[FltLt HardBall]

Gibbage's 3D Max Tutorials

Edit: I have taken the liberty of correcting the spelling :wink:

Setting up your Workspace

The key to a good model is good references and an efficient work space. This is not a tutorial on how to organize your desk space, or even your desktop. That mess is up to you, and I am the last person you want advice on about THAT. This is about setting up 3 view drawings into 3D Studio's Max to help you re-create models from drawings. Here I will demonstrate how to do this with the P-63 Kingcobra WWII aircraft.

First think you will need is a good set of high res 3 view drawings. The more detail, the better. There are a few great internet sites were you can download these including a few Russian sites, but the best place is from a book for many reasons. #1 is you control the quality. Below is what a typical 3 view drawing looks like.



Note a few things with this image. First, its MUCH too low a resolution to use as a good 3 view. Get your own. Two, it uses what I call "half" views. The top and bottom views are combined into 1. This is done if the aircraft is an exact mirror on both sides, and to save page space. Also, the front view its cropped. No need to draw both wings if they are the same. Also note the sectionals. THESE ARE CRITICAL! The sectionals are the line drawings marked with numbers or letters. In this case, they are marked with A, B, C, D and so on. The sectionals shows you what the aircraft section would look like. You can see at the top, the side view is divided into section's A-K. This corresponds with the sectionals A-K. The wing is also divided to show you a cross section of the wing and its aerofoil. These sectionals help out a LOT in getting the shape of the body perfect.

When I set my work space up, I divide the 3 view into 5 sections. Top, Bottom, Side, Front, and Sectionals. I save each section alone in its own file's. The top file has only the top drawing in it and so on. You could have just 1 file like above, but I find it less complicated to do 5 files in the long run. I do this with Photoshop and cut/paste and erase the stuff I don't want. When in Photoshop, do what you can to clean things up.

Now that your 3 view is chopped up, lets work in getting it into Max. Most people set each file into the Viewport Background. I have found MANY problems with this. Scale for one is difficult to keep, and detail is another problem. In order to get it high res, you really should have them on separate planes. For this, you will need a good 3D video card. Lets start out by making sure Max will display the full res file.



Its as easy as 1, 2, 3. Click Customize, Preferences, Viewports, Configure Driver, and then put a check on "Match Bitmap as close as Possible. This will make is so textures are applied in full res in your viewport. This is critical.

Next, lets set up our materials.



Set the Self-Illumination to 100, and click the box next to the Diffuse channel. This will bring up the Material/Map Browser. Double click on "Bitmap" on the top right corner. This will bring up an explorer window. find your TOP file and click open.



First, click on "Go to Parent" button to return to the material property. Now rename your new material TOP. Now, make sure you click the blue and white checker box. This is VERY important. Without that, you WONT see the texture till you render it. That will be useless for us.

Now repeat this for the Bottom, Side, Front, and Sectional files. You should now have 5 separate materials with the 5 views. Each named by its own name. Not lets pace the materials.



Click on Plane and drag a plane out in the TOP view. This will be the object we put the TOP texture on it. Now that you have the plane set, look at the graphic file for the TOP texture. My top texture is 1274 pixels high, by 1470 wide. You can see that I made the Length and Width of the plane to fit 1274 by 1470. Click in the Length and Width box and type it in manually. Now, make sure that Generate Mapping Coords is CHECKED. Hit the M key to bring up the Material Browser and now apply it to the plane



Here is the end result on the top. You can see the drawing on the plane in the viewport. Also, its very high res. Also note that I had to reverse the Length and Width around since it was stretched. If yours looks squashed, do the same. Now do the same for the other 4 materials.



This is what it should look like once you're done. I rotated them into their proper positions. Now its time to size them up and make sure they scale well. Using the size of the drawing is not going to work. The side view may be longer then the top, and the front higher then the side. Make sure all the drawings line up wing tip to tip, and nose to tail.



Here you can see I made sure everything lined up well. Wing tips and nose tail. You can also see that I need to lower the front view plane to match the canopy and tail. Once I make sure everything lines up, I move them back. I also lowered the opacity of the side and front view to help me line things up, but once I am done I return it back to 100% opacity. Now, its time to get to work and show you how this works!!!!



You can see here how I use it. I made a cylinder with 16 sides with as many segments as sectionals. I made a material with a 50% opacity so I can see through it to the drawing behind it. That's the key. I converted the cylinder to an Editable Mesh and then aligned the segments with the sectional markers on the side view. Time to make it fit in both the side view and top view.



You can see here how I use the non-uniform scale to shrink and grow the cylinder to meet with the front and side views. For the nose, use the uniform scale to keep the perfectly round shape. We will use this for the spinner later. The body is coming together quickly. Note that in the front view the body does not fit 100%. That's were the sectionals come in.



Here you see how I am using the sectionals to align every vertex with the corresponding section. I move the sectional plane forward and align the middle and top/bottom that should be accurate. Do this for every section, but only do this to HALF of the body. That will save you a LOT of time, and you just mirror it later for a perfect body. For the the wings, use my Wing tutorial.



Here is the final result after aligning all the sections, and mirroring the body. It don't look like much yet, but remember that this is just a start.


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Low Poly Wings

The wing of an aircraft can be very complicated to model. This method is the best I have found so far to build a quick and highly detailed aircraft wing in less than 5 minutes.



First start off by creating a line shape that fits the airfoil of the aircraft. Most 3-view drawings have a sectional of the airfoil. Use that as a template. I draw the shape using the Line tool. I moved the shape away from the drawing so you could see the result better. Remember not to make it too complicated for low polygon modeling. 6-8 steps are typical.



Next, use the Extrude tool. Extrude the shape you just made to fit within the width of the drawing. Add only the segments that you need. Add 1 segment per side of the flap, 1 per side of the aileron, and two for rounding the tip. I also added 2 for the engine boom. These segments will later on help you cut the control surfaces out of the wing.



Now change the extruded line to an Edit Mesh so we can make the wing fit better into the drawing. Select the vertex edit mode, and select 1 line of vertices. These lines of vertices I call the spars because they remind me of the spars wings are made of. But a real wing is made of MANY MANY spars. Align these vertex spars with the critical points on the drawing like the flaps, ailerons, and wing tips. Again, aligning these spars will help you cut out the flaps and ailerons.



Here, select Uniform Scale, and scale along the Y Axis to fit into the drawing's constraints. You may also need to move the spars on the Y axis.



Do the same in the forward view. The wing tip can get complicated. Its best to sometimes delete the polygons on the end, and collapse the vertices at the tip.



Here is the complete wing. Next, read the Smoothing Groups tutorial to complete the wing and make it look smooth.


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Smoothing Groups

To me, smoothing groups are at the top of the most important skills to have in a professional manner. Most beginners can get away with using the "SMOOTH" tool, but the pros manipulate the groups by hand. I have not used Smooth in about 1 1/2 years. Doing the smoothing groups by hand takes a bit more time, but the results are well worth it. Here I will demonstrate smoothing groups on a simple shear. The Smoothing Group section in max may look complicated, but once you understand the basic principals about the groups, its extremely easy.


Here you see the default sphere. It automatically sets all polygons to smoothing group1.


Here is what happens when you remove all smoothing groups by unselecting the highlighted 1 in the smoothing groups section. You can now see each polygon the sphere is made of.


Here the top half polygons are set to smoothing group 1, and the bottom half to group 2. This creates a smoothing "break" between 1 and 2. Note that I have not changed the model at all. This helps reproduce the effect of a plastic ball that was made from two pieces, like a Pokeymon Ball, or a plastic Easter egg.


Here, the two halves again are in separate smoothing groups. But this time the center polygons have BOTH group 1 and 2 selected. I color coded the the different sections to help visualise the smoothing groups. Remember. Yellow and Blue make Green. The green polygons with both smoothing groups selected blends the two together.


Here you see the use of smoothing groups on the P-38 model. The fillet uses a separate smoothing group to give it a detached look. The wings have group 1 on top, group 2 on bottom, and group 1 and 2 on the leading edges. This keeps from getting the typical dark edges on the trailing edges of the wing you see a lot when using bad smoothing groups. The boom also uses smoothing groups to help define the depression for the GE Turbo Supercharger. The Smooth command WOULD NOT be able to duplicate this effect. Also, the turbo itself uses a bunch of smoothing groups. The tires also use two smoothing groups. 1 for the rubber, and 2 for the hub.


Here are the results from BAD smoothing. At first, it does not look that bad. But look at the details. A lot of them are missing. Also the radiator intakes got REALLY messed up.