10 TIPS FOR HARD-SURFACE MODELLING
Simon Edwards reveals his top pro 3ds Max tips for modelling and object placement
T his image of Brunel’s Great Eastern steamship from 1858 will be on permanent display at a new £7 million museum in Bristol, opening their doors in the spring of 2018. ‘Being Brunel’ is part of the National Brunel Institute and the SS Great Britain Trust.
The model in this image has been organised into multiple layers and was built primarily using 3ds Max and V-ray. The characters were clothed with Marvellous Designer and Phoenix FD was used to generate a realistic light emitting from the ship’s furnaces.
Coal piles are generated from a single object instanced many times with Particle Array, and Displacement modifiers have been used to create the gnarly rope textures.
The model is lit by a bluecoloured GI environment, one Vraysun, five V-ray Disc lights and 30 VRAYIES accent lights.
For this exercise we will concentrate on the boiler room in the scene and build up one of the boiler unit ‘lids’. There is of course more than one way to approach this, and with this tutorial I have broken down the process into a number of my own preferred individual ‘tips’.
Finally I will share how to create and easily manipulate a length of chain link into any position using a bones system.