Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll use splines to create some new geometry for our engine. So the first thing we'll do, taking a look at this, you can see that the engine is facing along the x-axis, which, in this case, if we take a look at the front view, it's actually, we're looking at the side. And if we look at the left view, we're actually looking at the front. So if you want to fix this-- and just for clarity's sake, make sure that this is actually the front and this is actually the left. You can rotate these pieces around. It's certainly not necessary. Just because it says front doesn't mean your object isn't oriented a different way. But just for clarity's sake, let's look at how we can rotate our objects around it-- orient them correctly. So we'll select both of these objects. So Control click and select those. Now the pivot now is set to the center. We want to actually set it to the origin here. And one quick way to do that is to use a working pivot. And so we're going to go into the Hierarchy panel here. And we're going to go down to Working Pivot and say Use Working Pivot. And it's kind of a nice way to temporarily use a different pivot point for whatever it is that you're doing. And in this case, we haven't moved our working pivot, so it's right here at the origin. We can use our angle snap to rotate that so that it's facing in the positive y. So that when we actually look at our front view, we're actually looking at the front. When we look at the left, we're actually looking at the left. So that's something that you can change if you want to. And you can see we're now facing in the y direction. You can change that if you want to, it's certainly not necessary at this point, but just for clarity's sake, it may help a little bit. OK. Now, let's say we want to add some geometry here along the top. And we want to add these pointy, sharp, thin-like protrusions here. And one of the ways we can do this is to use splines. So let's actually go into the left view, and we're going to go into our Create panel. And this time, we want to create a shape. So instead of geometry, we're going to create shape. Now under here, there are three different kinds of shapes we can create-- splines, NURBS curves, extended splines. We're going to go ahead and create a simple spline. And let's just create a rectangle. So with that activated, we have the same method that we can come in and actually draw this out. So just clicking and dragging to draw that out. And we can go into our Modify panel, and you can see that now we can change parameters like the length and the width. We can also add a corner radius if we want to. You can see we can knock off those corners. But in this case, I'm going to leave the corner radius at 0. So the same thing applies here with our rectangle primitive that applies with our other primitive objects. And that is the fact that we have our parameters available, but we're not able to access any of the subobjects that we have here. So to actually do that, we need to convert this. So instead of converting this to an editable poly, let's convert this to an edibles spline. So now that it's an editable spline, we no longer have the parameters, but we do have access to all the subobjects. We can access the vertices the segments, and the spline itself. So you can have multiple splines inside of our editable spline. If we click on the vertices you can see we have these handles. And that gives us some information about what type of a vertex this is. There a few types that we can have. If I right-click to get the Quad Menu, if you take a look right up here, under Tools, you can see that right now it's set to Bezier corner. We also have Bezier, Corner, and Smooth. So we've got these different options that we could use. Let's start to shape our piece. And we'll keep the sharp edges first, and then go ahead and the smooth ones. So I want this point here to be kind of sharp, so I'm going to go ahead and just pull this out. You can see how this, because of the Bezier handles, is actually creating a curve between here. So I'll take this one. And let's go ahead and just bring this down a little bit. This one's going to be kind of inside, so I'll take this down and back. This one, I'll go ahead and take down and back into the engine. So I want to get just maybe something like that. So I want to add some new points here, but first I'm going to convert some of these existing points. So convert this one to just a corner, which doesn't give us any handles. Same thing here. We don't need any handles inside of there. Now for this one, we'll go ahead and leave this as a Bezier corner, and leave that as is. All right. Let's go ahead and add some additional points here. So we've got our vertex selection. If we go down to Editable Spline, you can see we've got a Geometry Rollout. We can say Insert. Go right up here. And we can insert new points. We can do the same thing here with our vertex. You can see it's here under Geometry. We could insert additional points. So let's insert maybe one right in there. Just clicking on this will allow you to drag it around. Just click that again to place it, and then right-click to end out. Now we need to manipulate our points a little bit to get the shape that we want here. So I'm going to just hit q, get out of that. So if I select this vertex, right now it's set to Corner. And I want to just set that Smooth. I want this to be nice and smooth in here. So we can go ahead and modify this. We can modify our handles by clicking on the handle. This one, I also want to be smooth. We can modify this point here. And we can modify our handles. Let's kind of pull this in. I can grab that. Just pull that in so we get a nice point there. And if you want to, you can convert back and forth between our Corner, Bezier corner, and so forth. You may have to reset your tangent handles at some points. For this one, I'll go ahead and make this a corner. You can see how this gives you a nice curve. This you can change into a Bezier, and that will let you control that inner curve a little bit more. And we can grab this one and kind of bring that down. If we look in our perspective, we can kind of see what that actually looks like. And the whole thing may actually be a little bit too large, so we can scale that down a little bit. Let me get it to where it's just kind of penetrating in there a little bit, like that. And so feel free to make your own variation on this, your own shape here. But you just want to get a good shape using a variety of the different point types that we have available. So right now, this exists right on that center line, right in here on this axis. And so what we need to do now is let's add some geometry to this and let's also duplicate this around to create the different pieces. So the first thing we'll do is add some geometry to this. So let's go into our Perspective, and what we can do is add a modifier. So we'll use an extrude modifier-- and you'll recognize extrude from the polygon tool that we used earlier. So we want to go ahead and add that. And you can see that it actually adds geometry here. So there isn't any thickness to it yet. So if we add thickness-- you can see we can come in here and start to add thickness in that direction or in this direction. So we'll make something that's fairly thin, and maybe go down to point 0.2 or so. Now because this is connected still to the spline, we can always go in and modify the points. And you can see how the geometry changes because it's still connected there. So we can always come in and change things up a little bit. The geometry is updated. Let me actually go back to the left. Pull that in a little bit. So just something like that. So the next thing that we want to do is to create copies of this. And I'll just make looking at this just a little bit thicker. So we need to create copies of this. And I want to rotate them around the center point of this pod. Now, we could go ahead and change the pivot. Because right now, if we select this, you can see the pivots up here. But I think our working pivot, again, will prove to be a valuable resource for us here as we start to duplicate this. So going into the front, I actually want to create a duplicate over here, over here, over here. So I need one, two, three more copies. So go ahead and select this guy, and let's turn on our working pivot. So you can see if I were to go ahead and activate Rotate, I can rotate this around, and it's going to rotate around that center point of our engine. So to create our copies, we'll just hold down Shift, and let's rotate it to the position of the first copy that we want. In this case, it's going to be minus 90 degrees. So let's rotate that down, let go. Now, it's going to ask us, OK, do we want to Copy, do we want to Instance or Reference? Let's just create copies. We're going to have the number of copies. So in this case, I want one, two, three copies. So I'm going to put that into our little box here, and say OK. And that's going to automatically create another copy, and each time, it's going to rotate it the same distance-- so the same angle. So it rotates at 90 degrees the first time, which is what I put in. The next time, it's going to rotate another 90 degrees and another 90 degrees. In this case, minus 90 degrees. We'll turn off the working pivot. Let's go back to our perspective. And you can see now we have objects that have been duplicated around very quickly. So we were able to create one and then very quickly duplicate those and create them all the way around using splines. So the next thing that we want to do is let's look at using a similar technique to create some really nice blades in here for the fan inside this engine. So we will look at how we can do that in the next lesson.