Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson we'll add some pipes around the back of the engine. All right, so here we have our engine and we'd like to include some pipes in here. Kind of maybe a rib like look of pipes coming around in a circle. So let's go into our side view, and let's change this to our left view, and let's draw in one of those pipes. And give it a little bit more of an interesting look. And so we can use our NURBS, curves, or splines. I'll just go ahead and use a spline, and I'll create a line. And let's just start to bring this in. So I will just create a few points in here, maybe something like that. It's very simple. Then we can modify the points themselves. So looking at this point, we go ahead and convert this to maybe a smooth point here. We can move this over, maybe this one kind of comes out. Maybe It's not quite so sharp, and kind of give this a little bit of shape here, OK. So maybe something along those lines for our pipe. And you can see that this just exists as a spline. So when we render this nothing's going to be visible. And there are a few ways we can add geometry along this spline. One of the quickest and easiest ways is to go in to our rendering rollout. So look at our line, and the rendering rollout will open this up. And so this is going to allow us to create geometry very quickly along this spline that we can see. So we can enable in viewport, enable in renderer. We can do both or neither, one or the other. So let's go and enable in the renderer and the viewport. And now you can see that it's actually created what looks like geometry here on the side. So now we can go into our radial, or rectangular to change the shape. So if we change this to rectangular, you can see we've got a square shape. We can now change the parameters of that. So if you want to get something that's a little bit more squared off, we can do that. We can change the angle, OK. Lot of different things we can do. We can go back to radial, we can change the thickness, OK. So make that a little bit thinner. We can change the number of sides. We want to get something very smooth, we can increase the number of sides. We want to get something very faceted, we can lower the number of sides. So we'll go ahead and leave that may be around 12, to get our geometry in there, OK. So just that easy to come in. And you can always again, move the points around and see how that's all connected. And just by turning this off, we're back to where we started. So that's a nice easy way of getting some geometry in there. Now let's take all of the points here. We can just kind of move those down a little bit, to bring those down. Let's take these points and move them up a bit. And now we can either use our array, or we can come in and use our duplication. So in this case we will use our working pivot. And let's go to the front view, and since the last time we used array, let's this time we'll just use our rotation. So holding down Shift, I'm going to go ahead and rotate this about 15 degrees. So that's going to ask us for copy and number of copies. So if we were to go ahead and rotate it 30 degrees, that is going to be into 360, we're going to have 12, so 11 copies. So in this case we are going to rotate it half that amount. So half of 30 degrees. So instead of having that many copies, we're going to have 24 total. Because of the 15 degrees, 360 degrees and so forth. So we want to make 23 copies since we already have 1. Say OK to that. And that's going to drop those in. We'll go back out here, and you can see those pipes now add a lot of detail in there. And we're able to get them at a very low cost. A very easy to create, very easy to duplicate, OK. Now there are a couple of other things that we might want to change here on our shell. We go ahead and turn on the edge faces. We can also create this kind of knocked off piece here. So let's try to remember how we can do that. We need to add another edge loop here. Now beyond just using connect, we can also use graphite tools. So if we go up here and use this swift loop-- activate this-- this will allow us to just really quickly drop in an edge loop there, OK. Now we can use Cut. Can see Cut's also located right up here to cut in from that corner to the new corner. Do the same thing over here. Bring that in, cut across. Now we can activate polygon selection. Select those polygons, and those polygons, and get rid of those. And now we have that piece knocked off there. Now we also probably want to add some thickness to this shell. You can see we don't really have anything to this. So quick way to do that again, would be to add our shell modifier. And I want to actually add an inner amount to begin with, OK. That's pretty close to our NURB's geometry. That's OK. We can go ahead and add some thickness to that. You can see down here where we have that thickness, OK. If you want to add a little bit of an outer amount, you can. I'm going to mainly add an inner amount. And then we can go back to our NURBS, OK. Let's select our curve, CVs, and then we can start to just modify this shape a little bit to give ourselves a little bit more room inside there. It's OK if it penetrates a little bit, OK. I also want to maintain the look here. We can come in here, give ourselves a little bit more room there, OK. And then if you want to give yourself a little bit more room here, and kind of pull that right end there, so we don't have a gap. Here you go. Now you can see how the NURBS of the back end here is being tessellated. OK. If we take a look at that, you can change the tessellation here. We've got our surface approximation, OK. And so what we can do is come in here and modify some of these settings. Just unlock that, we can turn that on parametric, that gives us a little bit of a smoother approximation there. OK. And so there are a variety of different things that we come in and start to modify as we put all of this geometry together, OK. So just experiment a little bit with dropping those tubes around. Then maybe add a little bit of thickness to your engine shell, modify some of the geometry. And as we start to work a lot of these tools in together, you'll hopefully get a little bit more used to using them. Kind of in context with one another, in combination with one another, and in context with what we're trying to do. So just do a little bit of practice on that. And give it a little bit of your own feel. Maybe make the pipes a little bit different shape. Maybe make fewer pipes or more pipes. Maybe you don't make them pipes at all, but maybe they're more those rectangular shapes. So really experiment with some of the objects that we're creating, all right. The next thing that we want to do is to build the sort of thrust ring of geometry here at the back of the engines. So these sort of panels coming down, we'll be able to move around. So let's create those in the next lesson.