Evaluation

Evaluation

The Project I have been working on is a 3D modelling project in which I was tasked to make an urban environment. This task was very inspiring I found that I was able to go as free as I’d like and truly play with ideas to test my skills within 3D max.
I started this project with absolutely no experience using this software and therefore the workshops we had for the first few lesson really helped to ease me into the programme before making my urban street.
For my street I decided on a post-apocalyptic street, I imagined something along the lines of rubble and everything burn as if a nuke had go off, my main sources for inspiration where the Fallout series of games and also I am legend the film, with the contrast between them I found it easy to make my own ideas but taking my favourite concepts from them and adapting and creating my own.
I feel this project has sparked an interest into 3D modelling that maybe in the future I would pursue however I feel that I did not have the best methods to make my model, it looks realistic and the way I imagined it however the poly count is way too high for it to work in any kind of professional medium. I think when I finished modelling my poly count had just reach one million this led to extremely low FPS and as a result it took me a very long to move around my scene and take final renders and screenshot.
If I had to do this project again I feel I would pick the same idea and I would extend it and put in a lot more chaos however I could only do that if I developed my abilities in modelling so that I can keep the poly count down and therefore my productivity up.
Overall I feel this project was inspiring and helped me gain skills that will prove helpful in the future, I feel that I have also learnt from mistake’s and have become a lot more able to work around problems I get instead of changing my idea to avoid the problem I find,

Trail Render!

this is the trail render of my finished street it showed that i will have to render my street seperatly to show what skills i learned and also to allow viewing of the full textures and how they are meant to look therefore i will be using lights to highlight the areas in the next few renders.

Final construction.

Today i have finished my model after struggling to get my rubble out of the scene to allow free movement and faster rendering of the final touches, i have placed my textures onto the houses and road in my scene, this process involved taking the textures i created and using the material editor.

within the material editor i changed the render i was using to the mantle ray renderer which gives a better quality render, the advantage to this render was that it gave me more options so instead of having to make a brick wall tiling texture in Photoshop and having max stretch it, i was able to the masonry setting make a bumped and very realistic looking brick formation on my houses.

I also discovered today how just using simple bump maps with things such as dent and noise i can give my textures depth and feel therefore creating a very realistic model. this is my finished road with pavement with the bump map and dents on them.

This is my street without my rubble after i bump mapped the textures of bricks and the road on to the scene. i also placed an environment map with a post apcoatlipic skyline colour scheme to partner this effect of the sky i created and skylight and directional spot light and tinted them red to give the feel of a very ir-radiated street.

Construction update

after creating my rubble pile, i imported it into my already structured street to find that my scaling in my two different files was completely off therefore i have had to scale down the rubble pile to make the bricks fit and not look giant however is also led to copying my all ready high poly rubble many times to actually fill the space i had laid out for it, i also used the boolean on my buildings today which arose issues i hadn't thought of and so at the moment i feel i might have to recreate my houses again and texture them before i bolean them. not too sure therefore its back to the drawing bored and research.

Rubble improvement.

i've spent the last two sessions really improving and re-designing my rubble pile for the end of my street,
i decided to start with basic block, make that into a building brick shape i chose the standard 2 holes in it. i then textured the bricks using my own brick texture created in photoshop. i then create a cylinder and tube for pipes in the rubble and added rust textures to them, however after placing these objects into a mini pile i decided that houses are made of more than 1 type of brick so i create another block and textured it to look like a red housing brick.
main components of my houses.

the next thing i did was take the components i had assembled and then simply copied then and placed them into a rock slide formation as if a huge amount of building had been destoried and the rubble had slipped into my street. this worked very well however the polygon count cranked up rapidly. however i feel that with this design and version of the rubble pile i get to use textures created by me instead of using a picture as a back drop. after countless rotations and movements i finally got a wall of rubble the way i thought looked best.

Street creation part 1

Starting building my street after many introductions into max was still a daunting task, I decided to start with creating the road surface this was made by using a standard plane. I created the planed with 3 length segments to allow creation of the pavement and the road in one object. This was very simple I made the plane an editable poly. Selected poly select mode and then extruded the main road surface down till I liked the size of the curb. Then delete the faces at the end to make it a continued surface not a sand pit like shape.


I then made a second plane using this plane I would create a rubble pile which will later block one end of my street off, and of caused destruction on buildings in my street. I made the new planes an editable poly and selected the modifier displace. Scrolling down the menu to find map I then added a Gradient map onto the plane adjust the strength slider to lower the plane. Then in the material editor I adjusted the noise settings on the planes to giving it a rocky form. I then rotated the plane into a place and angel I thought looked the nicest at the end of my street and placed it to create the base of my rubble pile.


Creating the base models for my houses was very simple. I simply created a box with 10 height segments and 10 length segments to allow easier poly editing when making the box into a house. After I made one of the boxes and had it placed on my pavement the way I wanted I copied it and moved it to the other side of the road. Then create an instance of one on either side and filled the rest of my street therefore allowing faster creation of houses in the future modelling of my street. However they will be broken in different ways and therefore wont all be identical.

3D max lathe tool.

the lathe tool take the line and creates it into a full 360. this can come in usful because it allows you to draw things such as bottles, glasses, tableleg, pillar using the line tool then use the lathe modifier and its makes it from a flat line to a solid object quickly and easily without messign around modeling each individaul part of the complicated bottle u want.

i made a lamp trying to draw from the front view however this was difficult and never quite went the way i would of like it. however after talking to other students i discovered they were creating better designed objects from drawing the object flat from the top view. affectivly lying the object you want down on the ground.