3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 1

The first assignment was simple enough, we just had to model and skin a futuristic box.  This assignment was to get us familiar with the materials side of 3ds max.  Once you make one box it's simple to duplicate it until you have a whole mess of 'em.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 2

Assignment 2 was to model and skin a wooden box.  I went a little overboard doing two dynamite boxes and one treasure chest complete with gold doubloons and rubies.  The dynamite box models are just plain boxes but the treasure chest took a bit of modelling.  The assignment was to test out diffuse and bump maps to add more depth to the objects.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 3

Assignment 3 was to model a globe, map, and bottle and then apply a material suited to all three.  I had a blast with this assignment and went with a Game of Thrones theme.  I pulled the map and label images off of Google and tweaked them a little for my purposes.  This assignment was a little modeling heavy but it was fun to put materials on something that I modeled myself instead of just being given something to skin.  The table and room were extra.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 4-5

Assignment 4 was to take a generic dough boy model a tweak it to make it unique and then get a clean unwrap of the model.  Assignment 5 was to then lay a material on it.  I went with a Braveheart/Viking marshmallow dough boy.  This was our first unwrap of an organic model and it is more difficult than I thought.  There is no easy unwrap program, just something that points you in the right direction.  The hardest part of adding the material to the unwrapped model is getting all the edges to line up properly so you can't tell where one side ends and the next begins.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment Final

 

 Our final assignment for the class is to take a generic humanoid head model, do a little modeling to it to make it our own, then unwrap it, slap a material on, and give it some lighting.  I went the creepy route, elongating the ears and enlarging the eyes and mouth, creating some bulging to the skull, and ultimately modelling horns for the top of her head.  This was a blast to model and I found that when I get in the groove it can even be fun to detangle the nightmare that can be unwrapping a model.  The grid like pictures on the bottom are what happen when you take a 3D model and squish it to two dimensional.  We do this so that you can add a material evenly across the model and nothing gets pinched or stretched.  While there are mods to help with the unwrapping process, nothing will slap it out looking that good without a little pushing and pulling, breaking and stitching, and generally manhandling of the whole model.  The first two sets of pictures are using a sub-surface scattering material that is mainly used for skin.  That material allows for light to penetrate the model to a certain depth, giving it more of the translucent look of flesh.  The last set of renders is just a diffuse and bump material.

Hard Surface and Organic Modeling, Vehicle

This model was a blast to make.  It's based off of an old German WW2 bomber interceptor called the Bachem Natter.  Its nose cap was filled with a salvo of missiles that it would fire at bombers before it attempted to land.  I was able to make a minimal cockpit that could be seen through a translucent glass window.  Each missile was created separate with its own launching tube and could be animated to fire. 

Hard Surface and Organic Modelling, Human

This is Olga, or so my teacher has dubbed her.  Humans are very difficult to model since everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to look like.  On this assignment we started by making a human female head and from there we modeled the chest, arms, legs, and feet, attaching all accordingly.  I used the Second Reality tutorial online with a few minor tweaks and adjustments to make my model, the background is courtesy of Google Images.  I still think that getting the face right is the most difficult part of modelling humans, everything else is just proportions and line flow.  To get skin tight clothes all you have to do is copy a selected field of the body and add a shell modifier, with a few adjustments in scaling.