Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we will build some front fins for our racer. So let's use some splines to do this, and I'll just jump into the left view, and I'll build it kind of right out here, and then we can kind of position them into this spot. So let's start by just bringing in a shape-- a spline-- and let's bring in a rectangle. We'll just draw this out. And again, we want to now go in and shape this. So that means we will convert this into an editable spline. And now we can access the points that we've got there. So let's go to our vertex sub-object, and I'm going to actually convert all of these to corners, so we get nice sharp lines here to begin with. And we'll start doing some shaping. Now I'm going to make mine a particular shape. Feel free to make yours whatever shape you want. I just want to get this kind of angular shape that's going to be kind of reminiscent of something we may have seen before, and let's go ahead and insert a point. I'm going to put one kind of right here, and then maybe one right back here. So maybe something like that. And I'm going to keep these pieces pretty sharp. Rather than going in and making any curves on these, I'll try to keep these fairly sharp looking. OK, so maybe something like that. Let's create another one. And so what we can do is just kind of duplicate this. So shift, pull it up, and this would be another sort of layer here. And so if we want to pull this in, we can. If we want to get rid of it, we can just hit delete to get rid of that. This we'll kind of pull up here, and just create kind of a complimentary shape. Maybe you pull this down a little bit. So something like that. Let's now add some geometry to these. And so I'm just going to add a bevel on here, and let's add one on here as well. So add a bevel modifier. Let's go in here, take a look. Now, these are all awfully thick, so I want to change some of the settings here. So we'll take the height way down. Take that maybe down to 0.2. Let's take our level three height and outline down-- say, maybe 0.05, maybe 0.1 on the height. So we get kind of a little bit of a bevel there. So let's repeat those settings-- so 0.1 minus 0.05 on this one. 0.1 minus 0.05. We could also take this bevel, copy it, and then paste it. Let's grab this. Let's copy and then paste. And so we can get rid of this one, and there we can repeat the same-- so use the same modifier. So you can copy and paste modifiers to your different objects, if you have different settings you want to keep. OK, let's now take this and pull that down. OK, let's pull it down underneath and over. OK, so maybe something like that. We'll add our color we had for our pod there for our engine. And let's take both of these, and we can start to move them into position. So if you want to group these, you can. Otherwise, you can just move these together. Let's grab both of these, and let's just move them back right along the front here. And I'll just pull these out, and I just want to start to rotate these a little bit. So you can see how we're rotating those to the side. If you want to kind of move one out a little bit further, we can, and maybe move this a bit more forward, and rotate him a little bit. So just maybe something like that. And I might want to rotate him up a little bit, so it's little bit more straight. All right. Now we want to attach these, so one way to do that would be to come in and bring a cylinder in. So we go to our geometry, and bring in a cylinder. Let's turn on auto grid, and we'll just draw it on here, pull it out. OK, we just want it to penetrate into this side, not extend through the other side. We can go to our modify, take the radius down-- that's a little bit too thick-- and now we can start to add more of these, so they're going to be at pretty much the same angle. So we can kind of pull these in. That one's actually a little too far. Maybe pull it down a bit. And let's again duplicate that and push it out, and create a copy of that. All right. Now we'll change our reference coordinate system to local, so we can move this instead based on the world or the view. And let's duplicate another one of these to hold these two together. And so we can now, if we want to make a group out of these, we can do that. So select all of these pieces, make a group, and we can call these Fins A or something like that. Now, to get those over to the other side, let's just use our working pivot, and we'll use mirror. We'll create a copy across the x, say OK to that, turn off our working pivot, and there we've got our fins created for the front of our racer. Those might be a little bit too small, so if you want to scale that up, you can certainly do that, and then remirror it over to the other side. Let's say it's a little bit too small. I want to make sure that your pieces down here are still connected the way they're supposed to be. So scaling that up, coming in, getting rid of that, and then just mirroring that over again. All right, so just really quick to change up things as you go. So I think we're about done here with our modeling portion of our training. The next thing we want to do is to bring everything together, so we've got the engine, we've got the pod. Let's place everything the way that we want to, and then we'll build the cables to connect everything together. So let's go ahead and do that in the next lesson.