Week 2

This week involved creating derelict buildings by a technique known as Lofting.
Being Derelict it gave us the perfect oportunity to use our new skills to destroy them.
Here I inserted new vertexes then connected them allowing me to delete the formed polygon, creating a tear in the wall. Being a fan of Godzilla I also thought I would use Boolean spheres to create a bite mark. Doing this I discovered two things. Grouped shaped cant be used as a boolean together, and using multiple boolean subtractions on the same shape creates excessive polygone creations.

 Here I created a Hospital, Using the text function to create a Helipad. I created a gurder and cloned it, then by creating extra Segments and selecting certain Vertices I was able to manipulate them into a twisted look. I also discovered when cloning something, you can select copy or instance. Copy creates a stand alone object that can be manipulated at your discretion. Instance allows any changes made to the block to be receipricated to its clones.

Confessions of a n00b

I will be honest. The house tutorial in 3DS max didnt go so well for me. I found the segment creation by connecting two sides very confusing. I got quite irate as I messed it up, so I deleted it.
Later in the week I turned my attention to the castle task we were set. With renewed vigour I was determined to get the hang of the segments. It was then I realised the segments were created perpendicular to the selected sides.
With this in mind I managed to create walls and towers with the classic castle battlements.
I used the boolean tool to subtract a sphere from the wall to make a gate.
Here is the castle-

As for the main tower I decided to make a lord of the rings esque homage. I achieved this by using the line tool to draw one spoke. I then extruded the shape out and used the cap tool to fill the hollow side in.
Once the side was rotated vertically, I cloned it three times and used the Alligning tool to ensure they were all touching equally and facing out to the four compas points. It was then a case of grouping these up, cloning and rotating the clone 45 degrees. I then grouped these up, cloned, and rotated 22.5 degrees. This achieved the desired effects.
One thing I will point out, grouped objects were no longer editable.(Tried to subtract with a boolean, but wouldnt allow). For future reference any individual adjustments must be done to individual polygons before grouping, lest you have to go back and ungroup everything.

Research Board

Here is my research board for my Animation with the Working Title AT-tack.
It will involve the race to the rebel power generator between the 3 AT-ATs featured in Empire Strikes Back. I want to play on a slight Tortoise/Hare theme, highlighting just how slow AT-ATs are compared to their smaller counter-parts the AT-STs.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, documenting my development and design of a short 3D animation set in the Starwars Universe.
To help me achieve this, I will be learning how to use the software 3D Studio Max.
This software is very similar to UDK in some ways, but it appears  to be much more versatile at creating  and maniplating shapes. I definately feel the key to mastering fluid shape building is learning to segment correctly.