Lighting and Materials Concepts & Skills: You should be able to: toggle the material editor between compact and slate modes create a new material (e.g. arch & design rubber) name a material copy a material assign a material to an object reset a material create a new ‘standard’ material change the color […]
Creating and Moving Cameras Concepts & Skills: You should be able to: create a free camera create a target camera position the camera body and camera target animate a camera’s movement using keyframes (see animation) animate a camera to move along on a path (spline) attach a camera’s target to an object Resources: Textbook part […]
Animation Concepts & Skills: You should be able to identify and locate: the time configuration menu the RAM player the time slider You should be able to: animate an object using keyframes (either autokey or set keys) augment an object’s animation by moving keyframes on the timeline animate a camera configure an animation’s frame rate […]
Editable Mesh/Editable Poly This tutorial describes the process of editing objects as an editable mesh or poly. When creating complex objects the standard primitives are often too simple to create a unique and abstract form. Editable mesh/poly gives you the opportunity to manipulate each component the object is composed of. These are vertices, edges, faces, […]
NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational Basis Splines) are a type of spline which is particularly useful for modeling smooth 3d surfaces. The lines themselves, called NURBS curves, are used to create NURBS surfaces or objects. An overview of NURBS, with links and examples, is available here. In this tutorial, we will use NURBS to create highly curved […]
A spline is a curved line, defined by three or more vertices. It can be 2-dimensional, with all its vertices on a single plane, or 3-d. Splines allow the user to create smoothly-curved lines with high precision. A spline’s shape can be controlled by changing the position, and other properties, of its vertices. In this […]
I spent a portion of the summer working on several illustrations for the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio (background @ link). The studio collaborated with Guy Nordenson to create an exhibit at the Venice Biennale looking at sea level rise and methods to create coastal infrastructure through sediment diversions and other soft infrastructures. In conjunction with […]
This tutorial details the process of creating a digital ‘diorama’ using 3ds Max 2011. The basic idea is to map images onto 2-dimensional planes, and arrange the planes in 3-dimensional space to form the illusion of 3d objects in space. It is sometimes also necessary to make certain parts of the mapped images transparent, […]