Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson we'll use NURBS curves to build the back of our engine. So here we have our engine shell, and we'd like to add the back part of the engine, or the interior part of the engine that's sticking out here. One of the ways we can do this is to use the NURBS curves. So we're going to go to Create panel, and under shapes we'll find NURBS curves, right underneath splines. We'll go to NURBS curves, and there are just a couple of options here, the point curve and the CV curve. And they're not going to differ too much just in the way they're drawn out. So we grab a point curve, just draw this out, you can see all the points lie on the surface, whereas the CV curves are going to have points that are off the surface. So, that's just a little bit different way of working as far as the two curves depending on how you're used to creating your NURBS curves. I'm going to go ahead and use the CV curve. So what we'd like to do is draw out a profile of what we'd want this interior of the engine to look like. So we'll start right inside the covered portion and just start to draw this out. And any areas that we want to be a little bit sharper, we'll want to add a couple of points in, so maybe make a little indentation there. In areas where we it to be long, strict, long and straight, we can just drag this out and click. Now I want to have a sharp division here. So I'll add a few points in here to make that sharp line. We can modify these later but I'm just kind of getting the rough idea in here. And then here as well. We'll create this kind of a sharp corner. And then pull that in. So we end up with something that looks like that. Now we'll go into our modify panel, we can grab all of the CVs. So you can see we have as our sub object our curve CVs that we can modify. We can bring those in a little bit closer. And we can modify this maybe if we want to get more of a sharp line there bring those a little bit closer together. We can modify groups of CVs as well. And so we'll just modify the shape a bit. And again this is our profile shape, working with what's going to be our engine. OK, so once we get a rough piece, a rough curve built in there, the next thing we want to do is create the geometry. Our geometry is going to be spun around this axis, ideally. And so we can do is actually use our NURBS creation toolbox to make this happen. So if we go ahead and activate this-- this is in our general roll out-- we'll bring up a bunch of options for points, curves, and surfaces. And we want to actually create a lathe surface. So we'll click on that. When it turns blue, we can click on there, and that actually will create our surface. Right now you can see we have options for direction, which we can change here. We have options for the number of degrees. Let's take a look at what this looks like, so we can see that. If we change our number of degrees you can see that it's not going all the way around. We actually do want it to go all the way around, we just don't want it to go in that direction. And we can change directions. But, it's actually going to use the center of that curve. So it's not to give us exactly what we want, even if we get it going in the right direction. You could try different things. Let's leave it on y for now, and look at how we can manually change this. If we take a look at this, we can actually rotate that gizmo. We select our surface, you can see we've got this yellow line here, we can actually rotate it. So if we go to rotate I don't want to rotate on the gizmo itself, I want to rotate up here. And so we can actually rotate that around. Click on the x or the z and then rotate that down. There, snapping. OK. So that, you can see, gives us what we had with our x. Now we will translate it, move it. So again click on y, and then move it up to that axis. That gives us a little bit more of what we want. Now you can see there are some issues that we have here. First issue is the normals are reversed. So with our surface selected, we can go ahead and look at-- grab that, you pull that back up there, select our surface, put that back up in there. With the surface selected here, we'll go down to flip normals, flip those around. And now we need to fix those issues where it's penetrating in. The way to fix that here is to modify our curve. So you go down to our curve here, start to bring that up. You can see that the surface will actually update. So you can modify our curve and that modifies the resulting surface. So bringing it will give us a little bit better-- a little bit less penetration there. OK. We can start to bring some of these points out. We don't want quite as much of an invention there as we might think. We can start to angle this out a little bit so maybe the angle is a little bit too severe, it's a little bit thin there. We may also want to thin this up, so bringing this section in a little bit more. So it's a little bit thinner there. I can add a little bit, bring that out a little bit. We can also take all of these if we want to have more of a hole back there we can bring that down and in maybe thin this out a little bit. So just manipulating this curve will allow us to change our surface or resulting surface there. So you can see how modifying that gives us the surface that we want. And this may be a little bit too long could always bring that in, and modify this however we want. OK. And leaving that, we can still have control over it based on the curve that we have. So now that we've got the interior engine built using our NURBS curves, the next thing that we may want to do is to add some pipes around the back of the engine. So we can add some pipes going along around here, and we can do that very quickly. So we will look at how we can do that in the next lesson.