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.

3D modeling lamp post

Today we created a lamp post, using 3D max this process was completly designed from one cylinder. using toold like extrude, inset, bend we slowly morphed the cylinder into the shape of a lampost post.
this session proved alot less complicated that i first thought it would be. this in turn made me realise that alot of 3d modeling can be made alot easier than i have been thinking they would be.

3D max material editor 2

Learned how to create transparent objects for windows. this process was easy. in the materail editor like before we put the specular settings to make it refelct light slightly. then we simply added the colour white with a hint of blue as the general window colour. then turned the opactity down to 25 and put it on the box to create a window.

then i got showed how to create a hole in things using the Boolean technique. in which i took a box and put it through the middle of another box about the size of the window frames i wanted and then went into the primtives drop down menu you to the compound object and click boolean. it makes a perfect hole through the box. however it depends on how far you put the box through the other object. altho it doesnt have to be a box it can just be object through object.

3D max material editor

with luke today i got shown the material editor and how we can change settings inside the editor so that instead of being given a really bland and boring texture onto the surface of our image. he also showed us how to title your texture which led me to think about that when i make textures for my project i should think really carefully about making them tile easily to avoid clear lines in 3D max rendering.

with the changing the textures to make them less bland you scroll down in the material editor and there is a set of options in which u can move the sliders and change the spetular levels in the textures. therefore giving us a better finish.

with the tiling of our texture in the material editor under the drop down menu coordinates, you can find a tick box which says real world scale and then you can change the height width to change how many times your texture is tiled into the wall therefore allowing you when making a model to make sure things such as bricks arent bigger than your doors.

3D max work shops

today with mike i started to work straight from a plane to create a building doin this wasnt as difficult as i had thought u simply map the image of the reference building and then change some setting like make the plane a editable poly and uvw map setting on it. then we clicked the presuve UDVs option which wasnt explained well but from what i gather it just stops the image from being pulled with the polys that we move. which helped once we start extruding and pulling the plane into the shape of the building.

This exercise took them morning session mike showed us how to do it then let us mess around and came to help when we needed it. was good it allowed me to really take time to get to grips with max and be alittle free and work out what worked when playing with it and what didnt.

first try at destorying building

today i have been messing with photoshop and 2 images that i took for research. i have used a image of a building that was under construction and have added my stone wall pciture i took to use as a texture on the building to make it look old and broken.

this went well however i believe i need to work into it more and find maybe other ways to work my textures into the pictures.

theese are the two images i have used and after alot of fiddling and playing with different effects this is the not quite finished building i have other bit to work into it but its as far as i have got without working seperatly on window smashing.

This mind map was some thing i was thinking of while trying to create idea for the street project, i have decided on doin a run down broken street kinda like the film I am Legend only alot more broken and dead. i want a Void of life as if the end just hit the world. this idea will eb hard to research using the internet therefore i feel i mite have to take time to go out with a camera and take pictures of old buildings. ruins. broken stone. maybe onto the moors and use the ruins up there to help get the texture and style of broken stone, however applying these textures and styles to modern buildings will be more difficult but i feel that the end results will be alot more interesting than a standard street you could look out the window at.

photoshop practice.

today with mike we did photoshop lesson in which he helped us learn how to remove objects from pictures that we dnt need for the model we are creating. he gave us a stock image of a run down house that was taken at angle so that we could learn how to skew the image to straighten it therefore when it goes into max and a prespective back ground, we dont create non straight models.
this was the image he gave us.

he showed us were to find the tools and just told us to play around with the image start removign things that we would think to create as a seperate model and then when makingthe final project put them into the same scene.
we used the content aware fill tool and the clone stamp tool. these toold made it very easy for us to get down to the raw texture of the building we were given. i feel that this session has developed tools and skills that i am surely going to need.
my final out come.

Building Research

the task given to us was to research buildings for the task that will be given to us next week. this task is to create a street in max therefore getting street designs and things we would like to put into our street.

I picked this picture because of the iron gates i really like the gates its something that is dying out and not really seen as much. i feel it gives character, however from a modeling point of view i think that it will give more shape and more depth to modeling the street when we have to finally create it.

this building i feel would be a good aspect to maybe start my street the subtle curve of it and the shapes within the structure i think would create a better look and more complex view towards the street in general istead of a normal straight uniform street.

The mass of glass on this building was impressive and striking i decided that making that shape on a building in my street because of the diangnal lines and shapes it creates would give a good chance to use different tools and develope skills in max.

see this building is pretty run down, it sparked ideas when i saw it i decided to take the picture because i havent seen the brief yet i dnt know whether or not my street has to be a standard street or whether i can destory the street and make it an doomsday theme.

bit of a silly picture but it was the phonebox that reminded me that i need ot have more in a street than just buildings. it needs lampposts post boxes. that kinda of extra objects and it need to gather more pictures to create a street that you would typically see but with hopefully my own twist.

Crate

today we created a crate using max this was quite a simple simple process compared to things that we could create and make. however at first being new to max this process got confusing. we used simple tools like extrude and inset to create the classic crate shape from most basic adventure games.

Intro

Today we had a basic introduction of the 3D max software and interface, this session was very helpful for me I am less scared of the interface now that mike has taken the time to take each tool apart with us and explain how everything works and opened the potential of the software.