Hey everyone!
Sorry this Monday Movie is being uploaded at the end of the day. I’ve been busy with work, and now another side project is eating up my time. This week’s topic is about the ShapeMerge tool in 3dsMax. ShapeMerge allows you to use a spline object to cut shapes out of mesh objects along the z axis. While this might sound complex, it’s actually a powerful and robust tool that can compliment both an organic and inorganic pipeline.
This week’s Monday Movie shows you how to bake an ambient occlusion map for an object in 3dsMax. It’s actually a much easier process than you’d think. Here, I’ll show you how to use the Render-to-Texture tool with mental ray’s Ambient Occlusion pass. The resultant image can be used to either visualize your object in the viewport, or as part of your texturing process!
Inserting Mono-Spaced Vertices in a Mesh
This is going to be a very quick post, but I wanted to talk about a script request I got on the Threedy Forums. There was a user who wanted to be able to easily insert a lot of vertices into edges into his 3dsMax objects. From a scripting standpoint, this is very difficult because the insertVertexInEdge function inserts only one vert at a time. Thus, you’re disrupting the edge IDs every time you insert a vertex, and it would take all day to script this kind of tool.
The workaround I proposed was to use the “Connect” tool (Modify panel>>”Edit Edges” rollout) to connect all the edges you want together. Then you can just use the “Remove” tool (Modify panel>>”Edit Edges” rollout) to get rid of the resultant edges and you’ll be left with just the vertices.
While I can’t say I understand why this user would want only the vertices and not the edges. Then again, I’m the “supplies coordinator” for the Dominance war effort, so I just do the best I can to provide what they ask for!
For the war effort, I’ve gone through my old script library and picked out some of the choicest bits I wrote back when I was still trying to be a tools programmer. WeldTexVert is a modal window that’s automatically added to your UnwrapUVW menu bar that lets you interactively weld texture vertices in the same way you would with editable polygons.
The good news is that you can bind it to a hotkey so you never have to worry about the original weld vertex tool ever again. The bad news is, you need to select the UVW vertices you want to weld before opening the window. Sorry about that!
Either way, I hope you enjoy the tool.
I’ve got a real treat for you this week. I’ve written up a script called “Wire Bundle” that makes it easy to make wires in your mechanical objects. Like the classic “Wire Jumble”, you can select a long chain of objects for the wires to pass through. As a new twist, you can also select a spline for the wires to pass through, making it even easier to get this awesome effect quickly.
This video shows you how to use the script. You can download Wire Bundle here.
This is a great modeling lesson!
I wasn’t planning to make a post today, but this caught my eye and you simply must check it out. Jeremy Wynn has made a timelapse modeling video of a gun he’s working on, and it’s exceptionally good. It’s rather fast, so you have to try to keep up, but you get a great feeling for the flow he uses in 3dsMax, and the kind of tools that are most often use!
Enjoy!
Hey everyone!
This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can use the LookAt constraint and the Path constraint to make objects follow each other in a “piston” like fashion. This is useful for mechanical rigs like hydraulics or characters. You can use this technique, and others like it, to create 3d characters that have their subtle animations (like moving parts) delegated away to constraints so that you can focus on the more important keyframes like positions!
Hey everyone,
I don’t want you to feel like I’ve forgotten you! I have, en route, a new 3dsMax primer that you’re going to love. If you think hard about it, you can probably guess what it is (imagine the particles primer, but for that other really hard body of knowledge). You’ll be glad when it’s out.
In addition, I’m still working on that alternate website. I want to build the best source for 3dsMax tutorials on the web. Providing new and interesting tutorials is directly helpful, but collecting all the knowledge that’s out there will multiply my efforts. I’ll try to get the website far enough along to release the URL on Monday.
In the meantime, I’ve signed up for Project Wonderful and placed a few of their ads on the site. They don’t have quite the fill rate that Google AdSense has. I’ll leave them up for a week and see what happens.
As always, tune in on Monday for the Monday Movie.
Welcome to another Monday Movie! We’ll be talking about how you can use the “Hose” extended primitive to speed up creating common hose-like objects in 3dsMax. The fact is that most people either don’t know this tool exists, don’t know how to use it, or think it’s not very useful. I disagree with this last group of people; the hose object is both quick and extensible making it a handy little trick in your 3d arsenal. In 3dsMax, you’ll find that it can do a lot of what a spline could do except faster.