply turbo smooth as you can see right now it's the same but the moment we apply or click on the smoothing group option you'll notice this now this portion over here is smooth while this one is still going off as a straight plane we can do the same thing over here where we're going to select them all again clear all and now make this number one and make this number two again turbo smooth and smoothing groups so as you can see in all of these three cases we have turbo smooth smoothing by the actual smoothing groups if I put on iterations - we have more geometry and better details over here so from what we saw here turbo smooth can smooth with smoothing groups or depending on geometry so now let's see how that geometry smoothing would look like so for this going to use this scene this is basically a scene where we have two planes and we have a cylinder carved end so we have a eight sided cylinder now here's the thing when if I select both of these you're going to see that both of these cylinders even though they're identical the geometry when it comes to the edges kind of differs a bit so if you take a look all of the sides in both cases are quads but there is a difference this one goes from one side from one edge to the end over here while this one is going to the sides and it's giving us more geometry so before we go over and try to explain or what is better or what is the difference let's add a turbosmooth on both of them and see what the difference is so turbosmooth to this one and turbosmooth to this one so as we can see due to the fact that this doesn't have any kind of a middle point from which it can smooth too it's trying to collapse this form and in turn we get this portion over here being shrinked while this one on the other hand because it has those two sides like this it's keeping its form so it's not losing any value so that is the main difference between both of these types when you have an inset like this so another thing is when you're working with a surface on which you want to make any kind of an indention you always want to keep to the rule of so what is the rule of eight the rule of eight states that if you want to place a hole in your mesh you need to have at least eight sides if you want your hole to be perfect why is that well simply because you want to have four sides on each side plus one extra in between them so it can hold the form so for example if I turn on the turbosmooth here you want to see that this really does look like a hole I'll bite nuts the best geometry yet but it looks like a hole so from what we learned previously we can either use smoothing groups or we can try to add more geometry now we saw how it looked like when we used smoothing groups let's see how we would add how we would get this to look if we add more geometry now in order to add more geometry we're going to have to I'm going to go over and I'm going to select all of these edges on the top side over here and here I have the option to you chamfer this so when you chamfer give you give one value for however you want to jump her however much you want to chamfer so for example I'm going to use a chamfer of three and I'm going to click okay I'm going to keep this at 1 so I'm going to click OK select the bottom portion over here so hold on control select the whole piece and again chamfer this as well so now since both of these have edges that are close to each other when it's trying to smooth it's not going to go to the edge to try to find it closest edge but rather it's going to go from one to the other edge what this means is that once we turn on turbosmooth this is what we get we get a whole which is much better defined so if you put two iterations and turn off the Isilon display then you'll notice that this whole is now starting to hold its form much better now the thing is like this we can really control how sharp we want our edges to be by how close these edges are and in case we want this to be a very sharp edge we can simply select one of the edges click on reign add one more connect in between them and now this should be a much sharper edge as you can see here so this was this case now this case on the other hand can be a bit different I'm going to try to select the entire top portion over here and I'm going to go over and click on chamfer let's give it a three and add two chamfers so right away you're going to notice a problem especially to the sides we have those two lines converging on itself on max 2014 it doesn't have the quad chamfer option that the 2015 and 16 offers instead when it comes to an edge where it kind of converges like this it kind of makes a bit of a mess that you're gonna have to clean up manually or you can go ahead while you have this you can cancel this we can manually add all of those edges the way to manually add them would be to go with the cut tool and try to simply cut away near the edges so again like this cut just over the edges try to keep it as close as you can or as uniformly as you can on all sides so once this is done now we simply have to go with a target weld weld these together put them into position again target weld put them back to position and target weld and the last one with the target world so once this is done we have the top edge that is going to help us hold this form so let's go in turbos load this and we're going to notice that right away we are starting to get something isoline display turn off we get this kind of an effect if you want this to be sharper you can simply go over here and now just I can either use the ring and connect option and add the connector like this or I can go to my full ribbon over here and from here use swift loop I would really recommend that you set up a hotkey for this because I always use this when I when I'm modeling so in order to set a hotkey for this all you got to do is go over in customize customize user interface and from here just go in and choose or click in swift loop for me I've said this for my numpad 0 so whenever I press it I automatically enter this mode so it is giving me the option to add wherever I want an extra edge so I'm going to click on 1 over here click another one for the bottom and since I want to have one more in the base I'm going to select bold all these four polygons and insert them for a minor value there we go and now if I put on a turbosmooth you're going to notice that my whole is really well preserved and it's really well defined so since we saw how to deal with making a hole let's close this and go and open up our last scene over here for this scene we have basically two cubes or two boxes the main difference is that one of these boxes is basically just a box while the other one has a few support edges added to it now I'm going to close my ribbon as I will not be needing it anymore and underneath both of these we have two more rectangles that are the same exact size as these boxes now the reason for putting these two rectangles be beneath this boxes is because that I want to show you that whenever you're using turbosmooth depending on what you have on what kind of geometry you have set up for your model your model might actually end up shrinking and losing volume for example if we put a turbosmooth on cube that has no support edges this is what happens to it it actually verifies it is trying to turn into a sphere and the reason for this is because like we saw at the beginning max is trying to interpret these iterations by making the middle lines come in between those two vertices and it's making this form so if we take a look from the top this is the actual form that this box had but now since we put up the turbosmooth it has lost a lot of its volume now in our second case over here we have this box it has a few extra edges to the sides so now once we add a curve smooth we don't notice that our cube has been rounded up a bit on the side on the corners but it's still more or less trying to retain that form but again if we take a look at from the top we're going to notice that again we are losing a bit of volume on the corners so this is something that you should probably be aware of especially if you're working on a model that has strict volume or strict measurements that you have to abide for just take into account that whenever you're using turbosmooth depending on how close your edges are that is how a much volume you're going to lose for example if I'm going to click on edit poly I'm going to have my turbo summit turned on I'm going to click on the show cage these guys to show me the original cage for my model or the one I'm working on so I'm going to select one of the edges loop it so it selects the whole edge now this gives me the option to move it around so as you can notice as I'm moving the cage or the basic geometry the turbosmooth is working and I can see the end result because I have this show end result turned off or actually turned on so when it select this and now get this closer to the edge and you can notice right away that this edge over here is starting to tighten up if I put this one up as well we're going to notice that now we have our top here really sharp Danielle well this side it's still retaining that roundness alright so with this we should we actually went over the basics the bare basics of trying to model inside 3ds max and using the turbosmooth modifier now in the future I'm going to try to make a few more modeling videos where I'm going to try to explain exactly how you would tackle certain geometries like edges or holes or an insertion to edges and different scenarios and how you would deal with those kind of scenarios so again for this video if you guys enjoyed it then don't forget to subscribe hit that like button as it does really help a lot with you too and this would be it for this video I goes I really hope you guys actually had fun and most importantly you managed to learn something new so for now take care and I will see you all in the next video you

Channel: Denis Keman

Views: 277,828

Keywords: 3ds Max, 3d modeling, tutorial, dkcgi, modeling

Id: OeCyTpnn_ck

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2016