|
|
"Ice Sculpture" Added on: Wed Dec 23 1998 |
Page: 1 2 |
Ok, so now I gotta spill my secrets. First of all since I've been getting a lot of email asking about the material I will start there. It's a pretty basic setup.
Blinn Shading
A Gradient for diffuse with dark color for the clear, wet ice and lighter for the cold ice. Same map but inverted and slightly modified for the shininess and shininess strength. Again same map for the opacity but darker.
Dark for clear, lighter for opaque. Raytrace in the Refract slot : around 95%; Raytrace in the reflect slot : around 15% (note all are mapped using a planar uvw gizmo from the front)
Modeling
For my modeling method I've also been getting numerous requests in the email. It may seem crazy at first when you hear it but its not.
Picture.1
- Overview
I know and have used pretty much every method around to model (NURBS, surface tools, box, modeling, tems and even h-splines) and have finally found a method that both provides flexibility and works great with animation. This method is not new just havnt found too many max users who implement it.
- Method
I like to make my models polygon by polygon. Yep every singly polygon perfectly placed. Sounds crazy i know but it works great. There are no rules with polygons unlike NURBS. I usually start by making a choosing spline, and clicking 4 times to make a rectangle. Then I collapse it to an editable mesh.
Download Andrei's MeshTools from MAX3D! They're great. With them you can build quad polygons and when you use meshsmooth on your mesh it will look much better.
So you have a single quad polygon now. It's not a true quad polygon but 2 triangles with 1 edge hidden.
Meshsmooth works based on visible edges. Anyway, in sub-object you can create 2 more vertices (there are many ways to do this including even selecting a vertex and holding shift and moving it and saying no to create new object) and then goto sub-object face mode and select build face. Click counter clock wise two of the existing vertices
and the 2 new ones. Now you would have 2 quad polygons.
|
|
|
|