Learn to 3D Model ANYTHING with 3ds MAX: Beginner Tutorial

[Music] hey everyone this is kyle with simulation lab here in brooklyn new york and this video is titled how to 3d model anything with 3d studio max that's morgan it's my girlfriend so if you're new to the channel i released a video about eight months ago now it's basically a it's a it's a 3ds max beginner crash course video and it's about an hour long and it basically runs down all of the uh it's a basic rundown of all of the the the basic tools um in within 3d studio max and the interface and we discuss um you know various components for animating and rigging things um so it's a it's a brief rundown of everything in about an hour so i definitely recommend going to check that out um prior to the rest of this little series that i'm putting together so like i said this video is is is titled how to 3d model anything so we're going to be discussing some some of the basic primitive shapes in max and the sort of philosophy of modeling within an environment like 3d studio max and then we're going to be talking about the typical modifiers that you use to manipulate geometry while you're sort of modeling as an object or objects and we're going to be talking very briefly about like booleans and blob mesh and stuff like that like a little bit more complex modeling techniques and i know we're going to be modeling some stuff i'll probably put together a little architectural scene with um with like a a chair a table maybe a beer bottle um and uh maybe we'll like at the very end of the video we'll discuss some some lighting techniques and very briefly set up a little rendered scene um i plan to release a couple of videos um or at least one video for like a beginner uh step-by-step guide on on how to light a scene and properly render a scene so that's uh that's coming up soon so a lot of the videos that i've posted that i've been posting recently have been um using thai flow which is like a sort of advanced like vfx plug-in it's a simulation plug-in so i do a lot of work with that plugin in particular so before you jump into vfx and like really advanced you know visual programming stuff it's really helpful to know the basics of how to model objects how to model a thing right because that's really what's going to make your work stand out is the the detail um and this you know the small nuances of the particular scene um that that really make it yours you know so your own artistic interpretation of of you know these particular objects that you're using in your scene and all that stuff is up to you and of course you can buy um you know 3d models and assets on marketplaces like turbosquid or cg trader or whatever and use those in your animations but it's really helpful to know how to modify those or how to make your own and you'll save a lot of money doing that and of course on top of that it's also important to know how to model stuff if you ever do contract work if you do work for clients obviously you're going to have to be modeling you know custom custom assets for them so all of these so be covering a lot of the basic modeling techniques of stuff that i use every day so let's go ahead and jump into it so in the 3d studio max interface in the beginning crash course we cover basically all the major menus and components of the interface and how to set everything up and you know what the orthographic view setup looks like so i won't be covering that too much um i'll be referring to a few tools here and there but um you know just so you guys are aware we have the uh this is how max usually comes in the install this is all standard so you have your top front and your left side view and each one of these views you can click into and you can pan around using your you click down in your mouse wheel and you can see the grid there and if you hold if you type g the g key you can hide your grid in any one of the viewports and if you click on the little plus sign you can maximize the viewport or hit alt w so again all that stuff is covered in the beginner crash course i'll leave a link in the description so let's discuss some model basic model primitives right so i'm going to go ahead and expand my perspective viewport so in our side panel here we have a bunch of different tabs here and all of them do different things right so we have our create tab we have our modify tab which we use to modify the geometry that we create we have the hierarchy tab which we can use to adjust our pivot location um which makes it easier to manipulate objects and rotate around certain things and whatever we'll talk about that later um you have your motion tab but you can assign particular motion controllers and paths and stuff we'll cover that in an another video specifically about animation basics um we have a display tab which is really helpful for hiding and revealing certain types of geometry and cameras and helpers and stuff and we have our utilities tab which we have like some basics utilities which we'll we'll cover later on in the video so in our create tab this is where we're gonna be creating all of our geometry right you can create all sorts of stuff okay geometry you can create spline objects and shapes okay lights cameras and helpers which will cover lights and cameras later on in the video and we have space warps which is like things like forces and deflectors things you can use for simulations and systems which we'll uh take a look at this as well later on so let's go to the the the geometry tab here and in our drop down list you get a bunch of different geometry types that you can create so in the standard primitives this is the first drop down option here create all kinds of different standard primitives right so the general philosophy of modeling things in 3d studio max and you know similar to other softwares like cinema 4d and blender and maya and stuff um is that it's more of an additive approach um versus a subtractive approach right what i mean by that is you start with like the the fundamental like base geometry the simplest most simplified version of uh your asset that you can think of and then you build onto that asset right you build more levels of detail onto it as opposed to zbrush or mudbox where you're subtracting um material away from the object uh sort of like modeling clay right so in max you know a particular object like this like a um you know like this adorable little cat pencil case that my girlfriend owns so like you it's it's a very simple it's pretty simple object but you know it's made of multiple parts right you start thinking about this in a really you know fundamental sense like this is made of a cylinder there's some extrusions here to the cylinder the top is a sphere that's maybe cut in half the ears are maybe boxes that you can vertex weld um some of them vertices together to create the little wedge shapes here and uh we got buzz here buzz is a very complex shape he poops that's very complex anyway um so stuff like that like you have to start thinking about things in the real world the things that you're actually going to model in like the most simplified terms possible right so uh we'll go ahead and we'll create a box you know simple box and the some of the components some of the you know primitive shapes have multiple operations for creating something so if you drag in your scene and you can click and drag and you can create the base of the box first right so i'll create a box like right here and then if there's another operation where i'm not clicking anything i'm just scrolling up and down and i can click click again to create the the top of the box and there we go and i can click anywhere to to complete the operation of the box and then real quick i covered this already in the beginner crash course guide but qwer are your translation tools which are also up here so um q is your selection tool w is your move tool e is your rotation tool and r is your scale so those are just like really quick hotkeys that you could use to select things and move stuff around and down here is your like translation offset uh parameters your transition offset values so you can um these are relative to world space so you can right click on these to zero them out or you can you know drag in here and type whatever you want and your objects within the scene will move accordingly to those values so we got a cube in here cool and we can create all kinds of different stuff now that we know the basic operations so it's kind of like easy to expect you know you click and drag it creates the base and uh you click again cone has three operations so pretty pretty self-explanatory so i would suggest uh taking a minute and just just create some stuff to see it see what this stuff does and so what you could do is turn on auto grid here and if you can you know you can go down and create a teapot or something and what autogrid will do is automatically snap the xyz plane to whatever face that you are currently hovering over to whatever object so you can see that the xyz gizmo there is changing depending on where i'm at so you can go ahead and create all kinds of teapots everywhere something similar that i explained in the crash course video but yeah pretty pretty simple pretty straightforward so i'll go ahead and delete all this stuff uh okay so we covered so you can play around with all these standard primitives in the extended primitives we have things like hedra adronal shapes you have all kinds of different like chamfer boxes which you know this could be useful for certain things um but you can always create a regular box and then chamfer yourself later with a modifier um so it's like if you're just looking for a quick chamfer box like something like this is pretty it's an easy little tool built into max and if you want to see the little edge the little edges when you're doing more precise modeling you can go to edge faces and you can turn those on or you can turn on wireframe and wireframe is really uh great to to use when you're trying to model um like concave shapes like shapes that have like an inter like an inner face like interfaces to them let's say if you're going to model like a tunnel or something um or um you know like a uh some kind of case you know like a box or something and you want to be able to see what's inside the box you have geometry like inside the box whatever you want to be able to see that stuff and you can turn on wireframe and you can see inside of it so very useful for all kinds of different modeling situations and you have all kinds of different stuff you have a hose you know um again these shapes are are really useful for like when you know exactly kind of like what you're gonna model um if you're just gonna model something free form it's best to stick to stick with the standard primitives like the basic the most fundamental shape you possibly can to start with when modeling whatever you're trying to model right so we'll get into that in a little bit later on in the video compound objects are things like blob mesh and boolean objects so you know real quick the standard primitives will create a box and we'll create a sphere and we'll stick the sphere in the box and just to cover this real quick again you know i'll go ahead and create a compound object pro boolean or you can use boolean probiolean allows you to boolean multiple objects boolean is just a one-time operation so you can either union or subtract intersect merge attach or insert so go ahead and subtract so i have the box selected so i'm going to try to subtract the sphere from the box and i'll go ahead and add operands and i'm going to choose the sphere and that'll just remove a chunk out of this to the box so really useful when you're uh near the end of modeling something and you know you know that you want to remove um one object from another it's a little difficult to um to modify the topology of this box once you have this done you get some strange artifacts which we'll look we'll look at later so maybe i'll just go ahead and copy it i'll just move this over and the basic copy and like instancing and referencing operations i'm not going to be covering in this video um again i'm going to assume that you watch the crash course video so please refer to that for all the uh the basic like navigation and standard operations okay so um you guys can experiment with all the rest of these you know different object types you can create there's a bunch of them great stairs you know which are like really useful when you're doing like architectural scenes and stuff um there's doors there's all kinds of stuff in here and of course i have a bunch of plugins so this is where your you know objects for those particular plugins are going to show up okay so let's start taking a look at some of the typical modifiers that you'll probably be using the most frequently when modeling virtually anything using 3d studio max so i got a you know simple cube and a geosphere set up in my scene so we're going to toss on some modifiers on these guys and start looking at these so like i said there's five basic modifiers there's the edit poly modifier there's the chamfer modifier there's the turbo smooth and mesh smooth modifiers there's the normal modifier and the shell right so those five modifiers we're gonna be taking a look at and later on in the tutorial here we're going to be creating a little architectural scene using basically those five modifiers to create everything so um yeah let's jump in so i'll click on this cube here and in my little drop down here obviously you know these are your standard parameters and you can change the size of this cube here 30 by 30 by 30 and i can add edge segments if i want to or i can do that using the edit poly modifier which is what we're going to look at next so in my drop down list here and scroll down to edit poly and pop that on edit poly modifier is definitely the number one most used modifier uh in my opinion well that i use the most frequently right um it basically allows you to modify your geometry in any possible way that you can really think of um so let's uh let's you know go through some of these some of these options here right so in your selection drop down here you have vert the vertex mode you have an edge mode you have border polygon which is basically the faces of the object and element which is like the entire object itself and sometimes objects are you know created out of multiple um you know pieces of geometry which element mode comes in handy for selecting certain things which we'll look at later so in vertex mode if i click on vertex i can grab one one of these and you know with your q-w-e-r you can um move these around you know because basically like stretch the cube out um i can you know basically if i wanted to create like a wedge shape um you know i could um do it a couple different ways i could select these two vertices here and i can use the collapse tool and that'll collapse it down to a single point same thing here collapse you know so that's pretty cool and obviously being this is all parametric in the modifier stack i can if i don't want that i can right click and delete it uh you know being that i did a couple operations i'll just do a couple undo's another way you can do that is if i wanted the wedge to be on a certain angle or something i could use target weld and i can select this version and i can weld it to this one basically just click and drag cool so i got like a nice little wedge shape going on there and that's really helpful for modeling all kinds of stuff um you know if you just want to get rid of some vertices simplify your mesh when we go further on in the tutorial when we model this chair we model a little eames chair we're gonna be uh you know welding together some vertices to smooth out our mesh it comes really in handy um and then if i click i'm going to go over to my geosphere here i'll show you a couple other little tools for the vertex so i toss in add a poly on here um click on the vertex selection and select my vertex and i can grow my my selection so you can see the selection is growing outward the little points are highlighting when i click grow and that allows me to you know select multiple points in a given area alternatively i can select on a vertex and then use soft selection which is really helpful for modeling organic shapes and you can see that there's like this color gradient that shows up on the mesh wherever i select the particular vertices vertex and i can adjust the fall off you know so i can kind of like do it that way and then i can you know start to pull these out like a really kind of a smooth way you know which is really pretty cool for modeling things like i don't know water droplets or rocks or whatever you could really think of you know but it's not adding any geometry to it it's just manipulating it right it's because you're editing the you know uh topology of the the of the mesh itself okay so back into our cube here um look at a couple other operations so um an edge mode i could select uh you know certain edges and i can do things like i can connect edges so i connect a couple edges there cool and i can also double click on any edge or i can click on one edge and do a ring and it'll select all of the edges that are coplanar to that edge or that are you know in the same xyz orientation as that edge i could do loop which will loop around the object and i'll create a loop there and then i can modify these edges like that i could you know of course double click on that edge and select the whole ring the whole loop so that's cool um and then a couple things in the uh so there's all sorts of so there's all sorts of tools that you could use um in the uh edge mode um so you know feel free to explore these there's all kinds of stuff in here and then the polygon mode which is used most frequently for modeling stuff so you can use the extrude tool and basically hover over any face and kind of click and drag out and you can extrude phases like that or you can you know select a face and click on the little settings and you get this little dialog box that pops up and you can control the amount of extrusion more precisely and you can also select multiple faces of course and you know extrude those out the in the same way pretty neat and then there's the inset tool which i can select a face and kind of go like this and click on the little inset settings and then i can inset the face inward like that and they can create another face and i can extrude that one in and make a little depression a little concave shape which that's very helpful and then there's also so let's say if i duplicate this box you know rotate it 90 degrees or something you can turn on your angle snap toggle rotate that 90 or you know just whatever you're doing whatever you're modeling right and i want to connect these two shapes together in your edit poly modifier you can attach a shape to this object so you can attach i'll attach this one cool so now this is just one object now if i click on edit face i can select any one of these faces so it makes it one object right and let's say if i want to really connect these two objects together what i can do is um you know let's say if i want to connect this face to that face i can select both of these faces and use the bridge tool right here bridge that and that's it and it creates a little bridge section across them so i can grab all of these vertices and kind of move them around do whatever i want that is one solid mass and uh it becomes one shape okay so let's go ahead and create another box or you know what i could do is i'll just grab this object here and i'll uh drag i'll drag and holding shift shift drag and create a copy and then in our modify tab i'll go ahead and just right click and delete this edit poly modifier so we have a cube um and then we'll toss on another edit poly actually you know we'll do is um i'll show you the chamfer modifier next so the chamfer meyer is number two in our list here so chamfer modifier will has a couple of different operations one is the quad chamfer which gives you a another segment um within the chamfer itself and this standard chamfer just chamfers just the edges um so you can adjust the amount that it chamfers so if you want like a hard edged chamfer like that that's that's how you do that or if you can add segments to give it a you know curved edge so it's very similar to the chamfer box in our earlier in the tutorial we looked at but now you have full control over this box you know so you can increase or decrease the size and the length of the box and whatever you can add segments and the chamfer modifier being it's a parametric modifier will update your geometry accordingly so set that back down to 30. so we have a perfect cube um cool and if i want to uh chamfer just one specific edge or a couple of edges or whatever i could toss an edit poly modifier underneath the chamfer modifier and i can select uh particular edges so say if i want just one edge it just transfers that one or i can select you know three edges or something so now just this edge just this just these edges in particular are being affected cool i'll go ahead and copy this over again i'll grab both of these modifiers and we can right click well i'll grab just the i'll just grab just the chamfer for now and delete that one turn off our edge mode here and now we'll look at the turbo smooth modifier which is something i use very frequently for modeling organic shapes and i'll show you what that does and i'll show you what the difference is between chamfer and using turbo smooth so we'll toss on a turbo smooth modifier and i'll show what that does basically it kind of spherizes your geometry in a particular way so it's kind of almost like a perfect sphere even though it's a little oblong so if we add segments to this in the edit poly let's say if we go to our edge tool and create a couple uh loops so cut i'll go ahead and connect this maybe we'll just do two loops i'll spread the model a little bit click okay and um you know it will turn on our turbo smooth and see what that looks like so it kind of gives us like this um uh cylindrical looking object right and i can continue to turn that off and kind of continue working here i'll connect these ones and maybe connect this one too all these ones cool and turn out turn with smooth and it kind of gives us a similar look to the uh you know to the the chamfer the chamfer box let's see if i just select all the edges there yeah so it's similar but it's a little bit it's a little bit less precise than the chamfer however it's good for modeling more organic looking shapes like things like couch cushions and pillows and stuff like that you wouldn't want to mod you wouldn't want to create a box like this and chamfer it to make a like a pillow um it just it would just look odd because the surfaces are still very hard um you know using a smooth modifier allows you to have a bit of more of a give to it a little bit more of a fluid um you know organic approach to creating that kind of shape and then in our edit poly we can turn this off and i can go in the top view and i can go ahead and like maybe select these vertices and move around a little bit oops yep select these and we'll kind of see what that does so i have still have my vertices selected if i turn on my turbo smooth again i can uh you know just kind of start to see how that is affected so you can take it a step further let's say if you want to create like a little futon like it's a little cube futon kind of thing like a poof right you can uh use a couple different tools you can either use the soft selection and select some of the top uh vertices or something and kind of like puff them out a little bit or you can use another modifier um you could use the ffd um three by three by three or four by four by four one of these guys here you grab one of these and basically just creates a little cage around your object and you can uh you know you can click on this cage or drop down and click on the control points and you can start to select some of these little control points and you can move them around and it kind of gives you like this pillow-like effect you know that's pretty cool for mod uh for creating really organic like really still pretty precise shapes okay next modifier that we're going to look at is the normal modifier so maybe i'll grab one of these boxes copy it over i'll delete everything and maybe i'll scale this up to like a 60 by 60 60 or something and i'll toss on another edit poly modifier i'll select these three faces and get rid of them and let's say i want to create some kind of backdrop right a backdrop for a product or like um you know like an animation or something you just want to have like a flat backdrop with like you know a floor and walls or something um uh this it's it's pretty simple to do that right so like um rather than like creating separate you know like uh you can you can always create a plane right and then you can create a box or something and that'll be your um this will be your wall this will be your floor or something you know really simple way to do is just to create a box and then you can use the normal modifier to flip the normals right so these black faces are technically the back sides of the faces because all the faces and max have one side right so these are your back facing faces so those are probably not going to render properly unless you have a double-sided material but it's in good practice to always just flip your normals and make sure whatever the camera sees is the front face of the object right or else you might start to get artifacts and stuff in your render so what you could do is toss on a normal modifier and that's automatically going to flip the normals right so you can choose to flip the normals and you can choose them to unify the normals as well yeah so you can go ahead and flip the normals there and there you go so now like whatever so what we're currently seeing is the front face right so basically you took what was inside the box the interfaces and you made them the outer faces that are you know that you can use as a backdrop now so that's pretty easy to do when you're modeling you know an architectural scene or something that has floors and walls and stuff you can quickly create like a a box remove whatever faces you don't need and uh you know do it that way which is pretty cool another way you can use the normal modifier is let's say for instance um you know i'll get rid of my old edit poly so now we just have back faces on the outside right i can right click on this cube object properties and uh i could choose backface call so now i see what's inside the box right and the back faces are currently facing outward because we flipped the normals but we're seeing inside the box now so now if we stuck a camera inside of this box and a light it would look like sort of like an architectural scene right it would look like a little room um so that's another way you can you know use the the power of the normal modifier to uh to optimize your geometry optimize your scene so you don't have too many faces right cool and then the last modifier we're going to look at is the shell modifier so let's say i want to you know copy this guy over and i want to give let's say if i want to give these uh faces a thickness right what i could do is drop down it can even get rid of my normal modifier we don't really need that anymore because what the shell modifier is going to do toss on the shell modifier is give a thickness to these faces right so it basically allows us to extrude these faces out and it's going to do it based on the normal um outward facing vector direction um of the of the face that is that's being extruded so that's why we get these strange little um you know curved uh or slanted surfaces here in this particular mesh but no worries we could always scroll down here at the bottom of the stack and you can see our bottom of the rollout you can see straightened corners so i'll toss that guy on at the bottom there and that allows us to extrude out the faces and shell this shape perfectly so let's say it's kind of like a big cube now with a small chunk tank taken out of it and i can extrude this one in two now for fun before we start modeling some you know architectural stuff and you know really getting into uh how to model actual objects right just for fun i'm going to show you a couple of fun things you could do with you know some of the more advanced com compound objects so uh you know let's say i'm going to take a couple geospheres we'll copy them around scale them up a little bit and we can link them together create like a little like molecule looking thing what we're going to do is in our compound objects i'll create a blob mesh and i'll stick that somewhere on my scene and under the modify tab here i can pick whatever objects i want to add to the blob and basically what that's going to do is create one unified mass for whatever objects i feed it so i can control the sort of like size of the little blob voxels um that it's feeding i can adjust the tension that's pretty cool and what i can do is like you know vertex weld this optimize it a little bit and get rid of the floating vertices and i can maybe relax it use a relaxed modifier i'll kind of show you what that does so these modifiers do different things i can crank that up a little bit and if i turn off my edge faces you can see how smooth that looks so it's kind of like this clay blob ball looking thing so under my geospheres if i can go back and i can select my geospheres and i can move these around and the blob mesh will update in real time so this is pretty cool for doing like uh close-up shots of water droplets or something you know if you use p flow or thai flow to create like a little um you know particle simulation of rain or water or something you can use a blob mesh uh object like this or you know tie flow has the tie measure modifier that you can use the time measure object that you can use to uh to mesh your particles uh as part of a simulation which is pretty cool so that's just another little tip that you could use to model like certain things it's not useful for everything but just kind of depends on what you're trying to make cool get rid of that i'll turn on my edge faces again and so those are the five uh like fundamental modifiers that i use frequently edit poly chamfer turbo smooth and mesh smoother you know it could be used you know um for similar situations um the normal modifier and shell um so we're going to be using all five of those modifiers to create some stuff so uh let me clear out my scene and we'll uh we'll get ready and we'll jump into uh the rest of the tutorial okay so i cleared up my scene and before we jump into modeling things real quick i just want to show you a couple examples of some architectural visualization stuff that i've done uh recently and in the past so again all these assets were modeled from very basic primitive shapes like we looked at previously you know you can get like a pretty fine amount of detail and resolution on the geometry itself and then take care of the rest with textures and correct lighting um you know for so these scenes are are pretty minimal they're pretty they're pretty simple to build you know and uh doing something like this of course that over the process of working with the client to make these renderings there's a lot of iteration involved however like if you set up your scene properly and you utilize you know the the most fundamental raw shapes you possibly can and make it keep everything parametric where you have like a pretty uh you know efficient non-destructive workflow with your geometry you know you can make your life a whole lot easier if you just know how to model things correctly so these are just a couple images that have done for a particular project that uh um you know the client itself is a um quartz and concrete manufacturer so they did do like architectural finishes and this is another product shot for a leather company so they did custom leather upholstery and architectural details like wall panels and stuff so a bunch of details packed into these images these are not the these are not the highest resolution images but you know stuff like this is uh you know pretty pretty simple to to create all this geometry so i just want to show you a couple examples of that kind of stuff and of course on my website there's a bunch of architectural visualization projects that we've done in the past as well so feel free to pop over here and take a look okay so back into max um let's uh let's start modeling some stuff so today what we're going to be doing is we're going to be modeling this like eames chair it's actually the exact same chair that i'm currently sitting on and we're going to be doing a like a beer bottle and maybe some kind of table and i don't really have a reference to the table we're just going to kind of wing it for the table and see what happens so there's a couple different ways of modeling things and max a couple different ways you could think about it one way is like once you get good enough um well i guess i mean if you're if you're just kind of cruising through modeling something you could uh model just kind of eyeball it and have find like a reference photo and uh and have it like pulled up on the screen and kind of go back and forth and model it um sometimes you don't have like a direct reference to the drawings and the client will like show you a picture of like you know i want this chair and you just can't find a reference to the chair or whatever that that happens pretty frequently um and you kind of just have to wing it you kind of have to just like you know make it match the proportions of the human scale if it's a furniture piece or some kind of acid like an object or uh accoutrement in the scene or something you know like a particular vase or whatever and sometimes you just kind of have to wing it but sometimes you have reference photos like these these are pretty good reference photos they're not orthographic they're not per you know like perfectly straight on as far as the camera shot is concerned but they'll work for us so we'll bring them into our scene so first thing we're going to do is um here's standard primitives uh we'll go in our front view and we'll just create a plane i'm not really going to concern myself with the scale of it for now we can always scale our object later and what i can do is instead of wireframing default shading and what i might do is uh in our hierarchy effect pivot only and i'm going to turn on our snaps and you can right click on that and go to end point just make sure endpoint is selected that's good enough and we'll grab our gizmo here and we'll just put it in the corner there that way we could just center this out it's not really important i just wanted to show you that you can do that and we'll go ahead and just remove all the segments of this plane and this is just going to be the backdrop this is going to be like what we're going to be using to check uh for our reference so for like a material here we'll just name this chair uh chair background in a diffuse panel again to pull up materials you can click this little material editor here or type m and i'll bring that up so our material our diffuse channel i'll click on this little box there i'll choose bitmap and we'll go ahead and choose our uh eames chair which you could use any chair i just pulled that chair picture off of uh google you know google search i just uh like a basic ames chair um and we'll uh apply that material you know you can either drag and drop this this the little sphere here onto your scene and uh it's shaded or with your plane selected you can hit this little assign material to selection button okay we don't need this for now so we'll close that out and you can tell that um the chair is a little bit uh stretch tool what we could do is maybe just even stretch this i'll turn off my toggle snaps and we'll kind of scale that and it looks pretty good and maybe for human scale what we could do is uh in our create tab under systems go to biped and we could just stick a biped in our scene and we won't worry about the scale for right now i just want to like maybe use that for reference later for the scale of this chair and you know what we'll do is we'll put him on another layer name it dude i'll hide him for now i don't need need him for right now as we're as we're modeling stuff um okay so with this chair um actually i'll i'll show you what the chair looks like this is the chair right so basically it's a flat surface um that's you know kind of concave and has a you know some geometric um you know complexity to it so how we go about modeling this chair well there's a couple different ways first way is um you know you could like create a box and then start extruding stuff out and try to like modify the box as best you can or whatever but we're going to do with a plane which is a simple plane so i'm just going to create a plane in plan view just kind of like and you know i'm going to set up my layer here i'll call this chair set that to current with a little highlighted blue stack there and i'm gonna create a plane and i'll stick it somewhere in my scene say about there okay and i'll turn on edge faces so you can see the edge there and kind of just line it up and i again this this is not a perfectly orthographic image so it's it's not going to be a perfect reference but it's something to get us started and eventually we'll kind of just move it out of the way and and work at it in a free-form way so i got my plane set up here and i'm going to go ahead and toss an edit poly modifier like we worked with before i'll turn on edge faces i'll grab that edge and i'm going to hold shift and i'm going to drag that edge up okay and that's pretty much going to be the back of it back of the chair right and the chair obviously isn't perfectly you know 90 degrees or anything so i'm going to angle it back a little bit like that and all that stuff we can adjust later i'm gonna go ahead and pull my chair out a little bit and now we can start modifying this little flat plane here and uh giving it a little bit of definition so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna toss on another edit poly so that way we can always come come back to this in case we mess up or we want to change something with the base mesh so i'll toss in another out of poly and then what i'm going to do is um you know i'm going to go in here and select the three edges here and i'll do a connect and i'm gonna connect it like three times i think that'd be good enough and the same thing for these for this one okay and i'm going to select these edges here actually not okay so i'm going to toss on another edit poly modifier on this object just so we can go back to this in case we either mess up or we want to modify the base mesh later or something so we can do things in a procedural way like this so i'm going to go to our edge tool here our edge selection select all of these three edges and i'm going to connect them i'll just connect them twice again just keep it as simple as possible at first same thing here i'm going to connect these ones twice and i'll connect these ones twice as well cool so that gives us something to work with right and then what we can do is um you know we could start to start modifying this a little bit maybe push these down you know grab the uh the edges here maybe like uh you know modify this one a little bit comes up like that you know push this one down a little bit push these two back a little bit go in our side view start to like adjust the definition of the chair a little bit okay and what i might do is um select my vertex vertices here i might grab these four vertices and i might do like a okay so we got a little bit of definition going on there which is pretty cool and what i might do is um select the vertices here versus tool and i'll cut from here to here okay and i'll do another cut from here to here okay and i'll cut these two but down here as well again always just keeping in mind you want to maintain the simplest version of the object that you're trying to model so i'm gonna go ahead and delete these faces because they're no longer needed okay and then i can start manipulating the chair a little bit to kind of match the overall profile of the chair so what i can do is right click on the chair object properties and i'll go see through so we can kind of see the chair a little bit more and what i could do is like start shrinking the stuff up so i can shrink these in a little bit grab these ones and shrink them in you know it doesn't have to be perfect just has to be convincing you know and there's another way you could do this you could use the symmetry modifier which we'll take a look at in a minute here which could help you be a little bit more precise with some of this stuff so i'm going to grab these two vertices as well and maybe just adjust them a little bit to kind of give a little bit more definition to the sides there that's looking pretty good it's looking like it might work okay so from here we could toss on a turbo well we can go ahead and right-click and make this not see-through again and we can toss on a terrible smooth modifier and start to see how this is looking it's starting to look pretty clean we've got an issue here let's go and check this vertice vertex i mean okay so this vertex is not welded for whatever reason it didn't weld properly so i'm going to grab just uh control or sorry i'll uh fence select those vertices because there's two there that weren't uh connected and i'll just collapse those and then if we turn on our turbo smooth again that should be nice and clean nice and cleaned up for us so that's looking pretty good there's maybe a little bit more definition to the top there to the top edges and maybe the bottom as well so we can maybe modify this a little bit maybe add a couple more segments what we can do is um we can cut this again maybe we'll cut it to the edges there and what we could do is um turn on our snaps and go uh midpoint actually that's what i should have done before okay let's do that let's do it the right way so in our angle snaps we'll make sure midpoint and end point are selected and go to cut i cut from this vertex to the midpoint of that face again this vertex to the midpoint of that face yep and we'll do the same thing up here i mean for like uh right here something we'll kind of mess around with this a little bit so cut midpoint to the face right there same thing here cool so turn off my snap toggle we don't need those and i'll go back in this view and then kind of modify this just a little bit and just give it a little bit more definition up there and same thing down here kind of push this forward a little bit and grab these guys just want to make sure all this stuff makes sense cool so that should give us a pretty decent base to work from for this chair we can always modify it a little bit as we go but that's uh that's looking like it might be pretty good in our turbo smooth here so that's given us a pretty decent resolution it feels like it's pretty natural with this hair that i'm currently sitting on i mean obviously you're not going to probably have a direct reference to the physical object in your in your real world environment right but um you know just from photographs if you do if i did have like a side view of this photograph um it'd be definitely more helpful i can match it up just like we did with the back view like that with the front view but i don't so we're just to have to kind of go wing it a little bit so i can go back through and grab these vertices turn on my turbo smooth again and i can kind of just modify this stuff until it makes sense you know and i'm going to assume the bottom is pretty accurate so i'm just going to kind of leave it at this for now okay i did i was able to find a side view of this chair which is looking pretty close to what we have but maybe we can add a little bit more curvy definition to it to our chair so because right now it's looking pretty flat up top so what i might do is um you can add some edge loops so i'll toss in another edit poly modifier here and maybe i'll grab this edge and we'll do loop i'll do a ring ring and i'll go ahead and select oops fence select these vertices and we're going to try to connect these ones and we'll just connect it once just by looking at that photo that should probably work maybe we'll um put about there and so for the most part these faces are going to be pulled out a little bit to give it a little bit more definition up top along with this one go ahead and modify some of these vertex vertices to kind of match what we're doing i'll grab some of these ones up here and i'll pull them back kind of give that back curving definition there okay now we have our base mesh kind of uh looking pretty good um i'm gonna leave that turbo smooth on and i think what we'll do is um okay now that we have our base mess sort of set up mean there's a few tweaks you could probably make to it here you know to kind of get it to have a little bit more um curvy appeal we can come back and modify this stuff a little bit later on so now we have this kind of started what i'll do is um you know keep my turbo smooth modifier well i'll before we turn that on i'll tell me i'll toss in another out of poly here and i'm going to do is i'm going to grab the entire ring of uh edges around the entire chair so i could double click on that and grab the whole thing and what i'm going to do is there is a bit of a lip to these chairs um you can kind of tell in some of these they kind of go backwards a little bit so what i'm going to do is kind of replicate that just by pulling some of the vertices out or sorry pulling some of the surfaces out so i'm going to just like uh hold shift and drag those out and make a copy of them and i might uh scale them up a little bit and i'll just kind of like pull them down okay so now that i've kind of stretched these out a little bit um you know we could toss on a turbo smooth and see how it's starting to look so it's looking pretty convincing we have a little lip on the edge there i could probably tweak it a little bit more make it a little bit more like realistic because at the top you don't really see the not really supposed to see that uh overlap but on the bottom it's definitely definitely getting there that's definitely what we want to have happen in the bottom there so i'll turn my turbo smooth off for now and what i might do is just deselect maybe like these faces and i'll kind of just like angle these ones up a little bit just to give like a little bit of a gap a little bit of a a a ledge there see how that looks pull it back a little bit more that's looking pretty good again it doesn't have to be perfect i mean for the sake of this tutorial we're going to we'll get it as close as we can but you know in reality it's uh you know it's it's going to take a bit more tweaking for to do this for real okay cool and get a little tiny bit more definition there yeah all right great so now we have that set up we will uh go ahead and underneath our turbosmooth we'll add a shell modifier to give it a thickness that's too much thickness and maybe we'll just do the outer or yeah we'll do the outer amount so you see what's happening there give it a little bit of a thickness there so maybe we'll do like uh i don't know almost a centimeter that'd be pretty pretty realistic so that's good now with our turbo smooth at the top of the stack we could always add more iterations make it nice and smooth so we turn off our edge faces there we go a perfect little eames chair base pretty easy right just modeled from the from a single sil from a single plane okay now from here what we could do as we start taking a look at the legs so we'll quickly model the legs we're not going to model all the little details um now that you guys are pretty familiar with the method of doing that you guys can fill in little details but i'll just model the legs i'll show you how that's done so we go on the top view create a cylinder maybe we'll have the cylinder come from somewhere about here and we'll kind of just drop that down what i'm going to do is uh maybe set the segments to like 10 remove the height segments and we'll kind of just like yeah just pull this down a little bit okay i'll go ahead oops go ahead and angle about 15 degrees or do it and i'll adjust my height to be about there pull our seat down a little bit okay so it's pretty good and then what we'll do is uh we'll toss in a uh edit poly modifier i guess before we do this we'll kind of angle this in this direction as well so let's say for instance it's a maybe a 45 degree angle or something these don't really stick too far out from the underside of the chair so about there would do it and already probably i'll grab the edges and i'll go connect create one edge loop in the middle and then what we'll do is i'll grab i'll just do control a and then hold alt and deselect the center spheres and i'll kind of just like scale these down a little bit i can grab the center and scale that up a little bit so that you can see the tapering that happening there cool and then from here what we could do is i'll toss on another add a poly modifier grab my vertices i'll select these ones and and we can select these ones as well and we can align them on the z oops i mean i could do is grab these vertices here the top and bottom and then go my top view and i can go uh view align what that's going to do is that's going to flat okay so i can grab my bottom vertices here and i can go there's a couple different ways you can align it to like make the vertices flat on the same plane um so i don't know the quickest way to do it is from here we'll just do a griddle line and that'll just align it to the grid so you can tell it's nice and perfectly flat it works and then maybe these ones so we'll uh you know go up in the top view and go view align and that'll just align those to the make planar to that particular view at the top cool go ahead and turn on our edge faces again and in the same edit poly we'll go edge and i'll put in an edge loop here i'll just connect this and i'll uh oops drag this up kind of put the edge loop right at the top there actually you know what instead of doing that we'll do the bottom one first to connect and we'll put the edge pretty close to the bottom there nice what i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate this clone as a copy and we're going to make the top cap so grab this and we'll connect these and we're going to make the cap as a separate element so maybe all that there would be good and i'll grab my faces and just select all the faces besides the top cap and just delete those that'll leave us with this little cap at the top and in our hierarchy tab i can go effect pivot only center to object and i can reset the transform cool and then from here what i could do is do a little shell modifier and it'll give me the little top cap turn off straighten corners and there you go you got a perfect little cap there and you can like you know fiddle around with this and adjust it as you as you need to you know maybe have it make it go all the way up into the chair so in our edit poly we can turn off our shelf for now grab the top face and go local and we can pull that up and adjust it as we need to god damn it okay so now on these chairs itself on the chairs in real life there is a piece of metal that actually connects to the base of the chair and uh it curves up and does this little curve thing so if we have time we'll uh fill in that detail later on but we're getting pretty close to finalizing our chair here or the with the leg so what i'll do is i'll toss on a turbo smooth modifier and we'll basically be done with this leg and we'll copy it around so i'll toss in a turbo smooth oops one thing i forgot to do is i forgot to put an edge loop at the top there so go and connect that should be good perfect now we got a pretty nice looking um you know bottom here and we can always come back and adjust that later to make a little bit more clean but depending on the scale or just depending on the proximity of your camera to this object you might not see all those details so i could do is just move this down a little bit take my chair leg and i'll group that and we can copy this over as an instance and i'll go ahead and mirror that in the x-axis i'm gonna just put it over here i'll do the same thing for the back legs instance and we'll copy it and mirror it on the y-axis i'll put about there for now and see how it looks cool it looks like it's almost there obviously like these these parts would have to be extruded down a little bit we'd have to model these little metal components and stuff to enhance the realism a little bit so after we turbo smooth this we could maybe reduce the iterations to one okay and my mic cut out for a few minutes there so uh we'll pick up so we finish up with the chair um so i'm just going to move this over to the side here we'll take a look at that a little bit later on right now we're just going to go ahead and create our table and i think what i'm going to do with the table is just something simple so under extended primitives i'm just going to create a hedra and i'll stick this on my zero layer here create something like that i'm going to move this up and we'll toss on an edit poly modifier on that guy select polygons i'm just going to select all the polygons and we'll do an extrude by polygon and i'll just extrude all the faces out like that i kind of see how that's starting to look and that looks pretty good something like that and then what i could do is maybe scale all these faces inward like that and then i'll grab my vertex vertices grab the top and the bottom vertices and i'll just align this to the z plane oops do one at a time here align those to the z plane align these to the z plane cool and then there's some overlapping going on so i'm going to grab my the inner vertices there the interfacing vertices of this little table leg setup thing some kind of space age looking design i'm not really sure what the point is here but you know hey it's it's going to be a table it's going to look great gotta have faith in your own creations okay so i'm going to scale those in a little bit so to make them kind of like planar about there looks pretty good all right i'll just kind of move this down a little bit awesome and i'll turn this 45 degrees in the top view and we'll go ahead and create like a spline a creative rectangle and i'll just stick the table top in here like this yeah i'll disable enable and render and viewport and then we'll grab both of these and i'm just going to zero these out like that and then i'll move this up into place something like that should be good and then in the rectangle um you know we could do this a couple different ways to add maybe like a corner radius so i can add i can have the corner radius here like that it gives me like a little bit of a radius there or if i wanted to have a little bit more detailed control i can right click with the rectangle selected right click and go to convert editable spline and then i can grab my vertices and just grab all of them and then i can scroll down here and under fill it you can just add a little bit of affiliate to that so it's the same thing as the corner radius and the rectangle tool but we just have a little bit more control over the individual for vertices so that's cool and then we'll just add a shell yeah it looks pretty good okay so we got our table we got our chair and then now we'll do like a bottle we'll do like a bottle of beer how about that sorry to have this plane set up here um so let's go ahead and uh i'll trace this oops cool default shading and move this up just a little bit here okay and then uh the way we're gonna do a bottle it's the bottles and vases and stuff like that it's pretty simple we're just going to create the profile of the object itself and then we're going to use the lathe modifier to basically revolve the profile around and make our object pretty pretty easily so i'll just go ahead and do corner and corner and we'll add in some phillips later so i'm saying the middle of the bottle is about there so if i hold shift it'll snap to the uh you know the x and y and this will be pretty simple so we'll just go let's drag this up like that it will have one here and we'll add one there and uh you know just create this as simple as possible give it a little bit of a lip there and maybe another one here cool then what we could do is i could just get rid of this guy for now i could turn off my grid by hitting g and i can just go in here and kind of like fiddle around with the um turn on my selection till the vertex mode with the uh filleting so i can fill some of these edges so i can grab my fillet tool and i can just kind of draw on some fillets grab both of these and fill it that like that same thing here maybe that should be good and then we're going to have to do is um you know with our vertex mode selected we want to get rid of some of these um you know overlapping vertices there's there's a way you can um auto weld those but sometimes it doesn't really work so the best way to do is to just do fuse and weld and that will basically take that vertices make it one vertex so i'm going to do the same thing here fuse weld so there's a couple of those locations i think we got just the two that were important here okay cool and now that we have our profile done what i'm going to do is we're going to have to do this anyway in our hierarchy effect pivot only and we're going to move this turn on our snaps make sure endpoint is selected and just going to move that and stick that at the bottom of the profile cool and then now the fun part is we'll just go ahead and toss on a lathe modifier and instant bottle there you go done and of course you can go back and you can modify this stuff like if you don't want the mouth that shallow just grab this and kind of like pull this back a little bit there you go nice and then for rendering purposes being that the inside faces are still back faced what we could do is we could shell this and give it like a little bit of a thickness there something like that might be cool nice easy bottle okay i could scale this down give it a different color maybe and put this on top of our table cool nice so we have all our components done one thing we could do is you know there's a variation of this chair that's like more of a wireframe so maybe we can like modify the uh just you guys are aware of this is a possibility um turn on the edge faces if i open up this group i can select this surface here and with the turbo surge selected i'll go ahead and delete the shell because we're not going to need that and we'll go ahead and make the wireframe version of this chair sheet so i'll go edit poly in our edge mode i'll just select all the edges and i can use this create shape tool and that's going to do is basically create splines out of the out of the edges of that object so now what i could do is i could just delete the original mesh and i'm left with the edges that we just created i can enable these in viewport and render and i can scale them down a little bit neat so now we have like the wireframe version so if your client wanted that version there you go pretty simple what i can do is um close this group i can select that and then go attach to group and select that group and there you go sweet okay so we'll go ahead and rotate this maybe and kind of like set up a little set up a little scene now let's take it stick this guy here or something nice and i already set up a little camera kind of start to see how that's looking so that's looking pretty cool right so in the future tutorial i'm going to do a um you know basic lighting and camera setup and stuff like that for you know photo realistic rendering and we'll apply some materials maybe to this scene maybe to something else uh but we might as well continue with this scene now we have it you know pretty go looking pretty good so far um maybe we'll add a little bit more detail to these chairs and stuff but um you know otherwise it's just looking pretty good you can add like maybe a vase or the flower and a book or something here or you know pair of eyeglasses or something you know just some stuff to spice up the scene a little bit and then maybe like in the background we could do uh you know some wood flooring and the uh like a you know plaster wall or whatever and have some light shining in and make the scene look pretty realistic so it's already getting there um one last thing i already have i set up my dude a little biped guy and what you could do here is um wireframe i'll just grab the little pivot there and maybe move him into place a little bit more there you go neat so i mean this this is pretty simple to kind of you know model the biped and do whatever you want with them in the uh future video i'm going to do a basics of animation so we're going to be covering what you could do with the biped adding some animation to them and of course a bunch of other you know animation concepts that you could do with macs which is pretty fun so i'm looking forward to that um yeah so that is basically the extent of this uh 3d modeling uh tutorial so i hope you guys like learn something about the fundamentals of modeling just basic geometry from photographs or from just objects that you have around your your house or or um you know just stuff from like how to model stuff from reference yeah so i hope you guys enjoyed the tutorial um if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below um interested to hear your thoughts on this and if you like the tutorial please hit the like button and subscribe for more uh coming up in this sort of like intro level uh series that i'm doing here um again thank you so much for watching and uh we'll see you soon bye

Channel: Simulation Lab

Views: 67,072

Rating: 4.9725595 out of 5

Keywords: 3ds max, tutorial, beginner, how to, 3d model, 3d, step by step, animation, rendering

Id: q2QGaKCyCBM

Length: 80min 33sec (4833 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020