Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at using Object Paint to quickly add geometry to our model. So here, we have the engine in it's current status. And so let's say that we want to add something like bolts along the front here of our engine, or if you want to add something like rivets along one of your models. There's actually a new tool here in 3ds Max 2011 called Object Paint, which will allow us to do that very quickly. The first thing that we want to do is to actually build the piece that we're going to be adding. So let's say we just want kind of the head of a bolt So we will go into our Standard Primitives. Let's just bring in a cylinder. And we'll just use the keyboard entry to drop that in. And let's go to Modify. We can change the radius. We can change the height. And let me just go in here so we can see it. Let's change the height. Let's also take the number of sides down to 6. OK Take that down to 6. And we can take the high segments down. And let's also take the high down a bit, so we get something along those lines. We can also bring in a sphere. And we'll go ahead and just create that. Go to Modify. Let's take the radius down so it fits here. And let's also turn on the hemisphere and just cut that apart right in there. So my atmosphere's about 0.6, and it's going to sit right on top of that little bolt. So feel free to make whatever shape you want. I just want to make something simple so we can show what's actually going on here. Let's take this sphere and convert it to an editable poly, and then let's attach the bottom portion here. So now it's basically one piece of geometry and the axis is at the bottom. So we can call this something like Bolt, up here. So this is what we're going to be actually adding to our model here, this bolt. So let's go ahead and take a look at this. And it's going to be located up here with your Graphite Modeling Tools. If we go ahead and open this up, we've got a new Object Paint tab. And so we've got the option to paint, we've got the ability to pick our objects, so let's just start with this. So before we paint on the actual engine, let's just paint on the grid. So here's where we choose where we're going to paint on. We can choose Grid, Selected Object, or Scene. And so in this case, we'll just paint on the grid. We want to pick the object that we're going to be using. So we'll come in here and pick our object. Here, we can turn open up this little Edit Object list, and this will tell us the objects that we have selected. So you can have multiple objects. In this case, we're just using this bolt. So now, we want to go ahead and turn on Paint. And you can see, as we come in here, we can paint these out. We can change the spacing. So you can see as I decrease the spacing, the number of bolts increases. You can see each one is an individual bolt. I decrease the spacing here. So this hasn't been committed really yet until we hit the check mark. So we can change a lot of these different values. We can actually randomize and scatter the values here. So along the u, along the v, on the w-- so in each axis, we can scatter these out. So really create some nice, random effects if you don't want it in a straight line. When you're doing something like bolts and rivets, you probably do want those in a straight line, but let's say you're doing something a little bit more random, a little bit more natural-- stones on the ground, or something like that-- you want to randomize those a little bit more. You can also rotate the objects. Here's the rotation in the x. You can rotate them on their y. Let me pull that back down. You can rotate them along the z, so rotate them around. We also have scaling that we can add, So we can scale those all up in the z. If you want to do an even, random-- we can make that random. Dial this down a bit. So you can see that there. We can do even, make those all the same. So even after you paint these objects, you can go in and modify a lot of their attributes here-- things like the scattering, things like the position, rotation-- a lot of different values you can add. So you can add this. Let's say that we want to paint on our object. Let me just go ahead and exit out of that for a second, and let me delete those. If we want to paint on, for instance, this object here, we go ahead and hit Paint. We want to Paint on Selected Object. we can come in here and those are actually on the surface of our object. We can offset those off of the surface. We can increase the scale, increase the spacing. And you can see that those are, in fact, on the surface. So let's take a look at how we can get them evenly spaced around the front here. So to do that, we're going to use this next button, called Fill. So let me exit out of that. And let me add a new edge loop, and I want to add an edge loop kind of right in the center where we want to place our bolts. So let's go to Graphite Modeling Tools. And let me just take the shell, and I actually want to just collapse that and convert that to an inedible poly. And now let's use our swift loop to really quickly just drop in and edge loop here. You could also use the connect that we looked at earlier. So let's go ahead and drop this in. And now we've got an edge loop there. So what we want to do now is select the edge loop and then Shift click. We've got the whole edge loop selected. Now, let's go back to our object paint. This time, we're going to fill. And we've got the Paint on Surface, we've got the object selected. Let's do a fill. So just clicking on this Fill, you can see that it's added those bolts along that edge loop, which is nice. Now we can change the number here. So if we want to fill that with 24, maybe up to something like 36, we can do that. We can change the value here for the size, so we can bring that size down if it's a little bit too large. We can go ahead and bring that down. You can see that we've got Uniform Scale on, so that it's actually scaling those uniformly. Then we can play with the values here. If we want to have them spaced out evenly along, for instance, each edge, we can work with the values that we have here. So it looks like 37 gets us a good number there. If you want to offset that into the surface a little bit more, you can change the offset here. If you want to pull it out, I want it to be kind of right on top of the surface. You can see those bolts there. So this is a really quick and easy way to add geometry along another surface-- in this case, bolts or rivets and things like that. You can modify the rotation, the scaling, any of that data. So we can go ahead and commit this. All right, so now we can't modify that anymore, but we now have all of these bolts placed onto our scene. Now, if we want to go and modify any of these individual bolts, we can do that. They're not really attached, so to speak. So I can take these where they overlap, these pieces, and just delete those. Same thing down here. Get rid of that. And then this one up here. And so now we have these bolts added to our engine, and just very quickly. And so if you want to come in and maybe add some rivets, some bolts along the back of the engine, you can experiment with that. Try adding some different objects. You can also use multiple objects. For instance, if you have different kinds of bolts you want to add, if you want to randomize those-- for instance, if you're using things like stones or rocks, you could randomize different rocks in there. We won't go over everything, but you can definitely use this. And it's a great new tool here, in 2011, to be able to add new geometry very quickly on top of other geometry-- just painting that on. Same thing with the grid, you can just paint on the grid or a combination. So that is Object Paint really quickly, in a nutshell. Using it with some bolt objects that we created, and just adding those really quickly to our racer. So the next thing that we want to do is to go ahead and start building the actual pod cockpit itself. So there's a lot of geometry that's going to go into that, and so we'll look at some of the ways that we can start to build that in the next lesson.