Final halloween scene

The Pumpkin

I started off with a slightly squashed sphere using the scale tool(figure1). Then going into polygon editing mode I was able to extrude the grooves by using soft selection tool (Figure2). To make the face I used quick sliced the pumpkin to give me more faces to work with, then by selecting relevant faces I was abe to delete these to create the eye and mouth. (figure 3). Then a shell modifier was added to give thickness and a noise modifier to give a more organic look (figure 4)

The Dead Tree

Firstly I created a cylinder to act as the trunk then drew splines to resemble the branches and roots (figure 5). To make the actual branches and roots I extruded the certain parts of the cylinder along the spline (figure 6 & 7). Then I added a mesh smooth modifier to make the tree more organic(figure 8). The bottom part of the tree was scaled wider to give it an eerie look. Finally a bump map was added to the material editer, the map used was a crumbling bark which was a picture taken from a tree in my garden.( Figure9).























The Land

The land could have easily been created by adding a noise modifier to a plane, I find this effective but does not give you as much control over the bumps. To remedy this i create a plane with 100 segments each way and then use soft selection. The surface of the bumps is a edited smoke material added to the bump map and diffuse map. The water was created by adding a noise map to the plane and a flat mirror map to the difuse part.

The fog

Fog was created by creating a box gizmo and adding volume fog from the enviroment options, the default fog is white, I felt I had to change it to grey as the fog was creating too may hotspots.

Lighting

The whole scene is lit up by one spot light, this is to replicate moon light, a noice modifier was added to the light to disperse the ground light. The lights in the pumpkin are orange omni lights with invesed square setting, this setting allows me to control an area of light outside the pumpkin, this result allowed me to have orange light shining out the front of the pumpkin and not the back or side.

multi sub object material rendering

This is my attempt at multi sub object material rendering using mentay ray as my rendering engine.

Birthstone of April- Diamond

Diamond Birthstone - April

To make the birthstone i had started off with a simple cone. By editing the polygons I deleted the flat bottom of the cone leaving a hollow shape. From there i had started to bring up the bottom of the cone using the polygon editor to start making the flat edges of the diamond. To cover the hole i simply capped it.

The box around the diamond is simpy a chamfered box. to make it hollow I had duplicated the box, moved the duplicated box up and scaled it down slightly. By using boolean I was able to make the chamfered cube into a box to hold my birthstone.

The cloth was made twice, the first cloth sits in the box this was created by;

1. Firstly creating a rectangle spline and editing it to a relevant size.
2. While still having the rectangle spline chosen I had clicked on garment maker in the modifier panel, this allows you to add faces to the rectangle, the more faces the more the cloth will be able to cover objects. But as always more faces means more memory size so an adequate amount of faces were chosen.
3. Then i clicked on cloth, from here i edited the rectangle to have similar properties of silk and also added the box in as the collision object. I then ran the scene and let the cloth fall into the box creating a base for my birthstone.
4. At this stage when i had placed the birthstone on the cloth it looked like it was floating on top, this meant i needed to create another cloth to act as if the diamond was dropped into the box and the silk has wrapped it self around the base of the diamond.
5. Another cloth was made in the same way but this time the diamond was the collision object.
6. Once the silk had fallen on to the diamond i had turned it upside down and placed it into the box and then placed the diamond into the groove that the silk cloth had made.
7. Finally a meshsmooth modifier was added to both cloths.
   

To make the box and diamond look like real glass i had to first change my renderer engine to mental ray. This allows for materials to look realistic. I then added the material "glass physics " to the diamond and box, i had made the refraction on the box quite low but the diamonds refraction were kept to a medium. The light shining off the diamond turning into a ray is an omni light with a glow and ray modifier attached.

There are three lights in my scene;

1. The light creating the glow and ray on my diamond.
2. An omni light to light the scene
3. A sky light to cast a natural light over the whole scene.

A simple 36mm camera was chosen and a 50 degree field of view was chosen to get a perfect amount of scene into the picture.

my attempt at working with mental ray

Halloween scene

The Pumpkin

I started off with a slightly squashed sphere using the scale tool(figure1). Then going into polygon editing mode I was able to extrude the grooves by using soft selection tool (Figure2). To make the face I used quick sliced the pumpkin to give me more faces to work with, then by selecting relevant faces I was abe to delete these to create the eye and mouth. (figure 3). Then a shell modifier was added to give thickness and a noise modifier to give a more organic look (figure 4)

The Dead Tree

Firstly I created a cylinder to act as the trunk then drew splines to resemble the branches and roots (figure 5). To make the actual branches and roots I extruded the certain parts of the cylinder along the spline (figure 6 & 7). Then I added a mesh smooth modifier to make the tree more organic(figure 8). The bottom part of the tree was scaled wider to give it an eerie look. Finally a bump map was added to the material editer, the map used was a crumbling bark which was a picture taken from a tree in my garden.( Figure9).























The Land

The land could have easily been created by adding a noise modifier to a plane, I find this effective but does not give you as much control over the bumps. To remedy this i create a plane with 100 segments each way and then use soft selection. The surface of the bumps is a edited smoke material added to the bump map and diffuse map. The water was created by adding a noise map to the plane and a flat mirror map to the difuse part.

The fog

Fog was created by creating a box gizmo and adding volume fog from the enviroment options, the default fog is white, I felt I had to change it to grey as the fog was creating too may hotspots.

Lighting

The whole scene is lit up by one spot light, this is to replicate moon light, a noice modifier was added to the light to disperse the ground light. The lights in the pumpkin are orange omni lights with invesed square setting, this setting allows me to control an area of light outside the pumpkin, this result allowed me to have orange light shining out the front of the pumpkin and not the back or side.

october-halloween

For one of my scenes I have decided to do a halloween scene, below is my start to this scene.

Island scene_August

To make the island I started off by creating a displacement map. With a displacement map you apply a solid white colour on a black background in which 3ds max will read the white to where the extrusion will be, grey is a slight extrusion and black is no extrusion. On 3ds max i chose the displace modifier and imported the displacement map i made earlier on Photoshop. This had created the basic island. The material of the rocks is a bump map scaled down to resemble pebbles. The water is simply a plane with a flat mirror material applied to the noise modifier. By turning on the animation consol and changing the figures on the noise modifier I was able to create an animated water scene.

To create the sky I simply applied a sky image to the environment but found this did not look realistic. To overcome this I created a semi-sphere to act as my atmosphere. To create the clouds i applied a sky blue background to the inside of the sphere and then by using tiling and blur on the material editor i was able to create a white recurring pattern which resembled the clouds. After doing this i noticed that the tiling system seemed to have made the wireframe of the sphere appear in my atmosphere, after many attempts of trying to get rid of this wireframe i had to give up as a result of time and skill constraint. To make the white haze on the horizon i had duplicated the sphere and co-ordinated the tiling system to the bottom of the system.

The lighting system is made up of several different lights. The first is simply sunlight, this was added to give off a yellow light to resemble real summer light. The other spot light is on the horizon, I had applied a ray and glow to make it look like the sun.

At this point i felt that the island scene had finished but also felt that it had looked to of been missing a few elements. TAs a result i had added a silhouette of a man fishing. To create this I had imported a personal picture of a man fishing into Photoshop created a path around the fisherman. This path was then exported into adobe Illustrator, the purpose of this was to export the path of the man as a dwg file in which 3ds max is able to read. 3ds max reads this file as a spline in which i was able to extrude the spline and place the fisherman on the horizon and black him out. I did this because i felt that creating a full 3d model of a man fishing would consume too much time.

To create the boats I had first created a box and then started polygon editing. Once I created the outside shape I had used Boolean to create the hollow shell of a boat. To create the wood effect I had downloaded an image of a fence from Google images and applied the map to the boat, by using the map editor I was able to scale down and rotate the image to create the real wood effect.

As in all my scenes creating the camera is only a one step process. I feel the quickest way is to use the perspective viewport to move around and find where I think the camera should be placed. I find that moving a camera round can be a very tedious process. Once I am happy with the view from the prospective viewport I then go to create and then choose create camera from viewpoint. By doing this I feel that I am able to save valuable time.

spring

Autumn

season change

Festive Seasons

Chinese new year would be a great festive season to depict in a 3d model, unfortunately the chinese new year changes every year. Shown below are the past and future dates of this festive period:

2007 date	February 18
2008 date	February 7
2009 date	January 26

As a result of this change it would not be adequate to recreate this in a 3d model as the viewer would be confused as to what month I am trying to recreate.

Final fruit bowl with table and table cloth

Fruit Bowl

Elements for fruit bowl

Shapes

• Cylinder(banana)
• Sphere (oranges and grapes)
• Plane (base)
• Line (bowl)

Modifiers

• Meshsmooth (bowl)
• Lathe (bowl)
• Bend (banana and Orange Core)

Camera

• Target Camera
• 15mm
• Depth of view
• field of view

Lights

• Red and White Lights
• low intensity
• target light
• Shadows

Materials

• Gradients (oranges and bananas)
• wood (bowl)
• Glossiness (grapes)
• opacity (glass)
  

Months

Spring

-March
-April
-May

- Bloom/Flowers/Leaves
- Green
- Easter
- New Born
- Tranquility
- Buzzing with life
- Fresh
- Temperate Weather

Winter

-December
-January
-February

-Christmas/Valentines
-White Snow
-Cold Outside/Warm Inside
-New Year
-EarlyNights

Autumn

-September
-October
-November

-Orange/Brown/Red
-Naked Trees
-Harvest
-Windy
-Relaxing
-Rain