In 3Ds max, HOW Do I populate my bookshelves quickly and realistically?

Nico Forbes, US

The best and most robust solution I’ve found for this is to use the Itoo plug-in Railclone for 3ds Max. It seems that people are constantly finding new and exciting uses for this plugin, so it’s well worth the investment. There is also a lite version available if you know you’ll only need a basic implementation of the plug-in. Once you have it, it’s not that difficult to create realistic bookshelves.

Firstly, create the splines to represent the back of your shelves, then create a Railclone object from 3ds Max’s Create panel. With your Railclone object selected, open the Style Editor; create a Spline node by dragging it from the Items list. With it selected, go to the Properties panel and add your splines into the Object parameter.

Having successfully done that, you need to add a Linear array node to your editor and plug the Spline node into the Spline input of the Linear array. Then create a Material operator and plug it into the Default node of the Linear array. In the material properties, set Replace Material ID to 2 and set the range from 2 to 50. It’s now time to create your book objects, so in the Style editor create a Segment object node for each book. With that complete, create a Randomize operator and plug each book node into an input node of the the Randomize operator. You’ll also need to wire the Randomize operator into the Material node. To ensure that your books are aligned to the splines you have created, you’ll also need to create a Transform operator and place it between the Randomize and Material nodes. In its properties, make sure that Alignment is turned on and set Y to Top.

There is a whole host of other things that you can do to control the placement of your books, but I’ll just mention that you can quickly and easily customise how the books appear on your shelf by using the properties of the Transform node. You’ll notice that there are two tabs in its properties. You want the Transform one. Tick each of the Translation, Rotation and Scale check boxes. By adjusting the ranges for each axis you can make your books appear a lot more random.