Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll create an additional piece on the back of our cockpit. So let's again use some of the geometry that we already have to build an additional piece. So I'm going to turn off the smooth on our main body bar of our pod. And so let's go ahead and turn off the smooth. We'll grab some of these polygons-- let's just grab these six right here on the back. We want to detach those, so we're going to go, instead of edit polygons, Edit Geometry and do the roll out here. And so we can go ahead and detach those. And we'll Detach as a Clone, so we won't touch any of the geometry underneath. So now selecting that new piece, we can select the polygons themselves and let's just do an extrude. And this will be under Edit Polygons and also, again, in the graphite modeling tools. So we'll do an extrude and we'll just push that up. And let's just push it up above even the back piece there and we'll say OK to that. Let's now select the polygons on the back, and I just want to extrude those out. So let's go ahead and just extrude these out a bit. And let's do it one more time until we get something like that, so it extends back into this object here. Now we can start to do a little bit of shaping here. So let's take some of these points-- so these vertices here. Let's go ahead and pull those down and forward so they're kind of behind the glass here. We could take the bottom points and sort of bring those forward and then scale them out so they're right outside of that cockpit. And if we deselect the ones on the outside, we could take those ones in the middle and move those back so it's not penetrating into the glass. Let's go ahead and start to modify the shape of this, so we'll bring this down a little bit. Now, I want to extend this up here, so I'm going to actually leave these pretty much as they are here. Now I want to have more of a spike in the middle. So thinking about that, I can select all of these edges. And if I select that edge and go to Selection, I can select the whole ring. And then we can go to use our Connect. We've got one edge, it's going to be right the middle, so we can go ahead and add that in. And now we can use that to create more of a spiked look there. I want it to blend back in as it comes back up into the top here. And we can go ahead and grab all of these, move them up and scale them in if we want to get that nice, sharp look there, we're going to be smoothing this. Grab these and scale those in as well. From here it's just a lot of manual shaping and figuring out how we want this to look. So let's go into the view here. And looking at this, I want to actually get a little bit more of a rounded shape. So I can start to grab these and just scale these out. And then create a little bit more of a rounded shape just manually moving these around. We can grab these, pull those out a little bit more. Grab these, bring those out. Now, there may come a point where we need to have a little bit more resolution in here. And so we can certainly add that at that point. I wanted to blend down into the base here. So we can take this and I want to scale it, bring it down-- we can do that. And again, because we have these close together, we're going to start to get some creases, which in many cases is what we want, but in this case we don't. So we can start to space those out a little bit more, which will take away that creasing that we may otherwise get. So this will help us to blend in that creased look on the front of this shape with the smoother look as it comes into the back. Take both of these and move them down a bit. We probably need a little bit more resolution in here, so I'll just use a swift loop to add another loop right in there. Looking at this from the top, you can come in on that new loop and use that to shape things a little bit more. Now the smoothing, we can use a turbo smooth on this or we could use the NURMS smoothing. And so you'll see a button here called NURMS, it's a Non-Uniform Rational Mesh Smooth. So we also have it if we look under Subdivision Surface Rollout, we have it right in here. And if we just turn that on, you can see we get a nice, smooth preview. We also get a number of iterations, just like with our turbo smooth. So again, you'll notice it's very doughy where we don't have edges added. And so the same thing applies there that applies with our turbo smooth and we can turn that off and on here, same thing here. So you see how that activates that, so it's all related. So we can come in and start to add edge loops in here if we want to kind of tighten this up a little bit, start to bring in some edge loops in here. Now on the side here, this is going to tighten that up as well. So just keep that in mind when you're adding all of this resolution in here. So that gives us a shape that looks something like that. If we want to really tighten up the point here, we just need to bring those edges closer together. So looking at these points, if we want to go ahead and grab those and kind of move those in that will help us get something that's a little bit sharper on the point here. And so again, turn that on, and maybe that's a little bit quicker than using the turbo smooth modifier, it's really just up to you. And so now we have this object that comes in and extends into the back here. If we want to change the color of that and get that black color, we can do that. We may want to come in and shape this a little bit. So looking at this, I may want the glass to actually extend up to the top here and have this come down. So if that's the case, we can go ahead and grab this, we can get those points we have right here, and go ahead and just move those up. And let me actually undo that. You can move those up and move these up as well. And so then if our cockpit glass extends up a little bit higher, we can go ahead and grab those control points there on the back and start to extend that up and back. And do the same thing here, up and back. And then I'm just going to grab that whole thing, except for the bottom. So you can see we've got one that's a little bit off there that we've moved accidentally, so I'm going to go ahead and just grab all of those, move those back. Let's grab this one and move it up. So we want to leave the base pretty much where it is, but we can move this up here. And if we need this to scale that in a little bit we can do that, but that matches it up with that new piece that we've got here. And we can start to do the same thing in the middle if we need to. So again, just shape this the way that you want to, but kind of get these pieces to work a little bit more together. I kind of like that better than having this come down into this piece. So we end up with something like that. So it kind of just ties this piece into this piece. We may need to modify this. You can see that our spacing in here is getting a little bit tight. So we can take our FFD and just go ahead and pull this down, make that a little bit smaller. These maybe could come in a little bit. All right, so just spend a little bit of time working with all of our geometry together. And just remember that you can always grab geometry from different pieces to create new pieces which may make it a little bit easier than trying to make things from scratch all the time. So now that we've got this piece done, in the next lesson let's add some interesting struts coming in. And we'll do that using some splines and some interesting techniques. So we'll go ahead and do that in the next lesson.