Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson we'll build some additional detail for our engine, and we'll use some splines to add our power couple. So the first thing we'll do is, I just want to add a little bit of detail back here. And so we'll just go over some of the other things that we've talked about, and kind of revisit those. If you want to make the detail a little bit different, that's perfectly all right. But I would just want to go in and select some polygons. We've selected the polygons in the back of these large pieces on the engine. And we'll go down to our edit polygons rollout to edit these. We use inset. We'll create a specific inset amount, maybe 0.15 or so. Say OK to that. Let's now do an extrude. We'll move this back in. So maybe something like one or two, say OK to that. And again you can find a lot of these tools up here in your graphite modeling tools as well. These contain a lot of great tools to be able to use, and we'll touch on some of the newer ones here in a little bit. So once we got that I now want to add kind of a tube back here, coming around. And so we can do that using a primitive, and let's just use a torus. Go to our keyboard entry and the major radius I'm going to set at 10, and minor at 2, and we'll go to Create. Now we can rotate this and snap it to 90 degrees. Let's move it into position, roughly into position here. And now we can change our radius to get the exact look that we want. I want it to be a little bit smaller. So we can just start changing these values here. I want it to kind of intersect with the extrude that we brought out. I don't want it to be quite so large. And I don't want it to extend over the top. So maybe something like that. OK. We can change the number of segments if we don't want it to be quite as smooth, or if we want it to be smoother, we can change those up as well, right. So now we've got that detail, let's add a power couple here. And so for this we want to get an interesting shape, and we can get that shape using some splines. So let's go into our left view, and we'll just build this up here somewhere, and we'll go and place it. So we're going to go to Create, let's go to shapes, and splines. And so let's start by just bringing in a circle, OK. So we've got a circle shape. Let's bring in a rectangle shape. So maybe something like that, and we'll start with those. So we'll go to Modify. Let's bring up our rectangle and let's modify the shape a little bit. Let's make it a bit wider than the circle. So we've got maybe something along those lines. Now we need another circle in the center, so we can go to scale, hold down Shift and just scale this and get our copy of our spline. We'll create a copy, not an instance. So now we have a new circle in the middle and we can modify that, if we want to. All right. I also want to create a couple of copies of this rectangle. So let's just hold down Shift then I can again scale, to get kind of a smaller version of this. Let's change the width so it's a bit smaller, and we'll move it over here. So maybe something like that. Make it a bit smaller. Then hold down Shift and move it over to the other side, so we get something like that. So all these are now separate splines which we've created, and they're just right now sitting right on top of each other. And if you've got geometry around all of these, you just need to go into your rendering and turn off the enable in viewport, enable in renderer. OK. So that's something to be aware, if you're drawn out your splines and you've got geometry around there. OK, so now we can create some more complex spline shapes using the basic splines that we've dropped in. So to do that, we need to have them part of the same editable splines. So let's say we want to combine this circle and this large rectangle. So we take this circle and convert it by right clicking to an editable spline. And then we'll go right up here, under geometry, and attach, and let's attach the rectangle. And you can see as I hover over this, it's going to give us a new icon, a new cursor. So these are now attached. So they're part of the same editable spline. So I can select these, but if I select this, it's all the same piece. I can see if I move it. We can still select the individual splines if we go into the sub object. The spline sub object will allow us to select the individual pieces. So let's now select the circle, and we want to create a new shape based on the circle and the rectangle. And we use a Boolean to do that. So go down under geometry. All the way down here to Boolean and we want to create a union. So you can see the three operations here. So we'll select union, we'll select Boolean, and then we'll select the second shape. So as I click on that rectangle you can see that it's united those two splines into a new shape. It's eliminated everything in between, OK. So the next thing that we want to do, is to do the same thing here with this inner circle. So we'll take the circle and we want to convert this to an editable spline. Let's now go to attach, OK. And we can attach both of these rectangles on the side. So now we've got this centerpiece is all one spline, with the different spline sub objects there. So we'll select the circle, go down to Boolean and this time we want to do subtraction. And we'll subtract this rectangle. You need to try that again. And subtraction, you want to hit Boolean, then hit this rectangle, and this one as well. And you can see how that now cuts it out from the circle, creating a new spline. Turn off Boolean. OK. Now to make this one spline, all we have to do is select the outer spline. We'll go to attach and we'll just attach the inner spline. So now this is one editable spline. Since we have this as an editable spline, we can now come in and add geometry to this. So if we want to do an extrude or a bevel, can add an extrude to this. Can add geometry to this. If you want to add instead of an extrude, a bevel, we can add a bevel to this and give it kind of a nice beveled edge there. OK. So you can get some really neat effects and really need pieces of geometry by just combining splines in different ways. It doesn't have to be the primitive splines that you saw. You could draw out splines and cut pieces out of those as well, to create some really nice shapes, OK. Go ahead and pull this down, and kind of put it in the position on the inside of the engine, if we say that this is the inside. We can scale this down a bit, OK. And maybe pull it out, right. If that's extending a little bit too far out, we can go ahead and change any of our values here. Can see that, kind of pull that bevel out at that point. Or we can come in here at level one, make it a bit longer, OK. So there's a lot of values that you can do here. Make that a smaller bevel if you want to, OK. You can kind of see those parameters there that you can change, OK. So experiment with some splines, get some interesting shapes going on. Using the Boolean actions, there's a lot of different shapes that you can create. So have some fun coming up with some of those. I'm just going to scale this up a little bit maybe, all right. So the next thing that we want to look at, in the next lesson, is to add actually the fin. Kind of a fit on the side of our engine, on the outside. And then also a small connector for our cable. It's going to be pretty straightforward, but we'll go ahead and do that in the next lesson.