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.
Just a quick post today, I found this under-appreciated video on Youtube and kind of liked it. This brief 3d Studio Max modeling clip shows you how this guy created a few hinges and doodads on a character, and I liked the technique. Pay close attention after about the 3-minute mark!
Watch out, this video plays music. You may want to mute the player before you start.
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.
