Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll use instancing to create a nozzle at the back of the engine. And the first thing you might notice between this lesson and the last is the fact that the color the engine has changed. I wasn't really feeling the pink and green of the engine, so all I've done is change some of the object colors for different pieces, and that's easy to do. Just click on the swatch and change the color. In the next section of this course, we'll go through texturing and adding materials. The color's not really important right now, I just wanted to have a little bit of color to see some of the different pieces a little bit more clearly. So feel free to do that if you like-- you can leave the colors the way they were, customize them however you want, it doesn't really matter. So at this point, we want to add some slats at the back here, to service as our nozzle on the back. So to start, let's go to Create, and let's create just a simple box. We'll go to our keyboard entry, and I'm just going to create a one by one by one box. So create that. Let's bring it out here. And then we'll go to Modify to change some of the parameters. So style the length up a bit. So maybe something like that. Let's take our height down to something in that area. We'll move it up into position, just up here on the top. And we can penetrate this in a little bit if we want to. And let's also rotate it a bit. So I'm going to rotate it in the x. And let's snap that to a 10 degree rotation. And then we'll just move that down. So we've got something like that. I also want to kind of chamfer the edges. I want to knock off the edges of this piece. So I'm going to convert this to an editable poly. Let's select the edges and let's go down to Edit Edges, under Roll Out, go to Chamfer. And let's change this value to something like 0.03 or so, just to knock off those edges. All right. Now we'd like to taper it. We want it to be wider at the base here, and then narrower down here. So let's add a taper modifier. And we want it to affect the block along the y-axis. So we can change the amount here and you can see how that affects everything. But let's not change it quite yet. Now we want to create our copies. And so to do that, we're going to use our working pivot, and that drops it back at the origin. So we're now rotating it basically around this axis right here. Let's go to Rotate. And we'll hold down Shift while we rotate in the y. And let's rotate 30 degrees. Now instead of creating a copy, we're going to create an instant. So they're all going to be sort of connected. And we want to create 11 copies, so we go all the way around. And that gives us this. Now, we go back into any of these, go to our Taper. And we can change the amount, now, of our Taper. So let's dial that up until we get something that's wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. In my case, it's about 0.96 in the amount. You can play around with limiting the effect, as well. You can limit it on one side or the other, depending on the length. Mine were about 9 units long and about 0.27, I believe, was the size. But you can see how we can really quickly build those up. And the Taper allows us to get the spacing just right. So we've got a good number, we're able to drop those in, and then we can use the Taper to match up the top and the bottom as far as the spacing goes for those. Let's also add a cone inside there. So let's take a look at our object types . We've got Standard Primitives here, and there is actually a Primitive that is a cone. So we'll go ahead and grab the cone and let's just add some values in here and create that cone, and then we'll bring it in and modify it. OK. Let's grab it and bring it in here. Let me grab that other guy. It looks like we've got a duplicate. There we go. Let me make sure to turn our working pivot off. So here's our cone, which doesn't look much like a cone right now. That's because we've just dropped in numbers for the two different radius amounts. So if we take the radius you can see here down, you can see that starts to give us our cone. Or we take this radius down and we can get our cone that way. Let's go ahead and rotate this. I'm just going to rotate it 90 degrees. Let's change the height. And we can drop the base in here where we want it. And if we go to our side or top views, we can look and just drop this in back at the back and then change our height, so we can make that height a bit longer. We can change our radius at the base so it's a bit bigger. And we just want it to extend out from the back of the engine. And we can modify some of those parameters-- I'm going to give it a little bit bigger base there, maybe make it not quite come out so far. If you don't want it to come to an exact point, you can increase that radius, if you want something like that. You also have the ability to create cap segments here. So looking at this, you can see that we now have cap segments. If we that off, we just have that one polygon there. And then we can also change the number of sides, if we want to take this down. Maybe we don't need that many. So there are a lot of parameters here that you can play with on the cone. And so with those slats added and that cone, I think the next thing that we want to add is kind of a power couple object here on the side. We can create that using a number of splines, combining those splines together in some interesting ways-- we can create that. And let's also add a little bit more detail here, to the back part of the engine. So let's go ahead and do that in the next lesson.